Most of the animal’s stomach had slid out through the tear in its belly and was resting in a pool of congealing blood.
“Come on then, let’s get out of here,” Kelso said, closing up the camera case again. Looking at the three legs she could see, and the savage wounds all over the carcass, it did indeed look as if several strong men had ripped the animal apart. “Write it up as WILD BEAST STALKS LOCAL WILDLIFE. Might even make Northern Life. Local interest piece. TV kiddo. TV.”
She was glad to turn her back on the free anatomy lesson spread across the road and climb back into the car. The trees were just a fraction too tall and too close for her to see Rogan’s Farm at the top of the hill.
“Come on then, let’s go see what Mr. Rogan has to say for himself.”
- 16 -
Billy Rogan rolled over and cracked open an eyelid. The room was familiar. A grime-splashed window. The sharp angles of pallets and fertiliser bags stacked against the back wall. Shovels. Spades. Rusty attachments of an old lawnmower. Bundles of old newspapers. Shelves lined with jars filled with dark liquids. Canvas straps for lowering coffins into the dirt. His cot was directly under the window.
“Musta dozed off,” he yawned, rubbing his gritty eyes. His mouth tasted sour. He reached out for the Coke bottle he knew was by the side of the cot. It was empty. “Ahhh flippin’ fairies.”
Everything ached. He should have been back at the farm last night. The old man would like as not beat seven shades out of him when he found him. Stupid, Stupid. He’d probably yell at him and call him a “Fuckin’ Reetard” again just because he fell asleep in the tool shed. Most likely cleanse him too, beat that hateful streak out of him with the belt strap and the brush until his idiot son had learned his lesson.
Billy flexed his toes, trying to coax some kind of circulation to flow through his feet before he stood on them. His grubby work shirt was draped over the mower’s seat. Scooping it up, Billy caught a whiff of the unpleasant odour drifting up from his armpits. “Need a wash,” he mumbled to himself as he struggled into his shirt. Checking to make sure no one was coming down Chapel Lane; he unzipped and peed against the wall of the shed. “Ahhh better,” he sighed, putting himself away.
The gates of Swallowship Hill Cemetery were standing open. A McDonald's box flipped down the cinder track. Confetti hearts lay on the floor, markers to another love affair waiting to fall apart. Thousands of midges danced in the shadow of the willows. Five hundred tall headstones cast their own lunchtime shadows, here and there a cherub poking through the mass of grey stone.
Picking up his shovel, Billy walked down the grass lane that bisected the rows of standing stones. Flowers, wilted and dead, were set in jam jars at the foot of some of the graves. Gifts from the loved ones left behind.
Billy stopped by his mother’s grave and whispered “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild, please look after my mummy, your little child,” just as the old man had taught him. He crossed himself and headed over toward the plot marked out for today’s new arrival.
A rabbit bolted out from behind a weathered headstone and into the waiting hedge.
Across the rows of graves, Billy saw a familiar figure kneeling over a grave, the folds of his coat whipping in the wind. Maybe he felt the lingering touch of Billy’s gaze, maybe he didn’t, but at that moment Mike Shelton looked up. Even across the cemetery, the grief in his eyes was plain to see. Billy couldn’t help but shiver a little. He turned away to leave Mike to mourn his dead in peace.
Fresh sods had already been cut from the plot and green plastic sheets laid out along the edge. Hefting the shovel, he began digging. After fifteen minutes Billy planted the shovel in the damp earth and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Poor man…” Billy whispered, watching Mike walk away. “Poor, poor man…”
- 17 -
The outbuildings were deserted.
From up here Kristy could see the twin chimneys of the paper mill below. By some trick of the angle it looked almost as if the sun were drawing steam from the trees themselves, and not some industrial eyesore.
Kelso was already out of the car running off a series of angles around one of the ugliest trees she had ever seen. The oak was rotten through and obviously dead. Struck by lightning or fire. The way its jagged branches beckoned was creepy. It almost looked like a screaming man, so peculiarly human was its deformity. Kelso tapped on the window. She rolled it down.
“Do you want to go look for Rogan while I take a few more atmosphere shots?”
“Sure.”
Out of the car, the wind had an unexpected stiffness. It was almost cold.
The outbuildings were a mixture of wood and stone in equal measure; barn, stable, garage and farmhouse, and off down the hill, a disused building with wire mesh covering up its windows, clematis and other climbers covering up its walls.
Near the farmhouse door a steel drum was filled to overflowing with stagnant rainwater and dead leaves. The porch door was open.
Kristy knocked once. “Hello? Anybody home?” she called, loudly enough to be heard by anyone upstairs. She went inside without waiting for an answer and found herself in a long narrow kitchen with a single window. Dishes long since air-dried racked up on a steel drainer. A naked bulb burned dimly. Strangest of all though, was the hole in the floor where one of the bare boards had been pried free. The board rested against a wall.
Dirty footprints scuffed the untreated timber, clustered around the long rectory table. A cash box was open and empty on the table.
Kelso stepped up behind her.
“No one home?”
“Looks that way.”
“Hmm… there’s a car in the garage and the TV’s still on in the lounge.”
“Curiouser and Curiouser. You want to take a look upstairs while I check out down here?”
“Sure thing.”
The cash box didn’t look as if it had been forced.
Kristy felt like Goldilocks creeping about. She half expected to hear a disgruntled Frank Rogan demanding to know who’d been sleeping in his bed and eating his porridge.
The place was a clutter of bric-a-brac. The television set in the lounge was an old valve style black and white. The rooms were all coated with a layer of grime. The carpets worn threadbare. Everything shared the same musty smell of neglect. Slippers nestled beneath the coffee table in the lounge and a half-eaten plate of mashed potatoes and sausage was clotted in cold gravy. She left the room without switching the television off. To do so would have somehow disturbed the perfect sense of nostalgia preserved by its presence.
Back in the kitchen, Kristy started poking around, not sure what she was really looking for. She searched through the cupboards but only found a few tins. She tried the hole in the floor, groping blindly in the shallow cavity without any joy.
She heard Kelso coming down the stairs.
“We ought to call the police about the deer,” she called.
“Chuck us your mobile,” he said, sticking his head through the door. She threw it to him. “You carry on rooting around,” he called back.
She listened to him make the call, her gaze playing up and down the cold stone and plaster walls. The building creaked, sighing with the wind. Something ran across the floor, light, scampering. A mouse or a rat. Then: snap and silence.
A tiny grey mouse with a long question mark of a tail. The back of its head had been split by the metal spring of the trap. A thumb-sized chunk of mouldering cheese lay on the floor a few inches away. Besides that, slipping out of the shadow cast by the table’s edge, something else stood out, white and oddly clean.
On her hands and knees, Kristy crawled beneath the table. She tried hard not to think about the unlucky mouse as she did so.
“Found something?” Kelso wanted to know.
“Hold on and we’ll find out,” Kristy said, easing herself out with her find firmly in hand. What she held up, to her surprise, was a dusty Polaroid that must have slipped down the back of the table when Rogan last look
ed at his family album.
“Well well…” she mused, seeing the unmistakably familiar face of Jude Kenyon caught clearly by the photographer.
“Looks drugged up to the eyeballs,” Kelso commented, looking at the picture over her shoulder.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Kristy agreed. “The bruises around her eyes don’t look too promising either.” Jude Kenyon wasn’t alone in the photograph. A thickset Rambo-type was supporting her weight. “And he,” she offered, shaking her head slowly, “looks like the Action Man from Hell.” The two of them were walking across a neatly trimmed croquet lawn bordered on three sides by colourful blooms. The road weary wing of a Land Rover was caught in one corner of the frame and in the background, too small to read, a wrought iron gateway held the name and the answer they were looking for.
“Can you do anything to enlarge this?” she asked, tapping the arch above the gate.
“Depends. I can certainly give it a shot. Come on. Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
- 18 -
“Just want to run off a contact sheet of this morning’s shots before Abel gets his paws on them,” Kelso said by way of justification. They had turned off the A69 one junction short of the city and were weaving through row after row of uncomfortably similar looking streets like expertly trained lab rats picking the shortest path to the cheese. Kelso took another anonymous corner, this time using a broken-windowed phone box as his cue to turn. Kids of ten and eleven were kicking a ball about for want of something better to do. Perhaps the strangest sight offered by this inner-city Mecca waited on the next corner, where a three-legged dog was pissing against a lamppost, its lower body twisted to raise the phantom leg as if the dog had yet to realise it was missing.
They skirted an area of allotments, body shops and scrap metal yards the locals still called Paradise despite its rapid fall from grace.
Kelso took them around one last corner before he pulled in behind a bricked up Ford Cortina.
His two-up-two-down terrace butted onto a strip of Paradise, the view from his concrete yard dominated by the old tobacco warehouse on the banks of the Tyne. The owners of the house next-door had added a creative mural of the castle at the end of the rainbow to their side wall; a marked improvement on the anti-this and anti-that slogans that seemed to occupy every other wall.
As to the house itself, a mountain bike with half of the mountain still clinging to its black frame blocked the hall. Tripods served as coat racks. Kristy picked her way through the war zone only to find that the lounge was no better. Photography journals littered the room’s three tables. Starkly contrasting black and white prints decorated each wall. One, of a raincoated walker passing through an arch might have been a window onto some whole new monochrome world. And, wherever there was space for it, technology peered through the debris. A Gateway PC with a rack of shoot ‘em ups and 3D blow ‘em aways took up most of the self-assembly desk. Under the window a sprawling home cinema kit of speakers and blu-ray player, and Playstation 3 was hooked up into a giant widescreen television. The whole room was indicative of Kelso’s chosen lifestyle.
Kristy was thumbing through a sheaf of glossy contact sheets when Kelso came through carrying coffees.
“Just being nosy,” she said, laying the series of stills down.
“No problem.”
More than half were slick glamour shots of a trim looking redhead, some nude, a few too raw to be termed tasteful.
“She’s got a good body,” Kristy offered.
“Fair,” Kelso agreed. “You want to come through?”
Kristy followed him, coffee cup in hand to a backroom that had been converted into a darkroom. He switched on a low-wattage red light as she closed the door and set about checking the temperatures of the processing chemicals and topping up the tray of developing fluid. Then he dimmed the lights. She could only guess at what he was doing in the dark, sounds suggesting movement: opening the back of the camera, lifting out the roll of film, breaking open the metal cassette’s top and drawing out the length of film itself.
In the darkness she remembered vividly the blowflies making a meal of the deer.
More sounds. Scissors and liquid being agitated.
Then the lights came back on.
“Okay, you want to hand me that Polaroid?”
She handed him the photograph, not at all sure how he was going to unlock its secrets but certainly not expecting his next move.
“Well in about thirty seconds she’ll be singing like a birdie,” Kelso reached down for a wall switch and some piece of machinery she couldn’t see stirred itself into life with a throaty hum. He pulled a dustcover off what Kristy had assumed to be a table but was actually an expensive looking colour copier. “Picked it up at an auction last month. Hundred and eighty large. Not a bad little investment.” He said by way of explanation as he selected the correct scale for the enlargement. “She can pull out a times five enlargement without losing so much as a grain of resolution to smoke. It’s all down to the quality of the original. So cross your fingers.” He placed the photograph face down on the glass plate and covered it with a sheet of bromide paper to shield it from the sudden flare of light as the rod moved over the Polaroid.
The enlargement wasn’t grainy or distorted in the slightest. The shrubbery was picked out in perfect detail. The couple themselves picked out starkly against the hues of grass and flower. She could almost see the blood in the bruises around Jude Kenyon’s eyes.
Behind her, in the filigreed detail of the iron arch the letters ENEDNEVAH were wrapped up in the intricacies of angels and demons.
Kristy’s mouth opened and closed slowly as she translated the mirror-writing.
“Havendene,” she said aloud. “Now where the hell have I heard that before?”
“Only one way to find out. We better go ask the Oracle.”
– 19 –
Kristy mentally kicked herself along two of the three miles between Paradise and the newsroom.
Havendene.
Havendene..
Havendene…
No good. The mental foot-in-the-brain wasn’t stirring up any miraculous memories.
Bridges spanned the river, cars and brightly painted trains lumbering over them. An Intercity slipped eelishly between the grey station arches and out of sight. Babel-like insurance towers guarded the road into the city, blocking out the old Castle Keep’s walls; spotlights burned pointlessly. This side of the city was a haven of bars, restaurants and kebab shops. A twenty metre tall Ronald McDonald reminded Kristy that lunch had come and gone an hour ago. The personality of the streets outside had changed dramatically over the last half-mile. Here, walking pace was half a step too fast, ties a notch too tight to be comfortable. Taxi’s lined the kerbs.
“Wonder Doc.” She said to herself, realising where she’d seen the name Havendene before. “Kick me,” she told Kelso as they climbed out of the car.
“What for?”
“My excuse is it was snowing in February.”
“Excuse me? I think we’ve missed out a vital stage in the explaining here.”
“I’ve been there. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It’s some fancy health farm now, run by one of those wonder doctors who can cure fat simply by staring at people. Come on.”
They ran into the building. An unanswered phone rang to itself in the lobby. Kristy took the stairs three at a time. Through a door labelled ‘Archives’. The Oracle was a small grey nobody who buried himself in books and articles. He looked up, his face set in a studied lack of expression that was an expression in itself.
The room was eerily quiet compared to the hubbub of the newsroom. Rows of dummy terminals and microfiche readers lined the longest of the room’s walls. Skylights flooded the room with sunlight without banishing the lovingly musty air of old paper. A reading room was screened off by glass partitions. A handful of people were in there taking notes.
“Can I help you?” The Oracle asked, pushing himself slowly to hi
s large flat feet and coming around the desk.
“February,” she said.
“February it is,” he said with a gentle smile. “Do you have any particular favourite or shall we just plough through every one of those great grey beasts?”
“Mid-month, this year. 20th maybe. Give me a week or so either side to be safe.”
“Let’s see what we can do then, shall we?” the Oracle said as his pudgy fingers picked an expert path through a maze of index cards. “Here we are,” he said triumphantly, lifting out fiche slides for the days between February 13th and 27th. “If you want anything else, just whistle.”
Kristy began her search with the February 13th edition. On a machine beside her Kelso worked backwards from the 27th. They both scanned the rows of paragraphs as they jerked by. By the 17th she was beginning to doubt she’d ever set foot in Havendene after all. Then Kelso whistled. The paper from Saturday 22nd. A sidebar tucked away on page 14 next to an article of a church bazaar.
RICHARDS’ HAVEN
HEXAMSHIRE GENERAL’S MOST RECENT VISITING PHYSICIAN, DR. BRENT RICHARDS CLAIMS TO HAVE FOUND TO HAVE FOUND A CURE TO EXECUTIVE STRESS IN THE TRANQUILLITY OF THE NORTHUMBRIAN MOORS, WRITES KRISTY FRENCH.
A YEAR AGO HAVENDENE, SITUATED A MILE OUTSIDE OF HEXHAM, WAS WAITING FOR THE BULLDOZERS TO ROLL IN UNTIL AN OVERSEAS CONSORTIUM HEADED BY RICHARDS STEPPED FORWARD WITH AN AMBITIOUS RESCUE PLAN THAT HAS PUT THE OLD MANOR HOUSE VERY FIRMLY BACK ON THE MAP.
“THE AIM OF OUR LITTLE HAVEN,” EXPLAINS RICHARDS IN HIS BUSINESS-LIKE DRAWL, “IS TO OFFER THE BUSINESS MAN A RETREAT. SOMEWHERE TO TURN WHEN THE PRESSURES HE FACES DAY IN, DAY OUT, GET TOO MUCH. RELAXATION IS OUR WATCHWORD. WE AREN’T TRYING TO DIAGNOSE SOME TENUOUS PROBLEM OR OFFER ANY NEW AGE MUMBO JUMBO TO SOOTHE WHAT IS A VERY REAL ONE. WE LIKE TO THINK OF WHAT WE ARE DOING AT HAVENDENE AS STRESS MANAGEMENT. THE CLINIC IS BASICALLY A PRESSURE VALVE AND THAT HAS TO BE HEALTHY.”
Sufferer's Song Page 6
