Weirdo

by Cathi Unsworth

  A skein of pink-legged geese flew overhead, filling the air with their honking.

  Until she had taken that first telephone call from Sean Ward, Francesca had wondered if her ambition had died here, on the edge of the Broads, at the end of the world. Now she felt like she had woken from a long, dreamless slumber with the answer to why she had stayed. That somehow, somewhere deep inside, she must have known that all those things left so long undone couldn’t lie still in the ground forever.

  Now, with sad eyes and a shuffling gait, a man had come to kick over the headstones, raise the dead to tell their tales.

  And she was here to make sure he did it right.

  * * *

  Dale Smollet stole out of the bedroom on tiptoe, holding his breath. In the guest bathroom he took a long look at himself in the mirror while he cleaned his teeth and wet shaved, examining the set of his jaw and the fine lines around his eyes, fussing his neatly cut and highlighted hair into shape with some wax and daubing himself with cologne.

  Dale liked to think he still looked pretty sharp for thirty-six. He slapped his hand against a stomach kept rock hard by regular trips to the gym and an iron self-control that kept him from giving into canteen food or late-night indulgence in takeaways, unlike so many of his colleagues. Satisfied with his appearance, he crept into the guest room, where he always kept plenty of spare clothes for the times he was working antisocial hours and didn’t want to disturb his wife.

  Dale dressed rapidly, putting his mobile on top of the bed so that if it vibrated it would do so without making a noise. Crisp, pressed yellow shirt and grey, narrow leg trousers. A pale grey cashmere V-neck over the top. Not so very different from how he dressed as a teenager – or how he aspired to back then. Just better materials, a more expensive cut. Dale could afford to maintain his lifetime love affair with Italian clothes. Despite his long and devoted marriage, there had been no children.

  He trod lightly down the stairs to the kitchen, his ears straining for the slightest sound, his palm moist against the metal of his phone.

  Dale had been a policeman for the past fifteen years, had risen up through the ranks from constable to detective chief inspector. Not many things scared him. One of the few that did was already waiting outside his back door, a big, brown shape outlined against the frosted glass as he turned on the light, like a grizzly bear was leaning there. What it really was, was a sheepskin coat and a head of thick, slicked-back hair under a black felt trilby hat with a feather in the side of it. Smoke rising up from a panatella cigar, held in a paw-sized hand. Turning slowly as he heard the key unlocking the door.

  “Len,” said Dale.

  The former boss of Ernemouth CID looked back through heavily lidded eyes and said nothing, just motioned his head to indicate that Dale should step outside. It wasn’t until they had walked through the inky darkness of the garden, clicked the gate behind them and stepped out onto the lamp-lit pavement that the older man finally spoke.

  “We got a spot of bother,” he said.

  * * *

  The flame from the final candle lit the parchment at 6.36 a.m., filling the already heady air with the smells of musk, lilac, lavender and cloves. For a few seconds the flames leapt as the oils around the parchment ignited, then the paper rapidly crumbled as it was consumed, the light guttering out four hours precisely since the new moon had begun to wax.

  A hand reached down to lift the dish that contained the ashes of the spell. Tattooed between the thumb and forefinger was a bright green eye.

  Four minutes later, as the golden rim of the sun appeared above the blue horizon, the hand threw the ashes up into the sky, while the waves whooshed and hissed against the shore. Black paper petals falling slowly, like rain.

  * * *

  The sign on the front door said OPEN, so Sean pushed and stepped inside, a tinkling bell above his head announcing his arrival. Farrer’s Book Shop was one of a kind you rarely saw any more in London. A big old emporium, lined from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling with solid oak bookcases, several more running across the width of the room. Each one was crammed full of titles old and new, paperback and hardback, spines made of leather with their titles tooled in gold leaf, brand new spines of shiny card and battered, broken old ones held together by sellotape, the collective whole giving off the slightly dusty, musky aroma that surrounds the printed word.

  The shelf directly in front of Sean was labelled: LOCAL INTEREST. A couple of books had been placed face outwards to attract the eye. Ghosts of the Broads – a cowl-wearing skull transposed over a twilit stretch of water. Unquiet Country – the grimy face of a farm worker staring accusingly at the camera from another century, a face that flashbacked the nightmare that had curtailed Sean’s attempts at sleep four hours earlier.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  The voice was quiet, slightly sibilant and came up beside Sean’s right-hand side on feet that trod so softly that he nearly jumped upon hearing it.

  A little old man was standing there, looking up at him with bright blue eyes, a fragile wisp of white hair atop an egg-shaped head, a pair of half-rim spectacles on a cord around his neck and a smile that seemed almost beatific in its benevolence.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Hello,” said Sean, smiling back at him. “I hope so. Local interest is what I’m after and I hear you’re a bit of an expert, Mr Farrer.”

  The old man laced his fingers across his chest. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “An amateur historian at best. But I do have the advantage of having been around an awful lot longer than most people, I suppose.” He chuckled. “And I remain curious. Is there any specific area towards which your interest leans? History? Geography? Folklore, perhaps?” He nodded at Ghosts of the Broads. “I’ve always been rather fond of that one.”

  “Well, what I’d like to know,” Sean said, “is more about Captain Swing. I saw the sign over the pub next door yesterday and it’s not a name I’ve ever come across before, so I went in and had a word with the landlord. He didn’t know all that much, but there was a fella in there tipped me off to come and see you.”

  “Ah,” the old man’s face radiated pleasure. He had very smooth, very pink skin for a man of advanced years. “The good Captain. That pub has borne the name for at least a century, you know.” Farrer’s fingers rippled across his chest. “He led an uprising here, a rural equivalent of the Luddites, if you like. In the 1820s, when the threshing machine was first invented and threatened to do all the labourers out of a job. When Swing first rose in 1830, there’d been two bad summers already, crops had failed from too much rain and people were fairly destitute.”

  Farrer’s blue eyes stared past Sean’s, as if he was seeing back through time. “But the Captain took their despair and turned it into anger,” he continued. “He banded them together against their oppressors, organised guerrilla attacks, smashing the new machinery and burning the fields, then dissolving away before anyone could catch them.”

  Sean felt himself start to sweat under the collar as Farrer’s voice became louder. “The name of Swing spread like wild-fire across sixteen counties, as far away as Kent and Dorset, Huntingdonshire and Gloucestershire. Coming so close to the French Revolution, it put fear of God through the gentry.”

  “You almost sound like you were there,” said Sean.

  Farrer’s eyes came back to Sean’s with a twinkle. “Thank you,” he said. “But let me tell you the most remarkable thing of all about Captain Swing. He never actually existed.”

  His right hand fluttered down to the shelf, picked up the book called Unquiet Country. “Here,” he said. “This will tell you all about it.”

  “Thanks,” said Sean. “I’ll take it.”

  “Good, good,” the shopkeeper looked delighted. “Now, is there anything else?”

  “This’ll do for now,” said Sean. “Thank you.”

  The old man nodded, and putting on a deft show of speed, led the way to his till. Sean waite
d until he was handing the money over to attempt to claw back an advantage.

  “You said that pub had been called Swing’s for over a hundred years,” he said.

  “Indeed,” Farrer took the ten-pound note from him, put it in his till.

  “But the landlord told me it was renamed The Royal Oak for a while. Back in the ’80s, I think. Now, why would that have been?”

  Farrer’s nose twitched as he handed Sean back a penny change. “Well now,” he said, voice descending back to a whisper. “I don’t know how much you do know about our local history, but I’m guessing this is your first visit to Ernemouth?”

  “That’s right.” Sean pocketed the penny.

  “There was some trouble here, back then. Specifically relating to that pub and the people who drank there. There was a very grisly murder, and then …” Farrer looked across to the door, “a witch-hunt.”

  Sean pretended to look puzzled. “Are you talking about the 1980s?” he said, “or the 1880s?”

  But the bell tinkled and the door opened before the old man could reply; another customer sweeping into the shop appeared to distract him.

  “Oh, hello, my dear,” Farrer said, the beatific smile returning to illuminate his unlined countenance. Then he looked back at Sean. “I’m sorry, sir, would you excuse me? I have a customer just arriving who needs to take possession of a specific delivery.”

  “Not at all,” said Sean, trying not to grind his teeth. He turned to see the object of Farrer’s attention.

  There she stood, in her leopardskin coat, long black fringe still obscuring half her face, even in broad daylight.

  “But do come back,” he heard Farrer say, “any time.”

  Again, Sean found himself having to fight his own imagination, having to strain not to give in to the notion that here was Corrine Woodrow, in her 1980s incarnation, standing right in front of him. But as he got closer, he could see that the eyes peering out from under the fringe were green. Corrine’s, he assured himself, were brown.

  The girl said something to him, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Sean blinked. “What’s that?” he said. Something about her voice …

  “I said, are you feeling better now? The old war wound, remember?”

  Sean forced himself to smile, his stomach starting to churn. Pinpricks going up his legs. “Of course,” he said. “I’m fine, thank you. I’ll, er …” he reached for the doorhandle and she stepped to the side of him. “I’ll be on my way.”

  “Be seeing you,” she said, as he closed the door behind him.

  Sean hurried away, back down the cut to the quay. Yesterday’s clouds had parted on a pale blue sky, the sun glittering off windowpanes but not offering much in the way of heat. Seagulls whirled overhead, screeching to each other and the smell of the river filled his nostrils. It was just a normal new day in a normal old town. The pain in his legs subsided as he felt his heartbeat returning to a normal rate.

  “Get a grip,” he said to himself. He thought of Francesca’s cuttings lying on his bed. “And get back to the paperwork.”

  He had two more hours to kill before his meet with Rivett.

  12

  Notice Me

  October 1983

  “This is your room,” said Amanda, pushing open the door. “What do you think?”

  It was right at the top of the house, looking out over rooftops, chimneys and the iron and glass ceiling of the Victoria arcade. Amanda had decorated it in grey, black and red striped wallpaper, matching duvet set, black lacquer furniture and red vinyl cushions. Not that she expected to see any gratitude in her daughter’s sullen countenance.

  “Oh,” said Samantha, top lip curling. She did her best to maintain the bored expression, but Amanda detected a rapid widening of the pupils indicating disbelief that her terrible mother could have fashioned a room for her so well.

  A smile twitched on Amanda’s lips but she suppressed it. She supposed Sam thought she was the original rebellious teenager and she had certainly succeeded in shocking her grandparents. Although, of course, Edna had refused to believe Sam could have been capable of instigating any of it herself, had placed the blame squarely on the influence of her dim little school friend – and, by implication, on Amanda herself, for sending her daughter to such a low place of learning as Ernemouth High.

  Amanda had known her parents would be angry when she didn’t send Sammy to the local public school and Eric had been straight on the phone to Malcolm, expecting him to intervene. But Malcolm was drunk and started crying, admitting that he didn’t have the money, he’d just put the house in Chelsea on the market in a last-ditch attempt to keep his business afloat. Things were much worse than Eric and Edna had dared to imagine.

  Amanda stuck to her guns when Eric offered to pay the school fees, said that it would be better for her daughter to mix with the local kids, reminded her parents that it had never done her any harm. She knew Sam better than they did, knew that there were worse influences her daughter could come under in that seafront villa. It was time she had the spoilt little madam back under her watchful eye.

  Samantha’s gaze travelled across the floor to a new stack hi-fi system. She flicked a glance up at her mother as she moved towards it, as if weighing up the wisdom of what to say next. “Thanks,” eventually emerged.

  Amanda raised one eyebrow. “You should find you get plenty of light in here as well,” she said, “if you want to take up painting something other than Nana’s dog.”

  Samantha looked up sharply and Amanda caught it again, the widening of the pupils, along with a flash of colour rising to her daughter’s pancaked cheeks. She held her gaze, daring Sam to deny it as she had done so vehemently when they were in front of the others. It was rarely so easy for her once they were alone.

  Samantha blinked, then turned back to the hi-fi. She lifted the lid on the record player, pretended to study the turntable, running her fingers across the dials.

  The silence that stretched between them was broken by the sounds of feet on stairs. With a grunt, Wayne appeared at the doorway, hefting a box of Samantha’s belongings. “Where should I put this?” he said.

  “Samantha?” Amanda continued to bore into her daughter with her eyes.

  “Just down there,” Samantha nodded towards the side of the bed without looking up, her face now a darker shade of red than her foundation could conceal.

  “Thank you,” Amanda added in her most caustic tone.

  “Thanks,” Samantha uttered, barely audibly.

  “Right, well, we’ll leave you to sort it out yourself, get it how you want it,” Amanda’s gaze caught Wayne’s eye as he carefully deposited the box down, and gave him a wink. “We’ll give you a shout when dinner’s ready.”

  “What about the rest?” asked Wayne. There were six more boxes in the hall.

  “Sam can fetch them,” said Amanda, “when she’s ready. I’m sure she’ll manage.” She started off back down the stairs and Wayne made to join her.

  “Oh, Way-e-ane,” Samantha said softly, mocking her mother’s voice the moment she was out of earshot. He jerked his head round. The girl was coiling a strand of hair around her finger, sticking her rapidly developing chest out as far as it would go. Not for the first time, he felt profoundly uncomfortable in her presence.

  “Thanks, Way-e-ane,” she continued, top lip rising up into a sneer. “Now go on, boy, follow your mistress. Heel!”

  A vision of the scalped pooch danced before Wayne’s eyes as he hurried after Amanda.

  In the kitchen, Amanda was opening the fridge. She put a bottle of Riesling and a can of Foster’s down on the counter, reached into the cupboard above for some glasses.

  “I think we’ve earned this,” she said, handing Wayne his beer and sloshing out a good slug of wine for herself. “Cheers.”

  Wayne didn’t bother to pour his out. He clinked her green glass goblet with his tin and took a long, grateful guzzle. “Thanks, darling,” Amanda put her hand on his shoulder and gav
e him a squeeze, remembering her mother’s face after Wayne had redecorated her bathroom for her, the twitching cheek and the blinking eyes when she had been forced to thank him. “You’ve done a lot for me and I’m really grateful.”

  Wayne put his arm around her waist. “I told you, babe. Anything for you.”

  “Ahhh,” she reached up to kiss him. At the same moment, a muffled, thudding bass sound announced that Samantha had worked out how to use her new record player. Amanda rolled her eyes. “Well,” she said, “I did warn you it wouldn’t be easy.”

  Wayne stared into his lover’s eyes. “She did it, didn’t she? The dog …”

  Amanda swallowed a mouthful of wine. “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “I reckon she did.”

  A succession of images flashed through her mind. The shiny, rigid bodies of four little goldfish, lying on the carpet. A canary, feet in the air at the bottom of his cage, neck broken. A pair of terrapins with their heads wedged upside down between two rocks in their tank. Despite Samantha’s wideeyed denials that she had anything to do with it, her attempts to shift the blame onto the cleaning lady each time, Amanda had never dared buy her daughter any animals again.

  The High Mistress of St Paul’s calling her and Malcolm into her study, telling them about the girl found tied up with a skipping rope and locked in a broom cupboard. Explaining how, though she had no concrete proof, she knew who the ringleader was and if such incidents continued, she would be forced to take drastic measures. Well, that had been one embarrassment spared by their move back here. Amanda had been certain that the shock of going to Ernemouth High – where, if her own experiences were anything to go by, the kids were much more able to take care of themselves than those doe-eyed princesses in public school – might have knocked some sense into her daughter. That she would blanch at the prospect of picking on anyone her own size. But, it seemed Sam had found someone smaller almost immediately.

  “Not that Mum will ever believe it,” she said. “She couldn’t let herself. It would send her mad if she did.” Malcolm had never wanted to hear it either, had gone on firing cleaners until Amanda had put her foot down, pointed out the unlikely odds that they had hired three pet murderers in a row. And the hell he had given her for daring to think such things …