Weirdo

by Cathi Unsworth

  He came back out of the pillbox, a handkerchief over his mouth. He coughed, spat on the ground and then looked at Gray. “In’t you read her her rights yet?” he said.

  “Sir?” Gray looked from Rivett to Corrine and back again. “This girl’s just been seriously traumatised, I want to get her to hospital, not read her her rights. Can’t you see …”

  Rivett’s face darkened. “Din’t you see what she done in there, Detective Sergeant? She’s a bloody murderer! Alf,” he called over to his forensics man, “get in there now, get it all down. And take a bloody deep breath before you do it. You,” he turned to the paramedic, “give her any treatment she requires here and now. She in’t going to the hospital, she’s coming straight down the station with me.”

  Gray opened his mouth to protest, but Rivett raised his hand, a look of sheer malevolence in his eyes. For the second time that morning, Gray saw a bundle falling over the harbour wall and the words he was going to say got stuck in his throat.

  * * *

  “What’s this, Corrine?”

  The man sitting opposite her tapped a big, blunt forefinger down on the black leather-bound book that lay on the table between them.

  Corrine squirmed uncomfortably on the metal chair, her wrists aching from the handcuffs that kept her arms behind her back. The room swam in front of her.

  “Don’t know,” she managed to mumble.

  “Yes, you do, Corrine,” said the man. There was something familiar about his voice, something familiar about the big, bear-like shape of him. But Corrine couldn’t think where from. Her memory seemed to have short-fused. All she could recall was Darren, walking down a sand dune in front of her, saying something she couldn’t hear, as if she was watching a film with the sound turned down.

  “Your mum told me,” the man went on, “that this is your special magic book.”

  Corrine frowned, the shadow of a memory tapping at the corner of her mind.

  “In fact, your mum showed me the altar, where she say you cast your spells from.”

  The man’s voice was soothing and Corrine closed her eyes, drifting away back to the reel of Darren that was playing through her mind. Where she was, how long she had been there and why things had turned out this way were not thoughts she had got to yet.

  Abruptly, a jagged flash of red, black and white scored through her mind. The yew tree in the graveyard. Noj standing beneath her, his arms outstretched. She jolted back to wakefulness.

  “Ring some bells, do it, Corrine? Bells and spells? Is that what you done it for?” the voice persisted.

  Corrine remembered something. “I only wanted her to go away,” she said. Her voice was a fragile whisper.

  “What was that?” the man leaned forwards, his face coming closer to hers, closer into focus. There was something familiar about his eyes …

  “I din’t mean for no one to get hurt,” said Corrine. “The spell rebounded, see …”

  As she said it, it all came back to her. Darren walking down the sand dune, into the pillbox. The unholy scream that rent the air as she came running after him, too late. Falling over his dead body, falling into all that blood and seeing Sam standing there with that concrete in her hand …

  “I’m sorry!” Corrine screamed and pitched forwards, sobs wracking through her body, the chair scraping across the floor. “I’m sorry!”

  Rivett turned off the tape recorder.

  “That’ll do,” he said.

  * * *

  Back in his office, Alf Brown was waiting with the photographs. Rivett studied the mess that had been made of Darren Moorcock in more detail than he had allowed himself at the crime scene. His eyes travelled across a pentagram rendered in blood.

  “Time to call the press,” he decided aloud. “Where’s the arresting officer?”

  * * *

  Gray was down in the overcrowded interview rooms, talking to one of the drinkers picked up in the lunchtime raid Rivett had ordered on Swing’s. Harvey Bunton was speaking in a slow, deliberate drawl, maintaining he couldn’t rightly say for sure he knew anyone or anything Gray was talking about. Gray was struggling to pay attention to his charade, trying to blink back the shimmering black cloud of flies that kept appearing at the corner of his mind.

  “Paul,” Roy Mobbs’ voice behind him. “The boss want you upstairs now.”

  * * *

  Standing by Rivett on the steps of the station, Gray turned his head away from the cameras, from the questions led by Rivett’s pet journalist, Sid Hayles from the Mercury. Coming up from the interview rooms, he had forgotten how bright the day was.

  “I can confirm that I have been talking to a suspect,” Rivett was saying. “You can let your readers know they’ll sleep soundly in their beds tonight, the miscreant has been taken in hand and has just made a full confession. We just need to speak to a few more of her associates before we release the full details.”

  Gray swallowed, trying to take it all in.

  “Did you say her associates?” Hayles’ eyes goggled.

  Rivett smiled grimly. “Need an ear test, Sid? That’ll be all for now, gentlemen …”

  Across the road from the huddle of reporters, Gray saw Sheila Alcott stepping out of a beaten-up Citroën 2CV, pushing her hair off her pinched, white face. For a second, their eyes met, then Rivett’s hand was on Gray’s shoulder, propelling him back inside.

  “You heard that all right, then, Paul?” Rivett leant in close, so no one else could hear him. “I got her full confession on tape. Now I want you to get back down there and find out who else out of these jokers fancies themselves as a fucking wizard.”

  The black cloud moved in Gray’s peripheral vision. “What are you trying to do?” he said, rubbing his brow, trying to brush the apparition away.

  “Bikers and bloody weirdos,” said Rivett, “I don’t want them in my town.”

  * * *

  Maureen Carver paused on the landing, trying to fight back the tears that were swimming in her eyes. She could not believe what she had just heard on the evening news, could not countenance the fact that the smiling, softly spoken young man she had last seen only two days ago would never walk through their front door again. Doubling the shock of the news of Darren’s murder was the fact that the newscaster had announced that a suspect was being held in custody, believed to be a schoolmate.

  Believed to be a girl.

  Maureen’s mind rewound past events. Debbie bringing Corrine home and how much that had troubled her, the persistent fear that no good could come of this over-dependent friendship for her daughter. The strange afternoon when Corrine had come round after disappearing for a week, the conversation they had that worried Debbie so much. The falling-out with Alex next door and Debbie’s angry ranting about this new girl at school, this Samantha Lamb and what she had done to them all.

  Maureen choked back a sob, buried her head in her hands for a second, trying to gather up every last ounce of strength she possessed.

  She pushed open Debbie’s door gently. Her daughter had finally stopped being sick yesterday, but was so exhausted by lack of sleep that Maureen had let her stop home from school today. She had already worked so hard, anyway, to finish her O-Levels and get into art school …

  Debbie lay in her bed, hair fanned out around the pillow, one hand raised up to her mouth, a finger on her lips as if she had fallen asleep with a question on her mind. Spread across the sheets were the opened pages of the music papers Darren had brought with him on Saturday. Maureen shut her eyes, prayed to God for the courage to wake her daughter from this blissful idyll into a world that would never, ever be the same again.

  “Mum?” Debbie’s eyes blinked open and a smile spread across her face for a moment, before the look in Maureen’s eyes gave her pause to wonder. “Mum, what’s wrong?”

  * * *

  Maureen didn’t know how many hours had passed, only that it was dark now and Debbie had cried herself out, lying in her mother’s arms, passed into the merciful haven of sleep.


  Across the road, Maureen heard the sound of running feet. Then a metallic clink, followed by the smash of breaking glass, and the feet running off again, up the road. There was a sudden whooshing noise and the room became illuminated; then a piercing scream from the house across the road.

  * * *

  The flames had destroyed the downstairs and were licking up the front of the house by the time that Gray got there. Hundreds of people were out of their houses and standing around the spectacle, men with walking sticks and women with babies in their arms, their faces in the flickering light lit up with expressions of strange and cruel delight.

  “Burn her!” he heard someone yell.

  Smoke belched from the top of the building, where firemen now stood on ladders, aimed arcs of water into the conflagration, sparks and ash falling through the air, the sky lit up with reds, oranges and purples. For a second, Gray’s sore eyes rested on the plume rising into the sky, merging in his mind with the swarm he had witnessed earlier.

  “Whore!” a woman screamed beside him, making Gray jump, bringing his eyes back to a black figure silhouetted against the flames. Rivett walked up the garden path towards him, Gina lying across his arms, coughing into her fist.

  Rivett staring into the crowd, shouting, “Get back from here! Go on, all of you!” The hiss of the water hitting the flames. Pieces of debris sailing through the air around him. Rivett’s face red and his eyes as dark and unfathomable as the North Sea.

  Gray stared at his boss and found he could no longer think any more.

  * * *

  They watched the dawn from the car park of the Iron Duke, Rivett and Gray in Gray’s car, Rivett at the wheel. Sipping whisky from the DCI’s hipflask at the end of twenty-four hours neither would ever wish to live through again.

  “Said you were a Barnardo’s boy, din’t you, Paul?” said Rivett.

  Gray stared at the rim of the orange orb, glimmering over the blue horizon.

  “That’s why it get to you,” Rivett passed him the silver flask.

  Gray took it and swallowed, the liquid burning the back of his throat.

  Rivett watched him, continued: “You know, I admire you for that. You come from nothing but you pulled yourself up by the bootstraps. Had the guts and determination to make a man of yourself, become a proper detective. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

  Gray turned his head towards his boss. His pupils were redrimmed, but they had lost the wild incoherence Rivett had seen come over his DS as they stood outside Gina’s burning house. Gina had nothing but smoke inhalation and the unwelcome news of what her daughter had been up to to deal with. Which was enough, for now.

  “You’re a good bloke, Paul,” said Rivett, “and a good policeman. The two things in’t always mutually exclusive, are they? That’s why I want you take a few weeks’ leave – on full pay, of course. Take the wife on holiday, somewhere nice and quiet. Relax, get away from here and don’t think about work for a while. ’Cos I don’t want to have to lose you, Paul.” He rested his hand for a moment on Gray’s shoulder. “I really wouldn’t want that.”

  Gray’s lip trembled and he closed his eyes, to stop the tears from coming.

  Rivett put his key in the ignition. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get you home.”

  39

  Resurrection Joe

  March 2003

  Smollet looked at her, the woman he had been married to for all these years. She stared back at him with eyes that appeared green in the glow of the bedside lamp, but in direct sunlight, turned the same colour blue as the sea.

  “Please, love,” he said. “We’ve got to go.”

  He glanced at the clock at the bedside. If it hadn’t been for Jason Blackburn’s panicked call, he would have been meeting Len Rivett at the Leisure Beach by now. In the time he’d had since he fled his work, he could have been half an hour on the road. There was a noise in his head like the whirring of a trap being sprung.

  His wife dropped her gaze to the counterpane, began to pick at imaginary threads. As she moved, her carefully styled fringe fell forwards, and for a brief instant, the old white ridge of a scar could be discerned across her temples.

  “I told you, I don’t want to,” she said, in a voice little louder than a whisper.

  Smollet knelt down beside her, took hold of the hand that was worrying itself.

  “It’s only for a couple of days,” he said. “I’ve booked your favourite hotel. I’ve packed your bags for you. The car’s ready downstairs. All you need to do is put some clothes on. Please, darling. Do it for me?”

  Her nails dug into his fingers and she looked back at him, a strange expression there. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why do you want to get rid of me, Dale?”

  She bit her bottom lip with a perfectly white and straight set of front teeth.

  “I don’t, darling,” he said. “I’m just making sure you’re safe, like I always have.”

  He reached her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, closing his eyes, wondering if he should use sedatives to keep the promise he had made to her grandfather when he asked for her hand in marriage, the promise he intended to keep for the rest of his days. Even though the old man hadn’t wanted it, had had to be persuaded, and not by him either. By the only one he ever took advice from.

  “Uncle Len was here today,” she said. “Has that got something to do with it?”

  Smollet opened his eyes. “What?” he said. “When was that?”

  “This morning,” she said. “He came in for a cup of tea.” She bit down on her bottom lip harder. “Uncle Len never liked me,” she said. “It’s him, isn’t it? He wants you to get rid of me.” Her eyes welled with tears.

  * * *

  “What’s in there?” said Sandra.

  “The interviews I done with the headmaster of Ernemouth High and Corrine Woodrow’s form teacher,” Gray opened the book at a well-thumbed page. “Another one who got hounded out over this. The thing is, they in’t all about her. The biggest troublemaker in that year, in both of their opinions, weren’t Corrine or any of them weirdos. It was another girl, one what the headmaster had only just that minute had to expel.”

  “Who was she?” Sandra’s voice was a whisper.

  “That’s just it,” said Gray. “She was Eric Hoyle’s granddaughter.”

  Sandra’s hand came up to her throat. “Edna,” she said.

  Gray nodded, flicked forwards a couple of pages.

  “Another interview here, with Lizzy Hurrell, who run Oliver John’s hairdressers and took Corrine on as an apprentice. She told me Corrine and Samantha Lamb had a fight outside her salon on the Saturday morning.”

  Sandra shook her head, her eyes hardening. “She knew, Paul. Edna knew.”

  “Something else Ward told me,” said Gray. “Len had Alf Brown helping him go through all the old files yesterday. Alf Brown retired five years ago – but he’s the one who done all the forensics on the Woodrow case. And there was one thing that always bothered me about what they said about the crime scene. Up until today, I put it down to the shock of what I saw, that I din’t take it in or remember it properly. But I never saw no pentagram in blood around Darren Moorcock’s body.” He snapped the logbook shut.

  “Ring him,” Sandra’s voice was urgent. “Ring Ward before Rivett get him too.”

  * * *

  Smollet went into the en suite in the spare bedroom, stared at his face. His skin looked grey and he could see lines by the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there a couple of days before. His teenage infatuation might have burned itself out over the many years of his marriage, but until the dawn of Monday morning, he had still cherished the idea that he had done the honourable thing. That matrimony hadn’t just been an enterprise engineered to benefit his uncle – to benefit himself.

  Smollet had been told that Samantha’s teenage breakdown had been precipitated by a row with her mother that had led to Amanda’s miscarriage, the culmination of months of bad blood b
etween the pair. That was why she had had to go back to London to have treatment in a private clinic and then been returned to the custody of her father, Malcolm. When Smollet’s training took him to Hendon, Rivett had helped instigate the resumption of the tentative courtship that had only just begun before she was forced to go away. After two years’ engagement, Smollet married Samantha in Chelsea Town Hall, brought her back to Ernemouth with him when he passed out as a newly qualified PC. Told everyone she was a girl he had met in London. They said it would be better that way.

  Smollet’s love had still burned brightly then, even though there were few traces left of the girl he had known at school. He understood that the sterilization, the dentistry and the other surgery had been necessary, for her own good, and it had certainly rendered Smollet’s beloved the perfect policeman’s wife. Her childlike frailty made him love her even more, so that the promise he had made to Eric had not been entirely down to Rivett’s ulterior motives, the rewards he was promised he would reap from their union – and had, in due course, received.

  Samantha never alluded to the time when they had first met, and Smollet didn’t expect her to – from his understanding of the medical facts, she’d had to blank a lot out of her mind in order to recover. She sometimes recalled her earlier childhood, often forgetting that her nana was no longer with them, although she never mentioned Eric. Only Rivett seemed to make her uncomfortable, as if there was still something lurking in the corner of her mind that she half-remembered about him.

  She had never reconciled with her mother. Amanda now lived somewhere in Hertfordshire, still married to her toy boy Wayne and, from what Smollet had gathered, taking on a constant stream of foster children as some form of penance. Eric had died in 1989, succumbing to a second heart attack not long after the wedding. He left half of everything he owned to Smollet, so long as he continued to act as Samantha’s custodian.

  Smollet had risen rapidly to take command of Rivett’s old station. The long hours, his dedication to the gym and his carefully cultivated standing in the community had been compensation enough for the holes at the heart of his home life, holes that gradually widened over the years. As his wife drifted further away from him and into the shell of herself, Smollet’s good looks continued to attract the kind of similarly frustrated, middle-aged women who appreciated string-free assignations and were compelled by the bonds of their own marriages to remain discreet.