The Nightmare Place

by Mosby, Steve

  The road finished in a misshapen nub of tarmac, where I found space to park up. Wooden fences ran along one side, with a single break for a footpath. Beyond, I could see more houses. They looked like they had a second storey, but I knew it was an illusion: the estate was constructed on a slope, and the buildings ahead were just built on higher ground.

  I locked the car and headed up the footpath, then took one of the many jagged stone staircases that criss-crossed the estate. It’s deceptive, from the outside, just how extensive Thornton really is. The sensation came back to me now – how easy it can be to lose yourself here. The further in you go, the more it feels like you could wander through an area that is only a mile or so square without ever reaching an edge. Living here, it sometimes seemed that the area kept shifting around, reconfiguring itself to prevent you from leaving.

  Occasionally washing lines spanned the paths, with towels and clothes draped over them like curtains, and the smell of wet fabric and cheap washing powder was another reminder of childhood. There were memories everywhere here, and they emerged in my head fleetingly, like half-heard snatches of laughter. The slight breeze seemed full of ghosts.

  It’s just a place, Zoe. No better or worse than any other.

  And remember, you pulled yourself out of here.

  Jonathan Pearson lived close to the centre of the estate, whereas I’d grown up in a house on the edge. I’d deliberately parked at the opposite end; I had no desire to walk past my old home. It would either look the same, or be very different, and either way, it was nothing I needed to see. Because the voice in my head was right: I’d worked hard and pulled myself out of this place, this life. There wasn’t anything left for me here.

  Except one thing, of course. And about five minutes after I’d left the car, close to Pearson’s street, I took a ginnel that led me away from it. A couple of turns later, the land opened up ahead of me, and there it was.

  Like everything else here, the waste ground was almost exactly the same as I remembered it. In fact, my nightmare had preserved it so accurately that I felt a shiver despite the heat, and had to suppress the urge to pinch myself. But no, this wasn’t a dream. The sky was a normal colour, and there weren’t any clouds. And it was empty: no figures of any kind standing there. Don’t, I thought suddenly. It was irrational, and I didn’t know why, but the thought came anyway

  Don’t.

  I stood there for a few moments longer, willing a memory to come. Just some indication of what had happened here that I couldn’t remember, and that only ever came out in my sleep. But it wouldn’t.

  Quarter past eight now.

  Just do what you came here to do.

  I turned and headed back into the body of the estate. It only took another minute to locate Pearson’s house, and as I approached it, I could hear the sound of the television from the open window out front. Someone was home, then.

  I took out my phone and dialled Chris’s number. He answered immediately, and sounded annoyed with me. Understandably, I supposed.

  ‘You’ve got to do everything yourself, haven’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, although of course he was right. ‘You weren’t in, and I decided it was too important to wait.’

  ‘Bullshit. Zoe—’

  ‘Give it a rest, Chris. It might not even be anything.’

  ‘Then why was it too important to wait?’

  ‘Because it was. And I don’t need a chaperone. Anyway, look: I’ve called you now that I’m here. So you can escort me by telephone, can’t you?’

  ‘Zoe—’

  I moved the phone away from my ear and knocked on Pearson’s door. My intention was to play it as a follow-up from the nursery incident at first: nothing serious that might alarm him. But in truth, I was glad to have Chris on the line. Just in case.

  I heard bolts being withdrawn, and then a moment later the front door opened. I recognised the man immediately from the photograph online. The beard was gone now, but the wild hair remained. Of course, the picture had only shown his face.

  ‘Jonathan Pearson?’ I said.

  He nodded, and my heart sank a little. At about five foot six, Pearson was shorter than me, and he was dressed in pyjama bottoms and a white T-shirt that revealed how skinny he was. Not only would I have been able to overpower him with one hand, there was no way on earth he could be the guy the nursery workers had seen, and that the officer had stopped and interviewed. You would have had to be blind to describe this guy as physically large.

  I lifted the phone to my ear again.

  ‘Stand down, soldier.’

  ‘Why? What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s not our guy. I’ll be back in soon.’

  I ended the call, realising that what I’d said wasn’t quite right. Pearson might not be our guy, but I was certain that the man who had been spotted in Sally’s street was. The question was, how had the bastard got hold of Pearson’s driving licence?

  ‘What’s this about?’ asked Pearson.

  ‘Detective Inspector Zoe Dolan.’ I did my best to smile at him, although the sinking feeling had started to be replaced by frustration and anger. ‘I think we need to have a little chat, Jonathan.’

  Eleven

  It always happens like this, after the monster has come. He tries to forget, but after a while, it simply gets too much.

  Because he is a man who loves very deeply indeed, and he never truly leaves anyone behind. In this way, he is not so unlike other people: normal people. Doesn’t everybody mourn lost relationships to some extent? Whether it’s with hatred, fondness, confusion, guilt or forgiveness, surely everyone looks back. However hard we try, it’s impossible to unremember for ever.

  In other ways, of course, he is very different indeed.

  During the time he spends with someone, he is often happy. He thinks of them in the morning when he wakes up, and smiles to himself, content with the knowledge that he has them in his life, however obliquely. He anticipates the first sight of them that day, and makes plans for what they might do: dancing together at a distance. For a certain amount of time, he is able to pretend. When reality does intrude, it does so completely and utterly. The realisation of who and what he is can crush him: reduce him to nothing but a fat, heaving curl beneath the covers in a pitch-black bedroom. There is no light in the world at those moments, and yet somehow he sees himself all too clearly.

  When the relationship is over, it feels much the same, only bleaker. He can walk the streets and go to work, and for lengthy periods of time he is able to forget what he has done. The woman is no longer in his life, of course, but that absence is only the vaguest of pressures at the back of his mind. Perhaps there is an odd quality to the sunlight and the air, as though the world has subtly shifted on some emotional level, but he functions.

  Until he remembers.

  Who he is. What he is.

  Then every minute aches, and it seems impossible to imagine that he can bear an hour. He does, of course, and days somehow pass. What he experiences is not simply depression and self-hatred, but despair. True despair, he knows, is not so much an emotion as a vacuum. It is the feeling of God turning His back on you. Running through it is the knowledge that the things you have done can never be undone or made right. If a glass rolls across a table, you can catch it and roll it back along its path to where it started, but if it tips over the edge and smashes, that can’t ever be reversed. The glass will forever be broken, and you will always be the man who broke it.

  Even worse than the knowledge are the memories. He can still see everything that happened very clearly, and in his mind, the images play over and over, the most awful parts vivid and present. How could he have done that to them? The hate he felt for them makes no sense any more. It’s the memory of an emotion, and the memory doesn’t fit.

  He lies in his bed, sometimes for days at a time, trying to stop himself from feeling anything at all. He calls in sick to work. And he is sick. Sometimes he wonders if people can sense it from the street – if
the house stinks from the disease of him. He wakes up and imagines the women standing there in the corner of the bedroom. What’s left of them.

  It always happens like this. After a while, it simply gets too much.

  Of course, this time it’s different.

  This time, he’s killed her.

  He saw the flyer while he was working at the university.

  The contract was only for a week. He brought sandwiches in with him, and took to spending his lunch hours in the Union bar. The building was old; you walked in through the run-down entrance, and then down a set of stairs, and the bar was built into a large wooden booth at the centre. He would buy a couple of pints and sit, drinking slowly, losing himself in the chatter around him and trying not to think.

  He could feel the students’ eyes on him, because he was conspicuous in his overalls and obviously didn’t belong here. He was too big not to notice, and with his bedraggled hair and unshaven face, he looked as if he had walked out of a wilderness. Whereas they were all so young and small, with their supple bodies and smooth faces. The pupal stage of an entirely different species: none of them would grow up to be like him. He tried not to look back at them. When he did, the person staring tended to turn away very quickly indeed.

  The notice boards outside the bar were peppered with flyers and posters. Many were professionally done, advertising club nights. His gaze tracked across the images of young men and women in various states of undress, disco balls glinting, clusters of multicoloured bottles arranged like skittles. An alien world to him. There were also printed and hand-scrawled advertisements: rooms to rent; rooms wanted; lifts offered; musical instruments for sale. Notices for sports clubs. It was a cacophony of the small details of other people’s lives. Like the students themselves, there was an air of naïve, puppyish hope to it all. Nobody would want most of these things, but they’d put them up anyway.

  And then the flyer for the helpline caught his eye.

  It was on the third and final board, tacked to the edge: a simple glossy black sheet with the image of a bright red telephone – an old-fashioned one, with a circular dial – and big white text.

  MAYDAY.

  A problem shared …

  We are here just to listen.

  He stood there for a few moments, staring at the flyer, considering its message. We are here just to listen. Could that be true? His thoughts circled the idea, pondering the words and their meaning. He knew, of course, that such helplines existed. And they were confidential, weren’t they? At least, they were when it came to the standard calls – the abuse, the depression, the loneliness. But would that be the case with him? For the special things he would talk to them about?

  He ran his hand over his rough stubble. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure.

  Once the idea had settled in his head, though, it wouldn’t leave. How good it would be to talk to someone. What if, he thought, what if I could? That would be something, wouldn’t it. A problem shared. Because that was the point. It had always been bad in the past, but this time it was intolerable: the burden of the woman’s murder was too heavy to carry. Perhaps if he could share that with another human being, it would bring him some degree of peace.

  He didn’t know.

  After standing there for perhaps a minute longer, he looked carefully both ways, saw that nobody was watching, and plucked the flyer from the board. It felt like he was stealing it as he folded it away in his pocket and left. It tingled there, the possibility of some kind of release. He found himself almost huddling over it.

  If he was going to do it, he realised later, he would need to be very careful.

  He would have to make plans.

  And so now he sits outside on a bench and prepares.

  It is early afternoon, and this end of the park is mostly deserted. Across the spread of sunlit grass he can see clusters of people sitting, and a few others wandering along the dappled stone paths by the overhanging trees. There is a bandstand in the centre, and a couple of young men in shorts are on either side, arcing a frisbee to each other between the old green poles. A man is walking his dog; every now and then he throws a ball that’s as bright and red as an apple, and the animal tears off across the grass. He watches them all: normal people doing normal things. They have nothing heavy to carry.

  From the bench, he has a good enough view of the park to see that there’s nobody nearby. Nobody close enough to overhear the conversation he is about to have. It is far from ideal, of course, but his options were limited and he needs to be safe. When he’s not using the phone, he intends to take out the battery and SIM card. In case he’s wrong about the call being confidential, he won’t risk using the phone at home, or anywhere there might be CCTV that could catch him. He drove for a while before finding this park. It will do. If he phones again, then next time he’ll choose somewhere else.

  He looks down at the phone in his hands.

  The plastic feels polished and awkward, as though it might slip from his grasp like a smooth pebble. He purchased it, along with a pay-as-you-go SIM card, from a dirty newsagent’s just outside the city centre. It came pre-loaded with a thousand minutes. No need to enter credit card details or talk to a salesperson or set anything up. He doesn’t even need to know his own phone number. He paid for everything with cash.

  And now, his heart leaping, he turns the phone on and forces himself to calm down. One last check around, but there is nobody nearby. All anyone in the distance will see is a man talking on a mobile phone, having an emotional conversation. If they see anything at all.

  He takes out the flyer, unfolds it, and dials the number, then presses the phone to his ear as it rings.

  ‘Hello,’ a woman’s voice says. ‘This is Mayday. My name’s Jane. How can I help you today?’

  Twelve

  ‘He’s doing this on purpose,’ Chris said.

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  Late morning, and we were waiting in the reception area at the city’s morgue and pathology department. We’d arrived on time for the appointment, but the pathologist, Sam Dale, had yet to appear. Under different circumstances, I might have agreed with Chris’s interpretation of the delay: I quite like Dale, but he can be a prickly little bastard. Today, however, I doubted it. The pathologist had fast-tracked the post-mortem on Sally Vickers, working on it through the early hours of the morning. If nothing else, he’d be eager to get home.

  While we waited, I walked over to the windows. The unit is situated on the eighth floor of the hospital, and one wall is comprised entirely of glass. Beyond the hazy width of the river, and the white eyelash curls of its folding currents, I could see the estates, the distant foundries and factories, even the beginnings of the countryside. The sun was invisible: just a brilliant white stain hanging over the city. The river below was still draped with the morning’s mist, but the light made it look more like steam.

  Jonathan Pearson.

  He was back at the department being interviewed right now, but really, that was a formality. I’d already established everything I needed to know at his house. Pearson had denied being questioned by the police near the nursery, and I believed him, because it hadn’t been him. It seemed fairly clear what had happened: our real man had given the officer a fake name. For his part, Pearson had no idea how the man could have got hold of his driver’s licence. He’d misplaced it a long time ago – last year sometime, he said – and ordered a new one. But he had no idea where or even when he’d lost the old one.

  The only positive thing to come out of the development was that we now had a reasonable description of our man’s face. Presumably he had picked Jonathan Pearson because there was a superficial resemblance between the two of them that would pass if he was confronted. But that was far from positive in reality, because beards could easily be shaved off. Long hair could be trimmed short.

  ‘Ah! Good evening, lady and gentleman.’

  I turned to see Dale poking his head out of a door to the side of reception. At first I thought he was
implying that we were the ones who were late, but then I saw how tired he looked. In terms of hours spent upright, it was probably approaching midnight to him.

  ‘Join me.’

  Chris rolled his eyes at me, and we followed Dale along the corridors that led to the autopsy suite. I remembered the way, of course. We’d been here a few times, although it’s rare for either of us to attend a post-mortem, or – as now – turn up after one. In reality, there’s little point. You’ve seen the victim at the scene, and you’re not a medical expert, so it’s generally a more productive use of your time to wait for a report to land in your actions tray, while you get on with things you’re good at. Today, though, I had wanted to come.

  We stepped inside the suite. The lights were very bright, and the room had a sealed quality that made our footfalls clop and echo on the white floor tiles. On my first ever visit, it had actually reminded me of a large high-tech kitchen. Most of the surfaces are polished steel, all kept spotlessly clean, and there are sinks and cabinets along the walls, and islands lined up down the centre. One wall is all metal, covered with a grid of what look like oven doors. Except they’re not ovens, and, of course, the islands are dissection tables, with bodies lying under white sheets. The nasal sting of chemical detergent in the air doesn’t quite mask the smell of death. It’s a memorable combination of turned meat and old flowers.

  Dale beckoned us impatiently over to the island at the far end of the room. He’s a short man. Most of his head is bald – today reflecting the overhead lights – but there are neat dabs of brown hair at his temples. He also has ears that stick out almost perpendicular to his face. Chris once described him as looking like a monkey that had been shaved, and the image is appropriate enough. Dale has a wiry strength about him; you could easily imagine him hanging from things.