David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  ‘The Hyena’ by Carl H, Ward East C.

  I cast my eyes around at the others.

  Directly across the room – on the side furthest from the window – one of the murals was partially obscured by shadows.

  And yet something about it registered with me.

  I stepped closer and raised the torch.

  It was two hillsides, coming in from the left and right and meeting in the middle, both painted in emerald green. In the sky above was the sun, perfectly round, its beams coming down in parallel lines to where two crudely drawn figures, a mother and a child, made their way down the middle. The rays of the sun fell directly on them as they descended the valley.

  I took a step closer, eyes fixed – not on the sky, or the sun, or the figures – but on something square and grey, perched halfway up the hill on the left side.

  It was the remains of an old tinner’s hut.

  I looked down at the nameplate below the mural.

  ‘Heaven’ by Casey B, Ward East A.

  69

  The mural was a version of Franks’s photograph: the valley, the spire, the tinner’s hut. Dropping to my haunches, I ran a finger along her name and removed some of the grime, my mind firing. But, before I had a chance to think about what this meant, to try to understand why Casey Bullock had replicated the location in Franks’s photograph, I noticed something else: below the mural was a tiny air-conditioning vent, about six inches wide and three inches high. Its cover was on the floor in front of it.

  And inside the vent I could see the end of a rope.

  I reached in and grabbed hold of it.

  The rope snaked off further into the air-conditioning system, but as I pulled on it, it became taut. It’s tied to something on the other side. I yanked at it a second time, even harder, until the rope went rigid. And then I felt a shift in weight, a movement from back to front – except this time I realized it wasn’t something in the shaft that I was moving.

  It was the wall itself.

  The entire wall panel was coming towards me.

  I scrambled away, expecting it to fall on me. But it didn’t. It rolled out smoothly, as if on runners. When I pulled it all the way out, I saw that was exactly what it was on: the wall panel had been cut away, supported at the back by a makeshift metal frame, and perched on two tracks, so it could slide in and out. Beyond it, in what was supposed to be the cavity wall, a space had been knocked through, about five feet high by two feet wide.

  It led through to the adjacent room.

  Shining the flashlight ahead of me, I moved in behind the wall and into the cavity space, and then through to the next room. It was totally dark. No windows. One door.

  I tried the door.

  Locked from the outside.

  Sweeping the light from right to left, I could see it had once been some kind of supplies room. Shelving units were lined up in three banks of four, all the shelves empty. One of them had toppled over, hitting the nearest wall. There was dust everywhere, a sea of lint caught in the cone of the torch. There was a smell of damp, of rot, of a room that had been closed up from the moment the hospital was abandoned. When I glanced back at the door, no light escaped in under it.

  No one could get into the supplies room.

  Unless they came in through an entrance they weren’t supposed to find.

  I began heading further in. As I did, the air changed: it seemed to settle and become heavier, thicker, the smell changing too. It was no longer just damp and rot, but something more acrid and harsh, like burnt plastic. There was a gentle buzz now too; a constant, unbroken hum. I used the torch to zero in on it. It was a generator, battery-operated, sitting on its own against the back wall, about six feet from me. It hummed endlessly, the same noise, a burning odour drifting out of its plastic grille.

  Something glanced my face.

  I started, and looked up.

  It was a light cord.

  I tugged at it. Weak, yellow light rinsed out across the spaces around and behind me – but my eyes didn’t leave the back wall.

  Because it was covered.

  Photographs. Maps. Tickets. Receipts.

  As I moved again, getting closer, they seemed to multiply: occupying every available space, except for a small rectangle of wall, right in the middle, where a trestle table had been set up.

  On top was a VHS player.

  On top of that was a TV.

  There was something beneath the table too, partially hidden in shadows. I brought the torch back from my side and switched it on, directing it to the space under the table.

  Sitting on its own was an urn.

  It had LUCAS engraved on it.

  An odd feeling ghosted through me, as if I’d stumbled into something sacred – a memorial; a mausoleum – and then something caught my eye in a picture to my right.

  I leaned in.

  It was Casey Bullock, at least five years younger than the photograph I’d seen of her in the newspaper. She was holding her son. He was ten, eleven months old, dressed in a black-and-red winter jacket and a pair of denims. The boy was smiling, Bullock turned to him. Her expression said everything about how she felt about him, her eyes full, her mouth wide, the muscles in her face, the radiance of her skin.

  Above that picture was a receipt.

  Much of it had faded, but someone had taken the time to highlight the date and copy over it in biro.

  7 February 1998.

  At the top was the logo for London Zoo.

  My eyes returned to the photograph. Immediately, it was obvious where Bullock and her son were: in the background of the shot, I could see the Casson Pavilion at London Zoo. And as my eyes moved further up the wall, past the picture of the two of them, past the receipt, I saw something else, obscured in shadows.

  The black-and-red jacket the boy had been wearing in the photograph.

  Then I realized what this place was: nothing here was random. Each vertical strip on the wall formed a collection of related items – sometimes a photograph, a receipt and piece of clothing; sometimes a piece of clothing and toy; sometimes just pictures, even paintings.

  But all from the same day, or occasion.

  As I moved further and further in, I saw the first two years of the boy’s life charted, week to week: days old to twenty-four months; crawling to walking to running; the dark hair of his birth to the blond of his second year. In one – adjacent to the trestle table – he was staring in awe at the candles on a birthday cake, a train passing along tracks made from icing. The clothes he’d been wearing in the photograph were now pinned to the wall next to it.

  At the trestle table, I stopped.

  The TV was on, as if it had been used recently. There was no picture onscreen, but when I touched a hand to it, it felt warm. Below that, the VCR was on too, its time set to 00:00, flashing on and off slowly. An icon on the readout showed a tape was inside.

  I pushed Play.

  A picture kicked in.

  The CCTV footage from the night Pamela Welland had died.

  It was in terrible condition, worse than the version of it that had been filmed on the phone. Scanlines drifted from bottom to top constantly, the picture glitching, the colours rinsed out and pale. There was no sound, just a timer, running down the moments until Casey Bullock got up from the table and headed to the toilets. When she did, the footage became so badly damaged it was almost impossible to see what was going on.

  The screen went black.

  I raised my eyes.

  High above the television, at the very top of the wall, was another picture, placed there in shadow, as if deliberately hidden. It was Bullock again, her son cradled in her arms. The boy – about a month old – was wrapped in a thermal jumpsuit, Bullock dressed for spring, in a scarf and raincoat. In the background were a spire and a tinner’s hut.

  Above that was a blank card, Franks’s handwriting on it.

  Instantly, I wheeled back to the camera-phone film I’d watched in the car before coming over. In the moments b
efore Franks had ended it, I’d heard a creak on the video.

  A door moving in a breeze. Or a chair being eased into.

  But it hadn’t been those things.

  I knew that now.

  It wasn’t a breeze or a creak.

  It was a sob.

  Because, next to Bullock in the photograph on Dartmoor, was a younger Leonard Franks. He had one hand on the dome of the boy’s head, one hand reaching off-camera as he took a picture of the three of them. He was smiling – and in his eyes there were tears.

  He’d been crying at the video of Casey Bullock.

  Just like he’d cried the first time he saw their newborn son.

  The End

  October 2012 | Fourteen Months Ago

  Casey left the house and walked down the road to where the phone box sat perched on the edges of the cliff. Two miles west, along the coast, she could see Keel Point island, out in the water. The hospital was a smudge from here, a collection of buildings barely visible in the dwindling light of dusk. But she knew it intimately, even eleven months on from its closure – its shape, its structure, its corridors. She didn’t even have to see it.

  At the phone box, she paused and looked around.

  For three months, she’d slept in cheap hotels, in bed and breakfasts, in hostels, even on the streets – hunted, terrified – before this had finally become her home in January. Ten months on from that, some of the fear had gone, but not much. She’d been forced to establish habits here that she hated but knew were necessary. She’d only go out at dawn and dusk. She wouldn’t use a mobile phone. She didn’t send emails. She never told anyone what her real name was. Her neighbours on the floor above, a couple with a one-year-old daughter, thought her name was Charlotte. That’s the name she’d told them to call her.

  Charlotte.

  Or Charlie, for short.

  Yet, over time, she’d grown tired of the hiding. She’d never hidden from anything in her life. All the things she’d had to deal with – Lucas’s death, her divorce, her spiral into depression, Simon – she’d faced down. Some journeys had taken longer than others. Some she’d never fully made. But she’d never hidden from anything.

  Not until this.

  She tried not to linger on the thought – on the realization that this was her life now – and fed a couple of coins into the slot. She looked around again, in case she was being watched. But, the reality was, the village was quiet. In truth, it was barely even a village. There were seven houses, two of them subdivided into a pair of flats. It was half a mile north to the nearest through-road. The only people who came down here were those who lived here. Visitors would make curtains twitch. Visitors got noticed.

  That was why they’d chosen it.

  She dialled the number she’d been instructed to, and looked out to the island again. Sun glinted in the windows on the eastern side of the hospital, some of them smashed already, its vast cream façade soaking up the late-evening colour.

  Bethlehem was bleeding.

  A couple of seconds later, a generic voicemail message kicked in. She waited for the beep and then said, ‘It’s Wednesday 3 October, 7.15 p.m.’

  She hung up. As one coin tumbled into the dial box, another emptied into the coin slot. She slid two fingers in and pulled it out. It would be enough to make another call if she wanted to. A call to Garrick. A call to tell him she was okay. She wasn’t missing. She wasn’t dead. A call just to be able to talk to someone who wanted to listen to her.

  Slowly, she raised the coin to the slot, her hand hovering there, head screaming at her, telling her all the reasons not to do it; heart pulling her in the other direction.

  You’re lonely, she heard herself saying.

  Desperately lonely.

  So she pushed the coin in and dialled his number. She knew his mobile off by heart. He’d given it to her after a while, and told her she could use it in emergencies.

  But then, as it connected, she panicked.

  As she listened to it ring, she thought of the voicemail calls she’d been instructed to make. She thought of being cornered by Reynolds on Keel Point beach. She thought of how she’d got away from him in the hours after, of surviving thirteen months without him finding her – and she thought of the terrible risks she’d been taking by calling Garrick.

  The risks to herself. To Garrick.

  To his sons.

  As Garrick’s answerphone kicked in, she jammed a hand on the cradle and killed the call, looking back at the village she’d become a prisoner in.

  Better to be a prisoner than a corpse.

  That’s what Len had told her.

  But she wasn’t sure if she believed that any more.

  Two days later, she got back to the house after making her call to the voicemail, let herself in and locked the door. In the hallway mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself: a 37-year-old woman who wore every single year of that time on her face. She’d long since stopped thinking of herself as attractive, but sometimes in the months before she had to go into hiding, she’d still caught men looking at her, holding her gaze as she passed them in the street. In those moments, she realized something of her past remained.

  A glimpse of a younger life.

  A better life.

  She moved through to the kitchen. It had two entrances: one from the living room, one from the hallway. The flat was small, but despite its size, despite the way she had started to feel imprisoned inside it, it had a nice flow to it. She liked the way the rooms all connected. She might have liked the location if she got to leave it more often. She’d even grown to like the sound of the family padding around upstairs: their laughter, the girl’s tears when she was upset, the way the mother could so quickly and quietly comfort her.

  Casey had done that once, a long time ago, and as she thought of those moments, she allowed herself to drift. She sat down in the semi-darkness of the kitchen, and recalled those times that were gone and never coming back. That first train ride into London, reading over her interview prep, nerves coiling in her stomach. The day they called her at home in Devon to offer her the job. Cradling Lucas in her arms, three years later, in the hours after he was born. Turning her back for what seemed like a second and then hearing his screams for help. Burying him in the rain, his tiny coffin disappearing into the grave. And then the collapse of her marriage, the descent into depression – and coming out the other side. Sometimes she wondered if it might have been easier not to.

  Then she heard a noise.

  A click.

  She listened again.

  Nothing.

  She inched around the kitchen table and looked through the archway, into the living room. She could see the edge of a sofa, and a side table with an empty cup on it. As she passed under the arch, her hand moved to the wall and she switched on the lights.

  The living room was empty.

  ‘I thought I’d let myself in.’

  Her heart hit her throat.

  She spun around, facing back into the kitchen.

  Reynolds was standing in the doorway connecting the kitchen to the hall. He took another step. She automatically took a step back, the base of her spine hitting the wall.

  He’s found me, she thought.

  Oh fuck. Oh shit. He’s found me.

  In the subdued light, his skin was chalk white, like a phantom. He smiled, holding up a big hand, as if that would be some kind of reassurance.

  But it was the opposite.

  There was no reassurance in him at all.

  ‘Relax,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I think we need to talk.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  He smirked. ‘Oh, it wasn’t so hard. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist calling that doctor friend of yours. After all, who else have you got?’ He paused, eyes widening. ‘I’ve had a tracker on his mobile for over a year. He’s so caught up in his own world, in his buzzwords, his amateur-hour psychology, he never realized. Thirteen months later, your
weakness finally exposed you. You just don’t like being alone, do you, Casey?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do I want?’ He took another step into the kitchen, hand reaching out for the counter. He pressed his palm flat to it, fingers spreading like an oil spill. ‘We never got to finish our conversation. Don’t you remember that? Our conversation on the beach at Keel Point? We were watching all those patients being loaded on to the fun bus.’

  She just looked at him.

  ‘Do you remember that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you remember what I said to you? I said I wanted to talk to you, somewhere private, somewhere people couldn’t see me with my hands around your neck. So we made an arrangement: I would follow you on to the moors. And we would talk.’

  ‘You were taking me up there to kill me, to dump my car, to get rid of any trace I existed.’

  Another smirk.

  He took a couple of quick steps towards her, and before she could come out from against the wall he was two feet from her, leaning over her. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t need to: he’d blocked off her route into the living room, and out into the hallway.

  ‘You managed to lose me that day. I suppose you made use of your advantage: you know these country roads much better than me. I’m more of a big-city man myself. But, even so, when you lost me, when you didn’t return to your house, I thought to myself, “She won’t be stupid enough to go up against me. She’ll come back here, because she knows what happens if she doesn’t.” And yet, there I was, day after day, week after week, sitting there in my car outside your home, waiting for you to return. And you never did.’

  She swallowed. ‘You would have killed me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘But, back then, I would have made it painless.’

  Out of nowhere, a knock at the door.

  ‘Charlie?’ a muffled voice said.

  Reynolds didn’t move. He stayed there, standing over her, looking down into her face. She glanced from him to the door into the hallway.

  ‘It’s my neighbours,’ she said.

  ‘Charlie?’ the voice said again.