by Steve Mosby
I'd convinced myself I left because of the guilt and regret I felt over Marie's death. Every time a shadow fell, I moved on quickly, telling myself it was simply because she'd died and I'd been unable to deal with my failure. That it was too painful to bear. That was only part of why I'd left, but it was threaded through it so inextricably that the excuse felt true if I didn't examine it too closely.
And that was what had gone wrong.
You don't want to remember how bad it was.
When I read the newspaper report about Sarah, I'd thought of everything I'd lost without seeing clearly why it was gone. I'd allowed myself to feel lonely without understanding I deserved to be. And I hadn't listened carefully enough to that voice. I'd thought it might be safe to come back, because I'd forgotten the real reasons why I left.
The things you forget are invisible by definition, noticeable only by the space they leave between the memories they touch. When you stay turned aside from them, it works. When you finally turn back, the memories around come into focus, and the shape of what's missing inevitably appears. It gets harder and harder to stop yourself from seeing.
Before I leave, I want to tell you something.
Something that you deserve to know. I want to tell you about a man named Peter French.
That's what I wrote to Sarah in the letter.
I want to tell you what happened that night I turned up at your house in the rain.
And now, finally, I saw.
The weather that summer had followed a predictable pattern. For days on end, it would be unbearably hot and bright, the sun beating down so hard you imagined that paving slabs might split. People left the doors and windows of their houses open like tents. At lunchtime in the city centre, they sprawled flat out on patches of grass, fanning themselves with magazines.
But every so often, there was a breaking point. A cool breeze picked up and grey clouds began to gather; the air would smell of ozone and the horizon grumbled. Huge droplets of rain would patter down, tapping at first, then growing faster and faster, until the rain fell in savage sheets, washing the heat from the air.
I'd just learned about Marie's insurance policy and what it meant, and I'd been drinking most of the day. By eleven o'clock, when the pubs banged their doors shut, I was drunk. I went back home and paced back and forth. And then at some point, the heat became too great, and I broke in the same way as the weather.
Just before one o'clock in the morning, I was standing with my back to The Cockerel, my attention totally focused on that house across the road. Rain was slashing down in between, swirling in the gutter. No cars: not at this time. I was wrapped in a slick black coat, unsteady on my feet. It felt like I'd arrived here either by magic or by accident, much as it had on the day of Marie's funeral. But this time Sarah was not there to save me.
I crossed the street to that innocuous house. Just a square, red-brick semi, with the curtains shut tight and the paint peeling from its old front door. I walked up the path through the unkempt front garden, and knocked twice.
An upstairs window filled with yellow light. I glanced up, rain pattering into my face, then back down at the door, and waited.
Footsteps on the stairs.
A moment later, the light came on in the hall.
At that point, the anger and grief was swirling inside, riding the waves of the alcohol, and I no longer had any real idea why I was there, or what I was planning to do.
If Peter French had leaned out of the window and asked what the hell I wanted, it would have been different. If he'd even just opened the front door a crack and kept the chain on. Instead, he opened the door wide and stood there, framed by the light, like a fat, fallen angel.
For a second, neither of us did anything. There was just the insistent hiss of the rain all around me. I looked at him, seeing not only the person who'd destroyed Marie's life, and then mine, but an impatient man: angry at being disturbed. It would have been different if I hadn't realised Peter French had absolutely no idea about what had happened to my wife. He probably didn't even remember her name. He wouldn't know or care that in the privacy and secrecy of her heart she had replayed what he did to her, every single day, in a place I must have never tried hard enough to reach, and now never could.
It would have been different if he had.
Instead, he looked at me and said, 'Who are you?'
And I thought about that question now.
At the time, I'd been a man unable to deal with the guilt inside him. Afterwards, I'd been that same man: running away from what he'd done. But who was I now?
I wanted to believe I'd come back because I was lonely, and missed my friends, and because I felt guilty about not being here for Sarah, the way that she'd been there for me. I wanted to believe I'd come back for the right reasons, not that a part of me had simply used them to hide darker, more selfish motives behind.
But I wasn't sure.
He wanted to know if you'd found it yet.
The letter. My brother thought that was the real reason I'd come back. He knew what I'd done two years ago, and so it was natural for him to think I was returning now to cover it up. To make sure that letter didn't fall into the wrong hands. And maybe he was right.
Because I remembered sitting on the steps in Venice and thinking: she was living with him. Then, after I arrived, I'd searched the house from top to bottom, with no real idea what I was looking for. Later on, when I suspected Ellis might have taken Sarah's body, I'd gone to see him myself, rather than call the police. Even when I found the rucksack at the Chalkie, I'd rationalised not going to them. Perhaps I hadn't been facing up to my responsibilities at all. Maybe what I'd really been doing was tracking down that letter - my guilt, set in stone - so that I could keep it hidden.
The worst thing was that I couldn't tell any more. Both explanations used the same language. Responsibility. Guilt. Pain. Regret. It was what my mind had done so successfully for two years, and looking back over the last few days, I realised it had become impossible to read between my own lines.
But I wanted to believe.
'You OK, love?'
I looked up suddenly. The owner of the cafe was standing beside me, smiling pleasantly. It felt like I was half asleep. The memory of what I'd done had crushed me half conscious, and I didn't feel remotely capable of whatever I was supposed to do next.
'Fine,' I said.
It didn't sound convincing, but she nodded. 'May I?'
'What? Oh.'
I leaned back so she could clear the plates away. As she went about it, I moved the mobile phone to one side.
Sarah was alive.
One hour's time. Or she's dead.
The voice that wasn't a voice began speaking then, and it told me that I needed to leave. That going to meet this man would accomplish nothing, because Sarah was going to die anyway, and there was no point me getting killed too. Not like Ellis and Mandy Gilroyd had, like Mike and Julie and James. None of those deaths was my fault, anyway, the voice said: people make their own mistakes, and they live or die as a result of them. I'd kept my passport in my jacket pocket. I could go to the airport and be out of the country in the space of a few hours.
With time, the voice told me, I might forget even this.
But Sarah was alive.
Everything kept leading back to that. It was insistent, like a pulse in my head. If I walked away now it felt like something inside me would die along with her. It was one thing to abandon the dead; another thing entirely to walk away from the living. Perhaps I would be able to forget in time, but I thought it would require giving up more than I could afford to lose: cutting so much of myself away that there was nothing left worth keeping.
And I remembered: if she was still alive, I would have done anything - anything at all - to go to her.
It was just before I watched the video of Marie's death. I'd thought about that endless drop of a moment when you realise something has been lost, and that it's too late to save it. When you would give anything a
t all for it to come back to you. Anything at all for just for one chance to do things differently.
Sarah was still alive. I had that chance now.
I closed my eyes.
After a while, I thought: we're always there for each other.
If it was the other way round, you'd be there for me too.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-Four
Forty minutes later, I was standing outside number seventeen on Rose Avenue, wondering what was supposed to happen next. You'll understand what to do when you get there. But I didn't.
The street was a main road that traced the edge of a rundown estate. Number seventeen was a post-office. It was the last shop on a small stretch of concrete, squeezed in beside a bookies, an off-licence and a set of blue, graffitied shutters down over what had once been a card shop. A few local kids were hanging out at the far end, beneath the card shop's tattered awning: a teenage girl sitting with her legs flat out; a scraggy boy on a bike curling back and forth in aimless circles; another boy occasionally kicking the shutters. When I walked past them, they'd asked me to buy them alcohol, and then laughed at me when I said no.
This was definitely where the man had told me to come, but I was missing something. He'd said to take the footpath, but there wasn't one. Behind me, the road was busy, so I didn't think anyone was coming to meet me here. It was too exposed. Too public. But I couldn't just hang around here for ever.
So now what?
For the second time, I walked round the corner of the post- office. The view here wasn't any more edifying than out front. The road continued into the Balders estate, curving between flat, grey houses. Even in the sun, the buildings looked pale and sick: half of them either dying or already dead. The untended grass verges were bigger than the gardens. And there wasn't a footpath in sight. I'd already checked, but I did so again now. Nothing.
I turned round to head back out front. And then stopped. Someone had painted a small white arrow on the side of the building. I hadn't noticed it the first time I looked.
It was about three metres up the wall, and the paint looked very old and faded. But now that I'd seen it, the sign was unmistakable. And it was pointing into the estate.
Now I understood: this wasn't my destination at all; the man was being careful. If I'd gone to the police and given them this address, it would have achieved absolutely nothing, and now it would be obvious if I was being followed.
You shouldn't do this.
But I was well past the point where that was an option. Instead, I looked down at the plastic bag full of papers in my hand, and then took a deep breath and set off.
I thought I understood what had happened now. Like the symbols, it was a trail that was hard to follow unless you had the starting point and knew what to look for. But, when you did, you could trace it clearly from one end to the other, and the signs along the way became obvious in hindsight.
The starting point was that Sarah wasn't dead. James hadn't killed anyone. Instead, the pair of them had been shuttered away together over recent months. I'd imagined a festering madness in the air, as Sarah's research created a wedge, driving my brother to drink and then Sarah away from him. There clearly had been a kind of madness - it was the only word for what they'd done - but instead of driving them apart, it had brought them closer together.
What Ellis revealed to Sarah had fed her obsession. She would have become fascinated with these people, but also conflicted about what she should do. I pictured her returning to the Ridge, time after time, staring out at where Emily Price was lying unfound. But at some point when she was up there, she must have decided what she was going to do. Black hair, tatty coat, I remembered. I'd seen the box of hair dye in her bedside cabinet, but been too preoccupied to pay attention. It made sense in light of what she'd done. Bright red hair wasn't going to help her lie low.
Similarly, I'd written off the books I'd seen - the photos of crime scenes and forensic textbooks - as being part of her fascination with death. They were, but not in the way I'd thought. I hadn't considered that she might have been studying them - painstakingly, methodically - not so that she could dwell on those scenes in particular, but so that she and James could convincingly manufacture one of their own.
So that she could meet these people.
And finally, my brother's actions.
I'd worked hard to convince myself he might be a killer, but in my heart I should have known he wasn't capable of that. In reality, James really had done something absurd and unbelievable, and wrong too, but not because of his temper, or because Sarah was going to leave him. He had enabled her obsession by lying for her, to help her achieve what she thought she needed to do. He'd done it because he loved her.
I could understand the resentment when he knew I'd come back. Why wouldn't he hate me? I was the brother who'd never been able to do anything wrong, and who then ran away the first moment life became difficult. The one who'd left Sarah with that letter and the knowledge it contained. He'd been dealing with the fallout from that ever since. And now I'd come back, perhaps in an attempt to hide those things for ever and disappear again.
Tell Alex to go to the Chalkie. To see what he's done.
I think what he expected me to find there was Sarah. The Chalkie was close to the field, and I suspected she must have camped there when she wasn't keeping watch. The items in the rucksack, I thought, were leftovers. It would have taken weeks to collect the amount of her blood necessary to fake the scenes, and it would need to have been kept somewhere in the meantime. The note too. Both items grabbed in a moment of haste at the last minute. And then flung into the undergrowth when these people came and took her.
That was what he'd expected me to find, only by then it was too late. But whatever happened, I was going to find her now.
To begin with, the estate was just everyday rough - squat, scowling houses with smeared windows and concrete lawns - but the further I walked, the more beaten and broken-down it became. There was rubbish, bagged and abandoned in the cracked, flagstone gardens, and more and more windows and doors were boarded up. The buildings increasingly resembled prize-fighters, bandaged and black-eyed.
The road curled steadily onwards, then shifted suddenly, as though startled, and rose up at a steep incline. It was here, at a junction with a smaller street, that I found a second symbol daubed on the edge of the kerb. A circle with a dot in the middle, like the view through a sniper's rifle.
I took the turning, and found the next symbol little more than twenty metres along, where another street led off to the right. I followed it, heading deeper into the heart of the estate. Way up ahead, a woman was meandering along, dressed too far down even for this hot weather. She passed the shell of an old car, stripped to its chassis and resting on breeze blocks, and then turned the corner and disappeared.
I looked around. I was now totally alone.
It was so quiet here. Some of the houses were obviously deserted, but even so: there were no children playing, no other sounds of community. I could hear a dog barking in the distance, but the noise was plaintive and lonely, as though the animal had been left somewhere and didn't expect to be heard.
I passed the car, and reached a crossroads. Bits of wood were scattered across the centre, as though a packing crate had been dropped from a plane. The next symbol, a white slash that crossed two of the slabs in the pavement, told me to head right, and so I did.
The signs looked older than the ones I'd found on the Ridge. I was guessing the man who'd phoned me had decided to use this set because it was most convenient; he'd skimmed through the database and found somewhere that suited him. So where had they been originally intended to lead? Was I following a map to the other missing victim of Thomas Wells and Roger Timms, or was this something else entirely?
How many fucking routes are there?
A few minutes later, I got at least some kind of answer. The 'somewhere' I was heading was about half a mile into the estate, at the end of a cul-de-sac called Suncast La
ne. The street finished at number ten, an abandoned house with the windows and doors secured by perforated metal sheets, bolted into place. In the corner of the downstairs window, someone had painted a small white semicircle.
It was obviously deserted, but the house still had a presence. I could feel some kind of energy humming in the air, like when you stand close to a pylon. This was a destination: a place of power. I wondered what I would find if I went in. From everything I'd heard, it didn't seem like the kind of place where Wells and Timms would have left a body. All their other disposal sites had been out in the open.
Regardless, it was clear enough what I was supposed to do now. The promised footpath was at the side of the house: narrow and tight, with six-foot wooden fences on either side. It carried on straight for a time, and then bent sharply off to one side, like a broken bone.
I set off.
It was barely wide enough to walk down. The slatted wooden fences bowed in at me in some places, leaned back in others. I reached the bend in the path, and turned to the right. There was a section missing here; the corner had hidden it from view. Too late for me to stop, someone grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me sideways through the fence.
I sprawled forward into wasteland, swung by one man, and caught a flash of another man's fist -
Then shook my head, blinking. I was on my side in a patch of long, dirty grass, with dampness on my face and hands. My left eye was numb… and then it began thudding, in time with my heartbeat, and everything pulsed red.
Fuck.
'—et him—'
Barely heard through the ringing in my ears.
