by Mark Morris
Once again I slipped my hand into my pocket and stroked the surface of the heart, tracing its contours with my fingertips. I was aware that my desire to keep touching it was almost fetishistic, and yet I was not sure how much of that was based on my anxiety about Kate and my belief that the heart was a bargaining tool for her safe return, and how much was due to the influence – whether insidious or benign – of the thing itself. An hour or so before, I had felt at one with the heart, in harmony with it; I had felt not only that we were working together towards a common cause, but that I was on the verge of grasping its secrets and mysteries, of being granted understanding of its true nature.
But had that really been the case? Or had the heart simply been using me as a puppet, buttering me up for its own purpose? Was it merely a parasite that needed a human host to function effectively?
I liked to think that the heart and I were protecting each other, but perhaps we weren’t; perhaps the heart had its own agenda and would discard me when it decided I was no longer useful. In which case, until then, was I invincible with the heart in my possession? Was I like some kind of superhero, impervious to attack? And how far did the heart’s influence extend? What kind of powers did it yield? Could it – as I had wondered in Benny’s car – stop a bullet? What if I wasn’t directly linked to it – if I was shot or stabbed whilst asleep, say? Would it come to my rescue then? And what of the people in physical proximity to me, like Clover – would it save them too? I squeezed the heart in my fist, and immediately the questions crowding my mind dissipated, as if the black stone was absorbing my anxiety and confusion.
As my mind cleared, I became aware that, standing in the darkness, I had slipped into what amounted to a waking trance. I blinked and looked around me. Far off on what I presumed to be the horizon I could see the thinnest sliver of pale blue light. How long had I phased out for? One minute? Five? Longer? Clover had still not reappeared, so it couldn’t have been that long. Unless, of course, something had happened to her, or her claim that she needed to pee had merely been a pretext for… for what? Perhaps she had slipped away. Or called someone on her mobile. Again I wondered how much I could really trust her. Perhaps she had her own agenda, after all. Perhaps she was playing me for a fool. Turning to where she had slipped into the trees, I saw a glimmer of white in the blackness.
It wasn’t until I had stepped forward, and had opened my mouth to speak her name, that it occurred to me that Clover had not been wearing white. Apprehension bristled through me, raising goosebumps on my arms, as the pale shapeless thing drew closer, flickering among the trees. I wanted to speak, to challenge it, but I was loath to draw attention to myself. The pale thing drifted closer still, pushing between the last of the trees, and was suddenly on the road ten metres from me.
In the darkness it was little more than a grey-white smear that seemed to hover above the ground. It was motionless for a moment, and then it began to waver towards me. I stepped back, drawing the heart from my pocket. I was about to shout out whatever warning my dry throat could dredge up when a soft voice said, ‘Alex?’
I drew in a breath so violently it sounded like a cry of pain. I recognised that voice. I had last heard it in what I thought had been a dream not more than twenty-four hours previously.
‘Lyn?’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’
The apparition neither replied nor came closer. It had halted six or seven metres away, a pearly smudge in the darkness. I wanted to walk up to it, but I was scared. Scared of getting too close; scared that if I did get too close it would disappear. I stood for a moment in an agony of indecision – and then I had an idea. Still clutching the heart in one hand, I slipped my other into my jeans pocket, took out my phone and switched it on.
This time the sound that came out of me was like a sob, though I was barely aware that I’d made it. Revealed in the icy glow of the mobile screen was Lyn as I had seen her in the hotel room, barefoot and pregnant and beautiful, dressed in the white nightshirt with the cherry design, which billowed gently around her body in the cool breeze. She was smiling and her hair shone like gold in the light.
‘Are you real?’ I asked.
Instead of replying to my question, she raised her arms as though to draw me into an embrace. ‘Come to me, Alex,’ she said.
I took a step towards her, but she shook her head, as though I had misunderstood. ‘No. Come to me. I need you. Only you can bring me back.’
‘Where are you?’ I asked.
She smiled sweetly. ‘Long ago and far away.’
I felt my throat thickening with emotion, the heat of tears at the back of my eyes. ‘I miss you, Lyn,’ I whispered.
The screen of my phone went dark.
After the glow of illumination, the blackness seemed so complete that I could no longer see even the glimmer of Lyn’s nightshirt. I jabbed at the screen to light it up again and pointed it at where she had been standing.
She was gone.
I moaned, despair washing through me. But even as I slumped, like a man coming to a halt after pushing himself to his limits, I was surprised at how bereft I felt. It was as though I was suddenly standing outside myself, analysing my emotions from afar and finding them curious and alien. Then the moment passed and I stared at the spot where Lyn had stood, feeling tired and strung out. Although the real Lyn wasn’t dead, I still felt as though I had found a way to make contact with her spirit – albeit haphazardly and so fleetingly that it was agonising. Just before my mobile screen went black again, I noticed that although the ground where she had stood was muddy, she had left no footprints.
Come to me, she had said, which could mean only one thing.
I heard a rustle in the darkness and turned my phone on again. Clover was struggling through the last of the undergrowth, pushing brambles and small branches aside. She staggered on to the dirt road with a gasp of effort and squinted at what to her must have been a small rectangle of blue-white light.
‘Alex?’ she said. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’
I turned the light on to my own face, plunging my surroundings into darkness. ‘’Fraid so.’
I sensed rather than saw her moving towards me. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit… strained.’
‘I’ve seen Lyn again,’ I said. ‘She was standing right there. She looked as real as you are.’
Clover hunched her shoulders and half-turned with a shiver, as if she expected my ex-wife to be standing beside her. ‘Where did she come from?’
I gestured towards the trees, which I now realised were beginning to gain a little definition as the sky grew lighter. ‘Out of the woods, right where you did.’
‘Creepy,’ she said, but I shook my head.
‘No, it was… sad. I have to go and see her.’
‘She’s not real, Alex. She’s an apparition, or a vision, or a trick.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s real and she’s lost. She needs me.’
Clover half-raised a hand, as if to stop me in my tracks. ‘Hang on. This is the actual Lyn we’re talking about, right?’
I nodded. Though I had no idea where it would lead, all at once I had a plan, a purpose. ‘I have to see her, Clover. I don’t care whether it’s a good idea or not, but I have to go to Brighton.’
NINETEEN
MADHOUSE
‘Oh my God,’ Clover said.
It was two hours since Lyn had appeared. Clover and I were sitting hunched at a corner table of the Copthorne motorway services branch of Costa, trying to appear as unobtrusive as possible as we devoured breakfast paninis and drank seriously big mugs of hot, strong, milky coffee. Although it was only twelve hours since Lesley had cooked us a belt-bursting dinner of lamb casserole, mashed potatoes and honey-roast parsnips, and less than four hours since Clover and I had been in Benny’s conservatory chatting over a pre-dawn cuppa, I felt as though I hadn’t eaten for days. Of course, puking my guts out next to Benny’s car and walking several miles in the autumnal chill of an early morning probably had a great deal
to do with that. Finishing my panini in double-quick time I contemplated whether to order another or simply stock up on peanuts and chocolate bars from WH Smith and snack en route.
Finally reaching the A25 after a good hour’s trudge, the two of us had managed to thumb a lift from a guy called Greg, whose ginger whiskers and stocky build put me in mind of Yosemite Sam. Greg was a draughtsman, who was originally from Sunderland, but who currently lived in Guildford and commuted to his job in East Grinstead each morning. Clover and I were so tired that we could both have done with a snooze, but Greg liked to talk, and as it was often an unspoken rule that a hitchhiker was obliged to pay for his journey in kind, I sat in the passenger seat and engaged him in conversation while Clover snatched forty winks in the back.
‘I love the classics, me,’ Greg said, nodding at the footwell between us, in which, among the chewing gum, sweet wrappers, pens and random bits of paper, was a CD case for Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. ‘I never read ’em when I was a kid cos I was too busy playing football and causing bother, but I’m catching up now. Once I’ve done with Dickens I’ll be on to Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles and all that.’
As he dropped us at the service station with a cheery wave I found myself envying Greg. He seemed to have it sorted – a good job, a nice car, a wife and kids who he mentioned with affection, and a determination to expand his horizons. His life seemed so neat and simple and organised, whereas mine was an unruly mess.
‘It’s in, then?’ I said to Clover in response to her exclamation.
She was hunched over the open newspaper she had bought, which covered three-quarters of the table. She looked up, wide-eyed, pushing her glossy, maroon-coloured hair away from her face.
‘Page three,’ she replied, the newspaper making a fluttering crackle as she flipped it around.
The headline read: 15 DEAD IN LONDON NIGHTCLUB FIRE. There was no mention of murder, or of the club coming under attack. According to the report, the fifteen bodies discovered in the charred remains of the cellar bar were too badly burned to have yet been identified. The story stated that although there appeared to have been no survivors, the club was sparsely populated at the time because it was near to closing time. Fire officers were still investigating the cause of the blaze, though it was thought that the fire had started somewhere on the ground floor of the building, trapping the victims in the basement area below.
We read the story together, and when Clover gave a sharp intake of breath I knew she had reached the final paragraph, which stated that the nightclub’s owner, Clover Monroe (27), was thought to be among the victims.
‘Shit,’ she murmured, looking across the table at me, an expression of shocked blankness on her face. ‘Everyone thinks I’m dead. Which I guess makes me a kind of… non-person. That’s weird.’
I hesitated to say what was on my mind, but then I said it anyway. ‘On the plus side, if the police think you’re dead it means they won’t be looking for you, not until they’ve identified all the bodies.’
Clover narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you think this is more of that scorched-earth policy you were talking about?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, the fire must have been started to conceal evidence. But those freaks who started it – assuming it was them – know we’re together and that we escaped. Could be they’re isolating us, cutting us off from help.’
‘Though if the worst came to the worst we could still go to the police.’
‘And tell them what? Your daughter’s gone missing, my club’s burned down – we must both be under suspicion. If we told them that we were on the run from villains who had done both of those things we’d have to tell them why and that would only incriminate us. How long before the police link you to McCallum’s murder? For all we know, these “Wolves” may have planted evidence at the scene.’ She raised her hands and slapped them down on her thighs, a gesture of helplessness. ‘No, if we go to the police they’d want to contain us and question us. We’re on our own, Alex.’
I had never felt more trapped, more uncertain of where to turn. Even in prison I had had a plan, a sense of determination, hope for the future. I looked around, my gaze sweeping across the sparsely occupied tables, to the drift of people gravitating towards the toilets, or the other fast-food outlets, or into WH Smith to buy a morning paper or a bottle of water or a quick snack. There was a constant flow of bodies in and out of the main doors, commuters stopping off en route to the office, night-workers heading home after a long shift. To my eyes all of these people seemed purposeful, unburdened, in control of their lives. I wondered what we would do – what everyone would do – if the Wolves of London were suddenly to make an appearance in these most mundane of surroundings. I thought of the tall man with his syringe-fingers and his grotesque clockwork army, the man in the demob suit with his living darkness formed from the accumulated horrors of war. I couldn’t imagine them here. They were creatures not only of the night, but of nightmare. How could they possibly exist in a world of McDonald’s and piped music and vending machines?
As I was looking around, Clover was still browsing through the paper. Suddenly she froze. ‘Look here,’ she said.
The story was on page ten: BRUTAL MURDER OF RECLUSIVE MILLIONAIRE. I swallowed, pressing my hands flat on the table to stop them from trembling as I read the story:
Retired millionaire businessman Barnaby McCallum, who was thought to be in his early 90s, was found brutally murdered in his home yesterday. It is believed that he may have disturbed a burglar, who broke into his house on Bellwater Drive, Kensington, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. His body was discovered by his housekeeper, Cynthia Pritchard (59) who lives nearby. Police have revealed that Mr McCallum was killed by a single blow to the head. Detective Inspector Michael Rainey, who is leading the inquiry, described the murder as a ‘vicious and cowardly attack on a defenceless old man.’ It is unclear whether anything was taken in the attack, though police have confirmed they are pursuing several lines of enquiry. DI Rainey made a statement in which he said that the killer would almost certainly have had the victim’s blood on his clothing, and he appealed for any information that might lead to an arrest. Mr McCallum is thought to have no surviving relatives.
‘Vicious and cowardly,’ I murmured. ‘Is that what I am?’
I felt deeply ashamed. Not only of what I had done, but also that since the attack on Incognito I had been so wrapped up in my own problems that I had barely given McCallum a thought. But the story in front of me, full of the kind of newspaper speak that the majority of us skim over on a daily basis, suddenly brought it all crashing in again. This was real and unalterable. As extenuating as the circumstances may have been, and however unintentional my actions, the inarguable fact was that I was a murderer. And what I now knew about the heart – little though it was – made me wonder whether, in fact, I had caused the spike to appear and pierce his skull; whether, subconsciously, I had wanted to kill Barnaby McCallum.
Clover reached forward and slipped her hands over mine. ‘Of course you’re not,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t think that.’
‘But that’s what it says here in black and white.’
She frowned. ‘What do they know? They have no idea what happened. They just say these things as a matter of course.’
I stayed silent. I knew she was right, and yet I couldn’t shake off the feeling that, whatever the circumstances, I deserved to be punished for what I had done.
As if guessing my thoughts, Clover said, ‘It was an accident, Alex. You know that. You mustn’t believe anything else.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘But nothing. The old man attacked you. You were defending yourself. You didn’t know that the heart was going to do what it did.’
‘Didn’t I?’
She gave me a curious look. ‘Of course not. Why are you even doubting that fact?’
We left soon after, Clover dumping the newspaper into a bin on the way out. After checking our
phones, which we had been doing on a regular basis, we trooped across to the lorry park in search of a lift.
We were in luck, chancing almost immediately upon a genial Glaswegian called Andy who was driving a consignment of frozen beef down to Brighton and was only too happy to let us tag along. The cabin of Andy’s truck was spacious and warm and smelled, oddly and comfortingly, of something akin to Weetabix or freshly baked biscuits. It was only as we rumbled up the slip road to rejoin the M23 that I realised I had never been in a road-bound vehicle quite as large as this one before. In spite of everything, I felt an almost boyish thrill to be so high up, looking down on the cars and vans scurrying and darting around us.
Andy’s accent was so thick I could understand only half of what he was saying, but that barely mattered as he did the majority of the talking, and seemed happy for Clover and I to punctuate his spiel with nods and laughs and grunts at the appropriate junctures. Most of his talk consisted of the downfall of Glasgow Rangers, the parlous state of Britain’s roads and the exploits of his daughter, Maura, who was one of only a handful of girls doing chemical engineering at Birmingham University. The constant barrage of words – exacerbated by the blare of Radio 1 and the leviathan growl of the truck’s engine – would have been tiresome if Andy hadn’t been such a jovial companion. Even so, by the time he dropped us off close to Brighton Pier, our ears were ringing.
The soughing sea and bickering gulls were soothing by comparison. Even the rush-hour traffic on the road that ran parallel to the seafront seemed muted. It was a chilly, breezy morning, but dry and bright enough to encourage several early-morning strollers along the promenade to venture out without jackets. One of a quartet of lads, who looked as though they hadn’t yet completed their previous night’s drinking, was bare-chested, a West Ham United badge tattooed on his bulging left pec. As he and his friends approached, he leered at Clover and said something that the wind snatched away. I squeezed the heart in my pocket, but although the other lads cackled so much they had to lean against one another for support, the group barely broke stride as Clover turned her back on them, curling her hands around the railings edging the pebbly beach below and gazing over the churning grey water.
