A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

Jack changed. From being a clean-cut sporty type he got into thrash metal and took to wearing black leather studded and chained with silver, with hair almost down to his waist. His bedroom walls reverberated to the strains of AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Deicide, and Slayer. I always thought he was taking the Satanist stuff in the last two groups’ songs a sight too seriously, but never realised how much so. Then again, I didn’t see as much of him in those days; he took to hanging with a different crowd. Not till the night he broke into the church and—well, left some pretty revolting things on the altar and equally charmless statements on the walls.

  He was damn lucky not to get worse than the community service they gave him, and after that he mellowed out. His musical tastes changed to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Doors, the Stones. I got to know him all over again, and it was kind of like old times, but with more dope and psychedelic music. Things seemed different.

  Jack was a lot better. He got a flat in Old Trafford and entertained a seemingly endless string of girls. He was happy. He played guitar, occasionally got together with some friends where they acted vaguely as if they were members of a band, and supported himself in ways I wasn’t always sure about, and of which I decided to remain blissfully ignorant.

  Then Jack’s parents, and his younger brother Adrian, died.

  A year had passed since the article in The Big Issue. Sheila got back with Andy the Arsehole, then gave him the push again. She went out with a couple of others, but never with me. A couple of meals, but that was it. Regretfully, I began to accept that to her I was, and always would be, a friend and nothing more. Lorry came back for a couple of weeks while Mad Dog was away—running smack or executing someone with a hacksaw for looking at him the wrong way, I forget which. Kind of thing that really added a peaceful atmosphere to the romantic interludes. He came back and Lorry rejoined him. I was never sure what she saw in him. Or maybe it was what she saw in me.

  Then again, I didn’t have much time for a relationship. Jack had begun to be an obsession. The spare room in my flat was piled high with copies of The Big Issue, and a map studded with red drawing-pins. I’d kept looking. There wasn’t much I could do in terms of tracking Jack down; I had no clue where he’d want to go, except maybe somewhere where he wasn’t likely to run into anyone who knew him and might say ‘Hey, aren’t you supposed to be dead?’ I hoped to God my suspicions were wrong, but while I suspected I couldn’t just leave it.

  The only thing I could think of was to keep buying The Big Issue and checking out the ‘Have You Seen . . .?’ section. It was a long shot, with over a quarter of a million people missing at any one time, but it was the best that I could do. And over that year, I’d religiously kept every issue, looking for a pattern.

  I read the papers, too. I had the girl’s name—Kelly Moores—and waited for news of a body being found. There was none. But in the Issue, over that year, I’d started to see a pattern.

  Several girls turned up in ‘Have You Seen . . .?’ who’d disappeared in the Preston area in the six months following Jack’s death. Girls who fitted in the same category as Kelly Moores. The same kind of clothes, the same kind of hippy innocence in their grainily-photographed faces. The kind of girls who Jack had always gone out with, who had always been charmed by him. I really didn’t want to believe the picture I was starting to put together. Of course, it could have nothing to do with Jack; it could just be coincidence that he’d spent time with Kelly Moores shortly before she’d disappeared. But I had to know.

  I knew what I was looking for. And I knew that if I saw Jack again in any place where the pattern re-emerged, then his guilt was almost certain. The map in my spare room would, sooner or later, point me in the right direction.

  And sooner or later, it did.

  Jack and his family had their ups and downs over the years—he was never the easiest of kids, God knows—but in the years after the church incident things had started to settle down, especially when he got his own place. And then their car went off the motorway on their way back from a family visit to the Lakes. Boom. Crash. Bang. All gone. The whole Fairchild family except for Jack.

  Jack changed. He became quiet and morose. I saw as much as I could of him. He was bitter, and angry. Life had lost all meaning. I did what I could, which was to be there as often as possible, listen to him when he talked, hug him when he cried, brew black coffee whenever he’d had too much to drink, and roll his joints when he was too drunk or stoned to do it for himself. It was a bad time, and the lowest I’d ever seen him.

  But he came out of it. I was there, Sheila was there, a couple of girlfriends were there, we steered him out of the woods.

  The woods. Maybe an unfortunate choice of phrase.

  The funerals had come and gone. Jack had the choice; his flat in the city, or the family home. In the end he chose neither. The house was too full of memories; he sold it, gave up the flat, and bought a small house in North Wales, not far from a decent sized town but surrounded by hills. A pine forest half a mile away. And a wood of silver birch right behind the house.

  The birch. That’s where I found him, that autumn.

  To be fair to Jack, I don’t think he’d meant it that way. I called in unannounced; I was coming back from a visit to someone else in the area, and decided to drop in on him. It had been a week or two since I’d last spoken to Jack.

  I pulled in at the cottage. His car was parked outside. When I knocked on the front door, it swung wide, inwards.

  He wasn’t anywhere in the house. I wondered where the hell he’d gone. I decided to try the birch woods, and walked into the field of greyish-white trunks.

  It was a grey day, the sky’s belly heavy, pregnant with rain. Soon it began to fall. I smelt damp earth, wet leaves. The rain was light, cool, and fine on my face. Trees creaked in the wind.

  The rain picked up. I looked grimly around and decided to double back to the house. Maybe Jack had walked down to the village. Then I remembered I had a mobile phone and so did he. As I started walking back, I took it out of my pocket and rang his number.

  Nearby, I heard a mobile phone ring.

  And ring. And ring.

  Till the answering service took over.

  ‘Jack?’ I called. Suddenly I felt a sense of foreboding. I began walking back through the woods. Which way had the sound come from? I dialled again. I followed the rings till the answerphone took me up.

  I thought, then, that he might have had a fall. That was the worst I suspected, that Jack had slipped and fallen, tripped on a root, knocked himself out on a stone.

  It took me a moment, when I saw the long, dark bundle swinging from one of the trees in the mizzling misty rain, to recognise it for what it was. I scrambled through the woods and looked up at it. Even though the flares, and the—bitter irony!—Slipknot T-shirt, and the long dark hair that hung down in strings were distinctive, I had to look up into the face, pallid and bloated from hanging in the rain for, the police determined later, two days, before I finally realised that it was indeed Jack Fairchild. His face, or what was left of it, looked like a wadded ball of grimy, sodden newspaper.

  The tree creaked softly as he swung on the coarse rope he’d looped around his neck. As my mind reeled, my eyes wandered, till they finally found something they could fasten on which wasn’t as bad.

  It was a knot. Tied in the rope that had killed Jack, yes, but a knot nonetheless. Something to look at, something . . . something strange about it. I couldn’t say what. It was an odd, complicated knot, like nothing I’d seen before.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Why?’ I said, passing her a joint.

  She stared at me. ‘Why?’ Then she grabbed my arm and hauled me across the flat and into the spare room, jabbing a finger at the map. ‘Well, how about that for a start?’

  The map in my spare room; I was telling you about it before. Whenever there was a disappearance that matched the description of Jack’s kind of girl, I put a pin in it, looking for a pattern. An
d in the end one came out. Five pins, all tightly clustered in the city of Birmingham. All girls who’d vanished within the last couple of months.

  ‘It’s become an obsession with you,’ Sheila said. ‘I mean, is this healthy? Is this normal?’

  ‘Well, what’s normal?’ I shrugged. ‘Normal’s a meaningless term.’

  ‘You sound like Jack.’

  I laughed. ‘He used to say that all the time, I know. I told him that after the church thing. I was trying to show him he could be whatever he wanted, not get bogged down in what he’d done.’

  ‘Don’t try and take responsibility for what he’s done, Ian. Jack’s been a big boy for years.’

  ‘So you think I’m right?’

  ‘I didn’t say that!’ she snapped. ‘God’s sake, you read enough missing persons reports you can find a pattern anywhere.’

  ‘And I just did,’ I said. I gestured to the other pins. ‘How many others are down to him on that map? How many who never made the papers? Obsessed? I was nowhere near obsessed enough, Sheila. I should have been out there every time I saw a disappearance who fitted the profile, I——’

  ‘Yeah, and maybe you could have if you were an international playboy or something, but you’re not. You’ve got a job and a limited income, remember? You know, your bank account? Or did you think your bank manager was sending you love-notes or something?’ Sheila sighed. ‘God almighty, Ian, if you thought something was going on you should have gone to the police.’

  ‘I did!’ I snapped. ‘Again and again and again. They’ve got me down as a nutcase, Sheila.’ I stared at her for a long moment and she stared back.

  ‘And so have you.’

  I stopped myself saying anything else, like she was the one who’d told me that Jack was still alive, or around, or whatever he was. Because at the end of the day, I was the one who’d drawn and jumped to conclusions. The responsibility was mine.

  I reached out and touched the five pins buried in Birmingham. ‘Here.’

  ‘Ian——’

  I leaned over and kissed her cheek before she could protest. ‘I’m going, Sheila. But thanks for the concern.’

  I rang in sick the next morning and set off for Birmingham. It was another of those dull, overcast days, with the sky spitting rain, so tightly crowded with dark clouds it was like a lid jammed down on top of the world. I drove through cities of grey concrete and steel, dulled by the rain; through suburbs of boxlike houses and through bleak countryside of wind-ruffled grass, of rainswept stone. The storm seemed to grow as it followed me down.

  I arrived in Birmingham in the early afternoon, found a cheap B & B, and booked myself into it. Then I went out and started searching.

  I found the cafés, the bars, the clubs; all the different places where Jack might come in search of his prey. I bought coffee, a Thermos flask, and Pro-Plus tablets to keep me awake. I staked the places out, sustaining myself on caffeine and junk food. The pubs in Moseley where the local hippies gathered to buy or deal weed by day, and the clubs where the rock-chicks gathered—Costermongers and Edwards No. 8—by night. The next day I rang in sick again. So many hunting grounds, and no proof the hunter hadn’t already moved on. All I had were faith and patience.

  But in the end they paid off.

  I found Jack Fairchild for the third and final time on the fourth day of my hunt. As I watched him come out of The Fighting Cocks with another pretty flower-child on his arm, it took me a few seconds to realise it was finally him.

  I ducked down low in my car once more, watching him pass. He was smiling, his long, thin angular face framed by long chest-length hair and spiked by a little goatee beard. When the lights of a passing car caught his face, he’d never looked more devilish.

  His car drove off. I followed it, remembering the last time I’d followed his car, with Kelly Moores in his passenger seat. I’d chickened out of going into his house then. Not this time. Not ever again, I promised. I already bore the responsibility for Kelly Moores and God knew how many others. I had no idea what I would do when I found him, how the hell you were supposed to stop a man who was already dead. But I had to try.

  The road he pulled his car to a halt in might have been Laburnum Close all over again; the two were virtually identical. Identical, too, was the house, the same kind of big Victorian place partitioned into flats.

  As I moved across the road, I thought I could hear voices whispering. I kept thinking I could see faces, pale faces pressed up against the windows, out of the corners of my eyes as I approached, but they vanished whenever I tried to look straight at them. I remembered the face at the window at the house on Laburnum Close, and I knew I’d come to the right place.

  Six tenants this time, and there was no way to pick from the names which was Jack.

  I took a deep breath and fetched the crowbar from my car, then forced the door open. I crept into the house.

  Where was he?

  I heard noises. Gasps. Pants. Jack. Even in the circumstances, I felt myself smile. Even dead, he didn’t seem to have changed.

  I followed the noises up the stairs. On the top floor, as I crept out onto the landing, I heard the gasps getting louder, and saw shadows dancing in the light that seeped out from under one of the doors. I tiptoed to the door and listened. Now what was I supposed to do? Kick the door in and leap through, brandishing the crowbar? And what if it didn’t even turn out to be Jack’s room? What if——?

  I stopped dead. The gasps weren’t gasps of passion or pleasure, as I’d thought at first. They were something else, something far worse. My doubts disappeared, and in one of the few courageous actions I’ve ever performed I jumped at the door with both feet and smashed it wide open. I almost went sprawling as I staggered into the hall, but regained my balance and reeled on.

  The gasps came from the bedroom. I kicked its door open, then froze solid.

  The girl who Jack had brought out of the bar had been about nineteen, pretty, her hair plaited into yellow-dyed dreadlocks. She still had the dreadlocks, but without them she would have been unrecognisable. She hung from the ceiling, on the end of a noose of rope. She was naked, her feet dangling at least a foot off the ground. Already her body seemed impossibly shrunken and shrivelled, like that of a very old woman perhaps, or a mummy. But most horribly, she was still alive, and her twig-like fingers fumbled helplessly at the noose. Her black, rolling, desperate eyes found mine and begged for help. I wasn’t sure what I could give, but I stepped forward to try.

  But the noose wouldn’t unknot. It was, I saw with sickening clarity, the same knot that Jack had tied around his neck that day. The best I could do was lift her up, take up the slack.

  But it couldn’t help her. Her body continued to shrink and shrivel in my arms, and then I saw what looked like a thick white smoke escaping her mouth, her nose, her body, her skin. It was drawn up into the rope, swirled into it and disappeared. There was hardly anything left of her now. I didn’t have a knife. If I only had, perhaps I could have cut her free, though I suspect it was already too late.

  Then her gasps became a thin, bleating scream, and the smoke swallowed her up. Her thin cry faded away to nothing, and the last of the smoke swirled up into the rope and was absorbed. Nothing remained. The noose seemed to slacken, widen out. It was big enough to fit my head through now, but I had no interest in trying.

  I stumbled back from what I had seen, and a hand fell on my shoulder.

  ‘Hey, man,’ said Jack Fairchild. ‘Good to see you.’

  He ushered me through into the kitchen. I looked at him; he was paler than I remembered, his skin was as cold as ice, and his eyes were black as coal. He carried the rope in his hands, widening the noose to knot it around his waist.

  ‘Brew, man?’ he asked. His voice was dull, lacking the emotions it sought to put across. I shook my head.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘I saw you dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  I shook my head to clear it. ‘You got those
old books of yours out again, didn’t you?’

  He grinned mirthlessly. ‘That old black magic, eh Ian? Well’—he spread his arms—‘it bloody worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘How many have you killed?’

  ‘Don’t know if they’re dead exactly,’ he said. ‘You saw what the rope did. It uses them to keep me . . . the way I am. Forever, Ian. Think about it, man, you could live forever. We could.’

  I stared at him in disbelief. ‘We?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, man. Why not? I was hoping you’d show up one day.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘What makes you think I’d be interested?’

  ‘You’re a fool if you don’t,’ he shrugged, and I knew he didn’t just mean I’d miss out on a good offer.

  Beside the cooker there was a wooden block stuck full of knives. It was my only chance; I went for it and yanked out the biggest weapon I could find.

  Jack reached out for me and I lunged at him, catching him the stomach. He laughed out loud; I pulled out the knife despairingly and stabbed again.

  This time the blade took him in the waist and, by pure luck, cut through the rope. Jack shouted in rage.

  Two things happened at once: I grabbed the rope, and he hit me. I flew across the kitchen and hit the far wall. The rope writhed in my hands like a snake. The two snapped, frayed ends of it touched and knitted together once more.

  Jack wasn’t smiling. He lunged for me. I jumped clear, scrambled down the hall—but Jack was suddenly there at the door, grinning fiercely.

  ‘No escape, man,’ he said. ‘I’m faster. Advantage of being dead. Now,’ he held out a hand, ‘give me the rope and I promise I’ll just kill you. I won’t take you into the rope and——’

  I pulled my battered lighter from my pocket and flicked open the cowling, striking the wheel. Jack’s mouth yawned open—everything seemed to have gone into slow motion—and he lunged forward. A flame danced up from the lighter, and I touched it to the rope, raking it along it.