by Kim Newman
‘We might have to ration it soon,’ James says.
‘Surely not. Councillor Hackwill must have got to the village by now. Help will be here in an hour or two.’
‘Unless Councillor Hackwill hung around and paid the lovebirds a visit last night,’ you suggest.
‘Oh,’ says Sean, who clearly hasn’t thought of that.
‘Make tea,’ James says. ‘We’re not short of water after last night. And we’ve enough PG Tips to survive worldwide eco-catastrophe.’
Sean gets busy.
That night, you sleep in shifts. Three of you awake, three asleep. Sean wonders why not two and four, allowing longer uninterrupted sleeps. James asks him which of the others he’s sure enough isn’t a murderer to share a shift with. Sean takes the point.
Ironically, you could have answered the question. You could pick Sean. Instead, you get Mary and Jessup. Mary doesn’t talk; Jessup doesn’t do anything else. He monologises about Councillor Hackwill, from where he is right this minute — heroically making it out to bring back help for his old pals — to their lifelong friendship and happy school days.
‘Do you remember dragging me and James into the copse at Ash Grove?’ you ask.
Jessup seems not to.
‘I remember that day,’ says Mary. ‘The end of break-time. You and Rob had James in the copse and weren’t letting him go. Keith ran in to rescue him. Bravest thing I’ve ever seen. He got in trouble for missing the start of lessons.’
‘You can’t possibly remember that far back,’ Jessup says. ‘You were just a little girl.’
‘I’d have beaten you bloody if you said that to me then. I might still. What I remember most is the shame.’
‘What shame, Mary?’ you ask.
‘You were the girl, Keith. Threw a fit rather than eat school custard. I’d have said you were the biggest chicken in school, yellower than the custard. But when it was your brother, you didn’t think, you ran in to protect him.’
‘You’re making this up,’ Jessup whines.
You’re glad it’s dark in the room. Mary can’t see the tears on your face.
‘I was ashamed I didn’t run into the copse too,’ Mary says. ‘It wasn’t my fight but I wasn’t supposed to care about that.’
Can this be the monster? The WPC who turfed out the squatters? The woman with the knife at your balls? How long have you misunderstood Mary? Or have you?
Listen to what she’s saying.
‘I should have torn the both of you apart. That was my school, Reg. You and Rob had gone on. You were coming back to my country. I owned that playground. I was the monster.’
Jessup shuts up, afraid.
‘Hackwill’s not coming back,’ Mary says. ‘Is he, Fatty?’
Jessup says nothing.
The next day, the rain stops. You wake up mid-morning, having done the graveyard watch. Jessup snores in the blacked-out room. Mary sleeps curled up like a baby, looking tiny and innocent, not deadly. You still haven’t processed the conversation you had while you were awake and the world was shaking.
James and Shane are in the kitchen, inventorying food.
‘Where’s Sean?’ you ask.
‘Checking on you,’ says James, knowing he isn’t.
‘The idiot,’ you say.
You go to the front door and see the bank manager disappear into the trees. He stumps along awkwardly, feet wrapped in big blue towel-balls.
Mary, bleary, comes into the narrow hall.
‘Sean’s bolted,’ you say.
She shrugs.
‘I’ll bring him back,’ says James.
‘Why?’ you ask. ‘He’s not the murderer. He was with me when Warwick and Shearer were killed.’
‘Not because of that, because he’s a prat. He’ll fall over and die.’
‘One bank manager fewer,’ Mary says, uncaring.
‘Our dad was a bank manager,’ you snap.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
If you volunteer to go with James, go to 252. If you stay behind, go to 265.
248
You stroke Shearer’s shoulder. You’ve never felt a man’s body like this, the way you’ve so often been close to women. Shearer, as demonstrated by his winning of the bed, is in great shape, sleek skin over smooth ropes of muscle.
You kiss him. You feel fine stubble on his cheek, but his tongue is just like a woman’s. He coughs and breaks the kiss.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s the whiskey.’
Your mouth must taste like a still. You back away, almost offended.
Shearer laughs, not unkindly. ‘Look, get some sleep, if you can. If you’re into this when you’re sober, get back to me. My guess is you won’t be.’
Somehow, being turned down by a homosexual doesn’t improve your disposition. You dream furiously.
The next day, a full storm is on. James wants to cancel the day’s event — an ascent of a cliff-like mountainside in teams — but you’re pissed off enough to insist that no weather is going to make sissies out of your boys. You look to the clients for support. They all look as if they’d like a day off. Yellow fuckers. It’s as if it were raining school custard.
You rope them all together and drag them out. James, reluctantly, backs you up. He’s gone soft now he’s got a regular shag, but you think you can drag him back to the schedule. On the face of the mountain, lashed by rain, you’ll get back with your brother.
‘I really don’t think this is a good idea,’ whines Sean.
‘What do you want to do, Wank Manager?’ you say. ‘Play tiddley-winks in the warm?’
‘Sounds fine to me.’
It takes a long time to struggle through the rain to the scaling cliff. It’s a face you know intimately, wet and dry, from dozens of earlier courses.
The teams rope up. James, of course, goes with Mary’s gang; which leaves you with Hackwill. It would be easy to snip his rope and let him drop. That would finish this permanently.
If you set out to kill Hackwill, go to 266. If you squash that thought, go to 279.
249
‘I think I’ve just buggered my future,’ moans Roger Cunningham. ‘I can forget college.’
Nobody is confident. Then again, in your whole educational career, you can’t remember anyone going into or coming out of an exam on a high, feeling they’re perfectly prepared or that they got exactly the questions that showed off their skills.
‘I didn’t do any revision,’ whines VC.
You are consumed with depression.
It’s too deep even for you to be hyped on being this age again, surrounded by these long-gone kids.
But your mind snags on VC. Victoria, she is called here. Having known her between the ages of fourteen and thirty as a contemporary, you have always thought of her as poised, adult, mysterious, other. Here she is as a real kid, a layer of chubbiness over the cheekbones which will eventually make her a beauty.
She’s going to be a pop star. She doesn’t need a fucking O Level.
Ro trots along and you reflexively prepare to be hugged and comforted. But she goes to Roger. You won’t get together for over a year. You’d forgotten she went out with Roger — and whatever happened to him? — before you. You remember fancying her like mad at this age. But this Ro is a little girl. You’d be a real perv to want to go with her.
‘It’s geography tomorrow,’ Victoria laments. ‘That’ll be worse.’
It probably will. When you got down to it, you could puzzle out most of maths. But geography is about knowledge and whatever you learned — about the principle exports of Peru or the Swiss practice of transhumance or how to irrigate the desert — is long faded, buried under detailed but useless facts about the future economies of countries that don’t even exist yet. Was Iran called Persia in 1976? Is it too late to apply for O Level Japanese?
You would exchange your foreknowledge of world events for a couple of years’ basic eduction in boring things.
As Roger said, if you don’t pass these exam
s you aren’t going to college. Or university. Or anywhere.
And you won’t.
Walking out of the hall, you find yourself separated from Roger and Rowena and Victoria. You are caught in a stream of former Hemphill kids, fresh from their CSE exams. You remember how you all looked down on them as thickos.
‘Keith,’ says a boy you don’t recognise.
‘How was it?’ asks a thin blonde girl.
You don’t know these people. They know you.
Then you know their names, somehow. Vince Tunney and Marie-Laure Quilter.
‘We’ll soon be out of here,’ Vince says.
‘Not soon enough,’ chimes in Marie-Laure.
You look around for Ro and VC, but they are gone. You’re stuck with these people. With another Keith’s life.
Go to 29.
250
Hackwill is dead. So is James, and so are most of the others. The survivors are Kay Shearer and Mary Yatman. Sean was alive when the helicopter arrived but died being loaded aboard. Mary has lost a lot of blood and slipped into some sort of catatonia. Medical examination suggests she’s been raped. Shearer claims he took off from the Compound when Warwick was found dead, and survived what they’re calling a massacre by going to ground in a shepherd’s hut. His story is backed up by symptoms of severe exposure; three frostbitten toes have to be amputated. Mary comes back from her personal space voyage and is extensively debriefed by the police, but appears to have selective amnesia, retaining only a few images from the last three years. She thinks she’s still a policewoman, and has no recollection of sexual abuse or receiving knife-wounds on her back and thighs. Naturally, Mary and Shearer are the chief suspects. Along with you.
Go on to 255
250
Hackwill is dead. So is James, and so are most of the others. The survivors are Kay Shearer and Mary Yatman. Sean was alive when the helicopter arrived but died being loaded aboard. Mary has lost a lot of blood and slipped into some sort of catatonia. Medical examination suggests she’s been raped. Shearer claims he took off from the Compound when Warwick was found dead, and survived what they’re calling a massacre by going to ground in a shepherd’s hut. His story is backed up by symptoms of severe exposure; three frostbitten toes have to be amputated. Mary comes back from her personal space voyage and is extensively debriefed by the police, but appears to have selective amnesia, retaining only a few images from the last three years. She thinks she’s still a policewoman, and has no recollection of sexual abuse or receiving knife-wounds on her back and thighs. Naturally, Mary and Shearer are the chief suspects. Along with you.
Go on to 268
251
‘Yes,’ you say. ‘She told me that. She also told me she had no intention of going through with it. I believe her.’
The policeman nods. He believes you. Does that mean he believes Mary?
‘I think that’s all, sir.’
Hackwill slips the country, and goes on the run like Lord Lucan. It’s still officially a mystery but with the financial implosion of the Discount Development, the police seem to read his flight as a cover-all confession.
You and Mary are living together, engaged. James is almost as surprised as Marie-Laure. You spend your days making love and raking over what happened.
Hackwill could easily have killed Warwick, you decide, but McKinnell is a problem. He’d have had to sneak into Castle Drac — not easy with so many of you about in such cramped quarters — and gone up to the bathroom, silently murdered McKinnell, flung the knife through the window, sneaked out again and barged in loudly, announcing his entrance as if it were his return.
It could have been done. That’s what all the true-crime paperbacks and TV movies say, with speculative but unconvincing dramatisations of Hackwill’s skulking — Iain Scobie’s meretricious paperback Killer Councillor even has him shin up a drainpipe to get to McKinnell — and elaborate unravelling of the evidence.
No version, from the soberest police account to the most lurid tabloid story, can deal with the boots, so they are left out of the story. Even you and Mary prefer to ignore the boots.
Hackwill shows up dead in a hotel room in Belize, killed by a teenage girl, a prostitute. Most people are satisfied that the story is over.
You and Mary get to live ever after. Happily? For the most part. You marry, bring Mary into the business, and have two children, Jed and Johanna. Your love for Mary, forged in the crucible of that week, lasts, growing and bending when need be, always with a core of steel.
Eventually, you can let it go; but it always worries Mary. She hates not knowing. She feels Hackwill cheated by dying without explaining. She constructs versions in which all of you, in various combinations, are guilty of either or both of the murders. She even includes you and herself in the stories.
It hurts you to see her grow obsessive. It doesn’t put a wedge between you, but it adds a sliver of pain to the constant sunfire of love that binds you.
When Mary gets cancer at forty-seven, you’re sure worrying at the mystery killed her. You live out the rest of your life, remembering. And wondering.
And so on.
Begin again?
252
You and James bind your feet, fixing towels with string. It looks absurd, but no one laughs.
‘I’m coming with you,’ Mary says.
You don’t argue.
‘Shane, stay and watch Jessup,’ James says. ‘If he tries to kill you, break his neck and eat him.’
Shane, who has become monosyllabic, grunts.
Mary slips long mittens over her feet. You’re concerned they won’t be enough.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she says. ‘I used to be a beat copper. I have indestructible feet.’
The three of you set out.
The skies are clear enough to let a strong November sun shine. With the grass wet, stones slick and vegetation dark green, the mountainside is beautiful. The smells are wonderful.
Out of sight of the Compound, it’s possible to pretend life is normal. You and James walk with Mary between you. She sings ‘Nellie the Elephant’. It’s charming but also suggests she’s cracked up.
‘I see something,’ Mary says, launching herself away from you, and plunging lithely into the undergrowth.
You and James look at each other. Has she gone on ahead, or escaped?
You follow, more carefully. It’s hard for you to get through thorny gaps still vibrating from Mary’s easy passage. Finally, you catch up with her.
She’s found Sean. He’s dead. Recently: his throat is still bleeding.
‘He was alive when I got here,’ Mary says. She is leaning over him. ‘He said, “Hackwill”.’
James looks around, for paths. You look at Mary, for the truth.
‘Really,’ she insists.
Her knife isn’t bloody. She shows it to you. She could have wiped it clean, but you can’t see where. Even if she’d used Sean’s clothes, you’d see.
‘He must have gone this way,’ James says.
Like you, your brother wants to think the worst of Councillor Hackwill.
‘Let’s go,’ says Mary.
You follow them.
A stream crosses the path and there’s a patch of mud. There are boot-prints in the mud. Hackwill. Mary is innocent, at least of killing Sean. You wonder if you could love her.
James is all for pushing on but Mary holds him back.
‘He’s dangerous, remember.’
‘So are we,’ says James.
‘You’re amateurs,’ she says, ‘compared to him.’
You have to go on. But carefully.
‘We’ve got him,’ you say.
Your advantage, which Mary has just made you think of, is that you’ve been all over this mountain for the last two years. You know this path.
‘This path comes out at a sharp drop. Five hundred feet or more. He’ll have to clamber down the slope. He’ll be in the open. Vulnerable.’
‘He’s right,’ James says.
Mary leads you.
You come to the end of the path, thick greenery all around, and are at the lip of the fall. It’s too much of a slope to be a cliff, but has to be climbed not walked.
There’s someone a hundred feet down. Hackwill.
‘He can’t see us,’ Mary says. ‘He’s concentrating.’
The slope gets steeper towards the bottom and there’s a fast-running river, swollen by recent rainfall, rushing through a culvert, plunging into caves. Hackwill doesn’t realise the way gets more perilous the further down he goes.
‘Keith,’ says James, hefting a rock, ‘what do you want to do?’
If you vote for throwing a rock at Hackwill, go to 258. If you vote for climbing down after him, go to 271.
253
You and James take turns on watch through the night. Your bedroom door is barred.
You’re trying to guess Hackwill’s next move. As James sits up awake, you can’t fall asleep for trying to imagine Hackwill’s position.
He’s killed with his own hands. He’d do it again if it’d help. If he can kill Shane and put the blame on you and James, he’d have a way out.
You sit up and tell James.
‘We should be watching Shane,’ you say, ‘not just keeping ourselves safe.’
‘Hackwill’s in the four-poster, next door,’ James says. ‘The others are all downstairs, in the one room. Except Shearer’ — he still hasn’t come back. ‘Hackwill can’t get to Shane without tripping over Jessup and Sean.’
‘Jessup’ll back him. And Sean’s expendable.’
You get out of bed.
Go on to 259
253
You and James take turns on watch through the night. Your bedroom door is barred.
You’re trying to guess Hackwill’s next move. As James sits up awake, you can’t fall asleep for trying to imagine Hackwill’s position.
