by Danuta Reah
‘Don’t tell them. He’s looking for me.’
‘Ashley.’ She needed to get through to him. ‘You’ve got to let me help you. You can’t keep running away.’ She looked into his dark eyes and felt that elusive sense of familiarity again. Adam? Listen to me, Suzanne! She took a deep breath. ‘OK?’ she said. ‘Ashley? OK?’
‘Where are they?’ he said.
‘Who?’ Suzanne was confused.
‘Next door. Loose …’
‘It’s all right, there’s no one there. They’ve gone to London for the weekend.’
He relaxed and seemed to take in his surroundings for the first time. ‘That’s all right then.’ He leant against the wall and closed his eyes. She couldn’t let him disappear again. What had brought him to her door?
‘Ashley. Let me help you.’ She watched him come alert, looking at her warily. ‘You need some food, and you need some sleep. Stay here tonight. We’ll talk in the morning. I promise I won’t tell anyone anything. Not until after we’ve talked.’ She wasn’t sure if he had agreed or not, but he followed her through to the kitchen where she cut some bread and made sandwiches. She wasn’t hungry, but she sat with him as it seemed important to be companionable. She was glad, very glad, that Michael wasn’t with her. She would have had no choice then. He ate ravenously, and for a while his attention was entirely taken up by the food. She wondered how long it was since he’d eaten. She ran options through her mind, wondering what to do for the best. She realized he was watching her again, waiting to see what she would do next. She needed time to think. ‘Why don’t you have a bath?’ she suggested. ‘Or a shower.’ She tried a smile. ‘You need it.’
His mouth twitched in response, but his eyes slid round the room. He didn’t trust her, she realized with a pang. Why should he? Did she trust him? ‘It’s OK,’ she said, wondering why he should believe her. ‘I promise you I won’t tell anyone until we’ve talked tomorrow, and I won’t do anything without telling you first.’ He looked at her, assessing her meaning, then gave an abrupt nod. ‘Your clothes are falling apart,’ she said. Didn’t she still have some stuff of Dave’s in a bag at the bottom of the stair cupboard? They were about the same size. She found him jeans, a sweatshirt, socks. He took them, still looking undecided and wary, then she showed him the bathroom and the towels in the airing cupboard.
She went into her bedroom and pulled on a pair of trousers and a jumper. As they had sat together in the kitchen, she had become aware that her dressing gown was flimsy, and aware that he was aware of it. She made up the bed in Michael’s room. She checked her watch. It was nearly one. She went back downstairs and waited.
The sky dark and clear. The wind starting to blow. Watching the stars, in the cold in the park, waiting. Walking through the woods in the darkness, past the glittering river, past the shuttered silence of Shepherd Wheel, past the dam where the mud gleamed in the moonlight. Remember. Always remember.
Order. Walls of brick, rectangles, doorways. Planes where the shadows washed like water over the surfaces. Across and back. The window, dark, no face watching.
Where? A shadow against the lit square pulling the curtain across. A dim light in the doorway. Where? Darkness again. Where? Where?
There.
Waiting now. Waiting for it to get quiet, for the lights to go out and the hush of night to fall on the house.
The lines of the bricks like maps to draw the eye, up, down, sideways in a crazy pattern. Disorder, but it isn’t, not really. Look, look, the pattern, whole and clear and beautiful, the eye racing along the lines, finding it, losing it.
Wait.
Half an hour later, he came down. He slid round the door and hesitated, looking at her. He seemed to be listening for sounds outside. Now he looked more the way she remembered him from the Alpha Centre. He’d put on the jeans she’d given him. He had a towel across his shoulders and his feet were bare. His skin was very white; his hair hung in damp curls round his face. The hair on his chest was dark. She couldn’t think of anything to say. He came further into the room. ‘There’s a bed made up,’ she said, her voice sounding artificial in her ears. ‘I’ll show you.’ She realized she was going to have to pass him to reach the stairs. He stayed where he was, just in the doorway. As she came close to him, he said, ‘You came looking for me …’ and he touched her face, gently. Surprised, she looked up at him, and he kissed her.
For a moment, she froze, and he pulled her close against him, his arms round her so tightly she could hardly breathe. He was pushing her back onto the settee. ‘Ashley! Wait, don’t …’ She didn’t know what to do. She needed to think, to win back the initiative. She hadn’t read his signals until too late, she’d got it wrong, wrong, wrong!
He was kissing her again so that it was hard to free her mouth, hard to speak. He was pressing her back into the cushions, his hands reaching under her jumper, pulling it off her shoulders, down her arms. It was like trying to swim against the current. She didn’t know, for a moment, if she was fighting him or acquiescing. He was kissing her mouth, her neck, her breasts. She pushed against him as hard as she could. ‘Ashley! Stop! I don’t want …’
He relaxed his hold of her and was still for a moment, his head between her breasts. She had to fight a crazy impulse to put her arms round him and hold him there. Then he lifted his head and looked at her, his expression confused. ‘Why did you let me in? Why did … ?’
Of course. Sex was one of the currencies in Ashley’s world. She’d gone looking for him, she’d admitted him into her house, invited him to stay. What else had she expected? ‘I want to help you,’ she said. ‘But I can’t do this.’ His head slumped forward. He wrapped his arms round her waist and pressed his face against her. She felt his warmth and the weight of him lying half across her. He whispered something and she had to strain to hear him as he whispered it again. ‘I’m sorry … love …’ She remembered Richard’s words: Ashley’s never had anyone who loved him or cared about him. She wanted to say something to show him that she did care about him, but she knew he would misunderstand her again. She felt his head heavy against her, and touched his hair, lightly. ‘We’re both tired. You’re tired. We can talk in the morning.’
He lifted his head and looked at her. ‘You’ll let me stay?’ She nodded. There were tears on his lashes.
She needed to be alone, to have time to think. She freed herself and stood up, pulling her jumper back up round her shoulders. It was torn. She stood away from him, not wanting to give him any signals he might misinterpret. ‘You know where the room is. The bed’s made up.’
He stopped at the door and looked back at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. Then he reached out for her, almost like a child reaching for comfort. ‘Stay with me,’ he said. For a moment, she wanted to hold him against her, do whatever he wanted her to do. He was young, he was lost and she wanted to comfort him.
‘I said, sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.’
He closed his eyes, steadying himself against the doorframe, then he smiled that warm smile. ‘OK,’ he said. He looked so young it nearly broke her heart. He pulled the door shut behind him and she heard his feet on the stairs.
The key sliding into the door, turning silently. The house full of empty air, full of the silence of abandonment. Stairs, where feet could tread one, two, three, four – always an odd number, always an itch in the mind. Feet stepping centrally onto each tread. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven … and stop. Knowing where to stop in the darkness. Along the landing, one hand on the rail, one hand on the wall, smooth and rough. Not equal, not balanced. Another itch.
More stairs. Narrow and twisting. And the room with the moonlight flooding across it. A bed, stripped to the mattress. A wardrobe against the wall, crooked. Sliding it away, and there against the smoothness of the wall, smooth against the fingers, the trap-door.
The trap-door opened into dusty night. Then a moonlit attic. Another trap-door. Then the dust-filled shadows. Then a room with b
ooks, a desk, shelves. A chair, looking black in the moonlight. A door, open to the steep and narrow stairs leading into darkness.
Suzanne stayed downstairs, putting together a makeshift bed on the settee. She wrapped a wool rug round her against the chill of the early summer’s night, and curled up against the cushions. Even though she was exhausted, for a long time she couldn’t sleep. Then when she did, her sleep was fitful, disturbed. The wind was gusting now, sudden bursts rattling the windows and making the shadows move on the curtains. She lay awake, listening so she would hear if he got up, if he moved about, if he tried to leave. She dozed off, and woke suddenly. Someone outside. The wind gusted again and the twigs of the cotoneaster scratched against the window. She turned over, wrapping the rug more closely round her. It was draughty. She’d have to do something about that before the winter: replace the draught-excluder round the front door, try and seal the window frames. She settled her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. She was floating through the shadows, floating down the road, looking at all the houses dark in the moonlight. Lucy’s monster was coming up the hill. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. It was a silent, gliding monster, but she could just hear its footsteps if she listened carefully. Rattle, rattle against the door, the creak of a floorboard.
Ashley reached out his hand and she smiled and took it. They were walking along the road, and it was all right now, it was safe, everything was OK. She looked at him, but he was looking behind them, and she couldn’t see his face properly. Listen to me, Suzanne!
She was awake again. Something had woken her. The wind was making the door shake now. She listened for a minute. Gusting, a draught, rattle, rattle. She turned over again and pulled the pillow across to muffle the noise. Again the wind gusted, rising almost to a shriek, the shadows danced madly against the curtain, and the twigs of the cotoneaster scraped against the glass. She squinted at the clock. Three-thirty.
She closed her eyes again, and sleep came in the form of a long, dizzying fall. She was falling so fast that it was getting difficult to breathe. The air was catching in her throat and making her cough. She was in a field – the air would be clear here – chasing Adam across the grass, but she was still coughing. The field was burning, and Adam was running towards the flames.
There was a crackling noise and a bang, and she opened her eyes, but her dream went on. She was coughing in a thick darkness, and there was a smell of … of something burning, rubber, plastic. She struggled up, pushing the blanket off her. There was smoke in the room and it was thick and black. There were crackling, popping noises from the hall. She ran to the door, turned the handle. It wouldn’t open. She tried again, rattling the door in its frame. It was jammed.
How … ? Then she realized that the fire was just outside.
The window. She could open the window. She undid the catch and pulled at the handles, feeling the window rattle, and a draught of cold air sucked and swirled into the room. The window stuck. The fire roared and smoke billowed. She gasped with effort and the smoke gripped and froze her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She retched and choked. The crackling of the flames was louder, and she thought she could see their flicker through the thickening smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She groped round for something hard, something solid. She pulled books off the shelves, grabbing one as it fell, and smashed it into the glass. It rebounded and fell behind the settee. She reached for another one, a heavier one, that slipped and almost fell as she fumbled at it. She lined it up this time, and drove the edge of the book at the window with the force of her body behind it. The glass shattered and she fell forward through a blast of cold air. A sharp pain ran through her arm.
She was on the ground, lying in the flower bed outside the front of the house, retching and choking, reaching for clean air to fill her lungs. The entry was filled with smoke. Ashley! Ashley was still in the house! He was round the back in Michael’s room! She couldn’t stand up, so she crawled, the frantic screams in her head coming out as faint whispers, and she fell down the step onto the pavement as the silent road watched her.
McCarthy looked at the charring on the door. There was a sickening smell of burning, and the hall, the stairs and the landing were a blackened mess. The floor was awash with dirty water. ‘It’s mostly smoke damage,’ the fire officer was saying. ‘The fire itself was pretty small. There was something on the stairs that made a lot of smoke – very toxic, that.’
‘How did it happen?’ McCarthy knew that this was no accident. He felt frustrated at being here. He wanted to go to the hospital, to find out for himself how Suzanne was.
‘Arson,’ the fire officer said. He rubbed his fingers against the wood of the door and held them out to McCarthy. The smell was unmistakable. It reminded McCarthy of winter days in his grandfather’s greenhouse, in the humid warmth with the smell of out-of-season blossom. Paraffin. ‘Someone poured an accelerant through the letter box. Then they jammed the box open – give a good draught, you see. No, there’s nothing accidental about this.’
McCarthy hadn’t thought so from the minute he’d arrived, alerted by a call from the patrol that had routinely attended the fire. Ashley Reid had been found at Suzanne Milner’s house, and was at the Northern General Hospital. It was almost daylight now, past five, and the scene-of-crime team were starting to work. ‘OK if I go in?’ he said. The fire officer waved him past, and McCarthy went through the door.
It looked very different from the way he remembered it. The stairs which ran straight up in front of him were smoke blackened, the wall a mess of soot and charred paper. To his left and to his right the doors were both coated with the same thick, greasy residue. The one to the left was slightly open. McCarthy looked at the door he’d come through, the one that had been attacked by whoever had started the fire. There was a Yale lock, bolts and a security chain. Using the end of a pen, he tested the bolts. They moved freely.
He went through the door on the left. The smoke had done its bit in here, and the water from the fire hoses made the carpet spongy under his feet. He walked through the room to the kitchen beyond. Apart from the broken lock on the back door, it was virtually untouched. The fire fighters had come in this way. McCarthy looked round. There was a plate on the worktop. Two cups were in the sink. One of the SOCOs was testing the door for fingerprints.
He went through to the front room. The door was closed, as it had apparently been during the fire. There was smoke damage in here, not quite as bad as the entrance and the dining room, but, instead, blackened areas around the door, and stains on the ceiling. According to the officers attending, the door to this room had been blocked, a piece of wood jammed under the handle. Suzanne had got out through the window, smashing the glass. One pane was knocked completely out; some jagged pieces of glass were lying on the floor. McCarthy saw blood on one of the shards, saw drops on the brickwork and the ground outside. He felt that sense of frustrated anxiety again.
He looked round. A bed had been made up on the couch, a makeshift job with cushions and a rug. Then he went up the stairs, looked in the room at the head of the stairs. A bedroom, Suzanne’s by the look of it. The bed was undisturbed. Though the landing walls had been thick with smoke, in here the damage was minimal. A dressing gown lay across the bed. McCarthy picked it up. There was a faint perfume on it that took him back, disconcertingly, to the afternoon in the heather, and to the night in his flat.
The other room was chaos. The bed – a single bed – was pulled away from the wall. The bedding was strewn over the floor. McCarthy wondered how much of this was from the rescue. He understood that Reid had been pulled unconscious from the smoke-filled room and rushed to the ambulance that was waiting outside. He needed to talk to someone who’d been there. He went along the corridor to the bathroom. Here, there was no evidence of damage at all, apart from the smell of the fire. A damp towel lay on the floor, and some clothes, jeans, a T-shirt, were discarded by the side of the bath. The clothes were filthy and torn.
A further flight of stai
rs led up to the attic. McCarthy looked up the stairway. It wound round, making a steep and dangerous climb. The stairs were dark and windowless. He pressed the light switch. Nothing. Maybe the electricity was off.
He came down the stairs again and went back to the front room. His phone rang as he was still formulating his message. It was Brooke. McCarthy listened to what he had to say, confirmed, listened again, and hung up. He stood in the middle of Suzanne’s front room, watching the early morning sun make shadow patterns on the carpet and glitter off the shards of glass scattered around the window and on the ground outside.
There was a photograph on the wall, a portrait of a smiling boy with curly hair and freckles. He recognized the face from his search through the records. Adam Milner, the brother Suzanne had loved, protected, given up her childhood for, and lost. He felt an ache inside him, the ache he’d long ago learnt to ignore … no, not ignore, dismiss. Not my concern, not my problem.
Ashley Reid was dead.
15
Barraclough couldn’t tell if McCarthy had been exasperated or angry when the records department at Sheffield University produced the name Simon Walker. He was a third-year student in the Department of Chemistry. He had lived in one of the halls of residence for the first two years of his course, briefly at 14, Carleton Road, then moved to a flat on Oakbrook Road, beside Bingham Park, just a few hundred yards from Shepherd Wheel.
Barraclough could hear the music of the funfair as she got out of the car. It was back down the road in Endcliffe Park, but the breeze was carrying the music, the creak and rumble of the machines, and the shouts and screams and the amplified voices calling to people to come and buy. She hadn’t outgrown funfairs. She felt an urge to be spending the evening in the candy-floss and hot-dog environment, spinning on the waltzer, winning a huge green teddy bear on some rigged shooting gallery. Instead she was here to work, here in search of Simon Walker at his last known address.
