The Tall Man

by Phoebe Locke

  ‘And we’ll see him? The Tall Man?’ Helen tripped on a loose stone, her clammy hand shooting out and grasping Sadie’s arm. The trees shivered in the breeze.

  She thought of the Tall Man she saw in her dreams. He showed her all of his faces now. Sometimes he was soft and kind, a movie-star twinkle in his eye. He told her that she was special and that he would protect her. Sometimes he wore his other face and stayed in the shadows, his voice slithering out into the light. A pale hand with its long, elegant fingers reaching down and closing over hers.

  ‘I heard that he took a girl in Manchester,’ Justine said. ‘She disappeared from her bed one night.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll show her to us?’ Helen asked. ‘Like those kids in the magazine?’

  Justine shook her head. ‘We aren’t that special yet. That’s why we have to prove ourselves to him.’

  They reached their clearing, the place they came to give him things, to burn their letters to him. She remembered the last one she had written: I want to be special. She remembered glancing at Justine’s as the flame took hold, the paper blackening. Never leave me. The way she had looked up and seen Justine watching her, her eyes blazing with the flickering orange light. She had let go of the burning letter, let it flutter down to Sadie’s feet. Her eyes never leaving Sadie’s as she lifted her foot and stamped on it.

  There were no stars in the sky and the darkness in the woods was almost complete. Their torch beams danced across the trees, their breath hanging in the air.

  ‘Here.’ Justine drew a circle in the soil with the toe of her trainer. ‘Who has it?’

  And Marie knelt and unzipped her backpack, removing the bundle of sweatshirt she had stuffed in there. ‘Point the light this way, Helen, you div.’ She unfolded a sleeve and then the other, and there it was, the knife that she had stolen from the kitchen while her dad set up the video for them in the living room. Sadie felt the first real pang of fear then. Helen’s hand slipping into hers made her jump.

  ‘Will it hurt?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ Justine shrugged. ‘But we have to give him something if we want him to give us stuff.’ She took the knife from Marie. ‘Who’s first?’

  Nobody spoke. It didn’t matter anyway. Justine’s eyes were on Sadie.

  She held out her palm. Closed her eyes as the blade bit in; as the wind whispered in her ear.

  18

  2018

  The cabin lights are dimmed, the window shades drawn. Greta drifts uncomfortably through dreams, the muted sounds of the people around her (the soft tinkle of the trolley, the whispering crew in the service area in front of them) never quite drowned out by sleep. She feels guilty about leaving Tom and Luca in Economy, though when she wandered back there, an hour after take-off, both were sound asleep – Tom with his head against the wall of the plane, a rolled-up jacket wedged between his shoulder and cheek, Luca sliding down in his seat, his skinny legs stretched out beneath the seat in front of him and his sleep-mask pulled firmly down. Her own feels scratchy and over-showy on her face; a prop. She remembers Federica’s email from earlier in the week: Earplugs, hon. Never travel without them. She’s not sure they would have helped anyway.

  They are halfway across the Atlantic when she feels Amber shift in the seat beside her. She pushes the mask up her face, blinking, and Amber’s face is close by hers, eyes open. They stare at each other a while, the insistent air recycling endlessly from the vents above them. Then Amber turns over, tossing the blanket up over her shoulder. Greta pulls the mask all of the way off and lies on her back, looking up at the overhead lockers.

  It’s different to the way it was with the Millers. She was only an assistant then; she showed up to the meetings and she showed up to shoot days and she asked the questions she’d been told to ask when it became apparent the kids had grown to trust her. This time she’s been involved from the start – she’s been there through all of the trawling and the gathering and the dismissing, through all the pitches and the consultations and the initial interviews. She was there the day Federica had her first meeting with Amber – alone, in a wine bar in Soho – when Federica came back to the flat and beamed at Greta and Millie, a bottle of champagne clutched in her hand. She’s perfect, she’d said. This is the one. Greta’s heard Federica tell and retell the story of Sadie and Amber Banner and their ghosts to executives and investors and, once, a group of strangers in the pub.

  It’s Greta, though, who has to find the pieces for them to put together. Greta who has to search police records and land registries and electoral registers, who has to stalk various strangers through their social media in order to fill in some peripheral detail which Federica will somewhere down the line decide is irrelevant. Greta has spent months chasing a ghost across counties and countries but it isn’t a man, tall or otherwise, just a mother running endlessly.

  Isn’t it?

  She glances at the back of Amber’s head again, its tumble of bleach-streaked hair. She tries to imagine her as a newborn, the cursed child. Tries to imagine what Sadie Banner saw, looking into that small face in the Moses basket, another set of breaths behind them in the darkness. She thinks of the sound file Federica uploaded to the shared drive last night, a recorded phone call. No note to say whether or not the woman knew she was being recorded or where Federica found her, whether her statements have been verified. Since the press picked up on the fact that the acclaimed Federica Sosa was filming her next project and that the Banner case was at its centre, all kinds of people have been crawling out of the woodwork, their stories offered. People who claim that Sadie Banner was possessed by the devil, who claim that she was their playmate as a toddler. People who claim that Amber Banner is not who she says she is, that the real Amber Banner died as a child or was spirited away. That the whole Tall Man story is a cover-up. That it’s the truth.

  But this woman was quiet, nervous. Without any notes it’s hard to be sure, but it doesn’t sound like she’d volunteered her story – more likely she’s been tracked down in one of Federica’s feverish bouts of research, probably with Millie in bed or out at work, Federica caffeinated and jittery and determined to chase down whichever loose end she temporarily had hold of.

  ‘You lived in Wombleton in 2005,’ Federica had said, no trace of a question and her breath heavy on the line.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Next door to you, for six months, lived a woman who had previously been known as Sadie Banner.’

  ‘No— Well, I didn’t know that. When I went round to say hello, she told me she were called Jane.’

  A silence from Federica, the woman too nervous not to fill it.

  ‘But yeah, looking at the picture you sent, and the newspapers and that, she were her. Sadie.’

  ‘Did you speak to her often?’

  ‘No. She were a quiet one, kept herself to herself. Up at funny times of the night, ’sleep most the day, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Why, what job did she have?’

  ‘Bits and bobs. She were the cleaner for the pub for a while, then stopped showing up. She done a bit of waitressing too, caff over in Pickering. She told me she’d done factory work before she moved, night shifts, so her sleep were messed up.’

  ‘Did you talk often?’

  ‘Nope. I hardly saw her after that first time when she’d moved in.’

  ‘Didn’t you think that was strange?’

  ‘No, she were a good neighbour to have. No trouble, polite if you did see her in the street.’

  ‘So no problems at all?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  Greta remembers that hesitation clearest of all. When she heard it in her earbuds in the car on the way to the airport, it made her pulse speed up. The story was there, in that trailed sentence, that second-guessing. And Federica was the shark circling the cage, waiting for it to venture out. The bloodlust went through Greta despite herself, and she clicked up the volume on her phone to hear what came next. She’s tempted to sit up now and play it again, even though she re
members every word.

  ‘There were a few times . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My kids used to say a bloke were watching them. Her boyfriend. Used to stand in the back garden when they was out playing and that. He’d not wave if they said hello, just smiled. Unsettled them, like.’

  ‘Did you ever see him?’

  ‘Once. It was at night and I were walking the dog past the house. Some bloke were closing the curtains in the bedroom.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound particularly memorable.’

  The hesitation is there again, the woman’s breathing slow and heavy. But the story is in motion now. There’s already blood in the water.

  ‘Well, it were late,’ she says, ‘and I were tired and the dog – little mongrel thing it were, pain in the arse – just stood right there on the pavement and I couldn’t get it to move. It were like that, it didn’t do any of your come or sit or stay. It went when it went and if it didn’t, well you were buggered. So I were there, tugging its lead and freezing my arse off and it’s stood there, looking up at the house. Jane’s house. So I look up too and I seen him there, in the window.’

  ‘And how would you describe him?’

  A longer pause then; Greta turns back on to her side and considers it. Not a hesitation. A simple search for an answer that has suddenly become evasive.

  ‘He were a big man,’ the woman said eventually (doubtfully). ‘The streetlight were right here so I couldn’t see much through the glass, not his face or owt. I just seen him draw the curtains and when I looked up he stopped for a second and he were looking back at me. But with the streetlight, like I say, I couldn’t see his face. He were just stood there and I were stood there and the fecking dog were stood there and then he closed the curtains the rest of the way and I had ter drag the dog home.’

  ‘And you saw him after that?’

  ‘No.’ The woman impatient now; the story out and waiting. ‘Look, the thing is, when I get to my front path, I look back, even though the dog were dragging me then, he couldn’t wait to get inside. I look back and I seen . . .’

  This time Greta can tell that Federica lets the silence unspool because her interest is waning. But perhaps this is what allowed the woman to say what she said next; something that under greater scrutiny she might’ve had second thoughts about voicing.

  ‘I seen that the windows were all like they’d been before. No curtains closed. Just the bedroom light glowing out even though I’d seen him there, seen him pull them shut. Curtains open, no bloke there, the dog growling like no one’s business. I were half-cut, I’ll admit, but I remember it. It were weird enough for me to remember it.’

  ‘OK.’ Federica’s voice carefully modulated, even Greta unable to discern whether she took this seriously. ‘And what happened after that?’

  ‘The next day the kids saw him watching them again. It were hot and they were out messing around with the hose and this paddling pool we’d got off their cousin, and he were watching them.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Well . . . no. But Gemma, she’s my youngest, she were right upset about it, she wouldn’t go outside the rest of the weekend. So I went round there. I told Jane, your boyfriend’s got eyes wandering where they’s not meant to be.’

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘She didn’t say much but then she never did. She were sorry and she said it wouldn’t happen again and that were that. I went home.’

  ‘And did it happen again?’

  ‘Nope. Next day she were gone. No moving van, no nothing. We didn’t even notice ’til my mate who works down the estate agent in Pickering told me and by that time they’d signed up a new tenant, it were a done deal. End of Jane. The next lot were right arseholes, let me tell you. Music at all hours, screaming rows half the day. Made you appreciate how good Jane’d been.’

  ‘Have you been in touch with her since?’

  The woman’s answer was no. The trail in Greta’s head is blinking out but already all of the things she knows about Sadie Banner have buzzed into life, gradually reshaping themselves to accommodate this new piece of the puzzle. One more square filled in on the grid. A step closer.

  She rolls on to her other side, her back to Amber, and finally sleep comes to her. Though when it does, it’s filled, as it always is, with the feeling of Hayley Miller’s small damp hand in hers, with the sound of a child crying and crying and crying.

  19

  2016

  On Monday, Sadie was alone again. It was not the kind of alone she was used to, but she was at least starting to feel less like an intruder, Goldilocks waiting for the return of the bears. The silence was a relief. The weekend had drained her; the endless hangover of Saturday, the like-clockwork arrival of Miles’s parents on Sunday for their lunch. Miles in the kitchen, fussing over the joint, individually painting potatoes with goose fat; Sadie refilling endless G and Ts and straightening place settings. And Amber at the centre of it all; joking with her grandfather, allowing Miles’s mother to stroke her hair away from her face, to clasp her chin between ringed fingers and examine her face with proprietary interest. Amber starting conversations at the table, gliding effortlessly through the silences the rest of them seemed to stagnate in.

  Six visits now, and Sadie wondered if she had begun to find her footing in this small slot of her family’s routine. Even in the beginning, that first night, with Miles clinging to her and his tears drenching the grubby shoulder of her T-shirt – even with Amber, appearing open-mouthed and bed-headed on the bottom step in her pyjamas, as if Miles had invited her to meet Santa himself – Sadie had known that it would be Frances and John Banner who would prove hardest to win round. They always had.

  The first time they’d come over after her return Frances had avoided looking at her for at least an hour, and Sadie had wanted to melt into the wall, curl into a corner, anything in order to help her. She’d known she should say something, but how to even begin? And so it had been stiff silences and John’s false cheer forming a jolly base note to Miles’s breezy small talk. Amber sitting back in her chair, watching them all with that smile. Enjoying it.

  Now they were all becoming used to each other once again. There were still uncomfortable moments – John, his third G and T almost empty, cutting into the sponge that Sadie had made (Amber’s cupcakes never materialising) and inquiring, ‘Get up to much baking, Sadie? Where you were?’ – but mostly it was the kind of discomfort she remembered from when they were first a couple, when they had had to tell them that she had fallen pregnant. Before all of it.

  Well, not before all of it.

  There was a moment after they’d left yesterday when Amber had come into the kitchen and found Sadie loading up the dishwasher, her own beaded glass of gin on the counter beside her. She straightened up, uncertain, as Amber came closer, took the tea towel Sadie had flung over her shoulder and began drying the glasses left on the draining board.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Sadie had said, surprised, but Amber merely shrugged.

  ‘I want to,’ she’d said, nudging the volume on the radio up – the Four Tops playing – and the two of them had finished the cleaning together.

  She turned this memory over now, alone in Miles’s study, and then thought of Frances and Amber together in the bright light from the patio doors after lunch, the three of them alone in the room. A mother and a mother and a daughter. Could things ever be that simple?

  Her phone buzzed on the desk, her heart stuttering painfully. Leanna: Fancy lunch on Wednesday? She tapped out a reply and then turned the phone off.

  She could not shake it, now, that memory of Amber up close by her. Taking the tea towel from Sadie’s shoulder, her fingertips grazing the skin not protected by it. It had been hot, the kitchen muggy and the lamb bone left in the roasting dish on the counter so that its oily smell hung in the air, the last flecks of flesh curling as they dried. Sadie couldn’t detach the image from one of Justine, leaning closer to her in the woods, her breath si
ckly sweet and her lips sticky with sugar. He can make you special, if you ask him. Justine drawing a circle in the dirt with the toe of her shoe; Justine sitting on the edge of a kerb, a cat winding its way around her legs. Digging a kitchen knife into the palm of Sadie’s hand, blood running down her fingers and dripping slowly on to the ground.

  A floorboard creaked in the next room. Amber’s room, though Amber had left for school several hours ago.

  She straightened herself, took a deep breath. Amber was not Justine, she was not Sadie. She was not one of them; she was safe. She had to be. It couldn’t all have been for nothing – Sadie had led the Tall Man from her daughter, she had protected her. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  Another creak, closer to the wall this time, and she thought for a second that she heard the first small notes of that laugh she had left behind. She waited as the sound resolved itself into a siren somewhere in the distance, its peals wavering as they reached her.

  She attempted to return to the mundane and monumental task of trying to find a job. It felt strange, as it often did, to be doing things the way everyone else did them. Searching brightly coloured job sites instead of surreptitiously asking around, checking noticeboards in the windows of rundown shops, cheap ads in local papers. She had cleaned, she had cooked, she had packed and shrink-wrapped and counted. Each time she had thought she’d found a place where she could keep the shadows to herself. And each time she had been proven wrong. She remembered the feeling of relief in that first year, her cottage near Peterhead. A cleaning job in a factory, the night shift, the workers gone. Just her and her mop, the occasional giggle from the darkened corners. A small set of footsteps echoing hers. Then the factory had been closed, Sadie reassigned by the agency to a school. She remembered the deep, plunging dread when they’d told her, how she had stammered and tripped over her words as she tried to think of a reason why she could not work in a place where children would be. Oh, don’t worry, the woman had said, keen to be rid of her. It’s after hours, the kids’ll be long gone by the time you’re there. And this had been true, at least at first. She had begun to relax again, she had even begun to wonder if he might have left her for good. But then one evening, the rickety old vacuum plugged in, she’d turned and seen the classroom door open. A little girl and her mother, a favourite teddy left behind. And as the child ran to retrieve it, Sadie had heard the Tall Man whisper in her ear. Had seen his girl step out of the shadows in her terrible bloodstained dress and wander over to the child. Her face pressed close, taking her in, while the mother, oblivious, chattered on beside Sadie.