Lost Souls

by Neil White

  ‘I don’t know if the police told you,’ I said softly, ‘but I’m the one who found your father.’ I paused. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She looked away. She took a few seconds to compose herself and then asked, ‘How did he look?’ It came out almost in a whisper, but as she wiped a tear from her cheek she laughed to herself, bitter and full of hurt. ‘He looked dead, I suppose, but what I mean is, did it look like he had suffered?’

  I gave a thin smile and shook my head. ‘It looked like a simple hanging.’

  She nodded. I noticed that she was holding a white handkerchief crushed between her fingers.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ she said, her voice more strident now. ‘You know that, don’t you? He didn’t hurt any of those children. He didn’t take any of them.’

  I reached out and put my hand over hers. I felt her hand tense, but then she gripped mine with her other hand. I looked into her eyes and saw an intense look, belief.

  ‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I know he didn’t. And do you know what, I don’t think the police believe that either. Not really, deep down.’

  ‘Then why did they go on television and say that they had caught the Summer Snatcher?’ she pleaded.

  I held her hands, pumped them as if to make her stronger. ‘If you know the truth, hang on to that. The police don’t always get it right.’

  She sighed and let go of my hand.

  As she dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, I looked at her and tried to work out her story. She was his legacy, but she seemed reluctant in that role. She had that same look as her father, like some kind of lapsed academic, with her hair short, soft and mousy, her eyes grey. She was wearing a lilac jumper and blue jeans, pressed so that she had a crease down the legs. She looked bookish, and it was hard to believe she came from an estate where tracksuits were the norm. Maybe that’s where she got her wariness from—a childhood of not fitting in. Her eyes constantly darted around the room, always looking for the threat, and her fingers played nervously with her leather purse.

  ‘Why did you want to meet me?’ I asked.

  Mary took a quick sip and licked her lips. Then she said, ‘About a week ago my father called me and asked me to contact Sam Nixon if he died.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘He thought he was going to die?’

  Mary nodded. ‘He thought that often, but he seemed genuinely scared this time round.’

  ‘Did you call Sam Nixon?’

  ‘Yes, as soon as I found out about my father, but he said he wasn’t interested.’

  ‘But he told you I was.’

  Mary nodded again.

  ‘Did my father tell you about his dreams?’ she asked quietly, embarrassed.

  I nodded. ‘He seemed scared, just like you said, but he told me his story. I wanted to write about him. I still do.’

  ‘He used to paint his dreams. He’s done it for years. Often I would go downstairs to go to school and he would be painting in the kitchen. It would take him a few minutes to even notice I was there.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of his most recent ones,’ I said, as if I was talking about a well-known artist. ‘They were painted just before he died.’

  ‘Did you recognise anything in them?’

  I smiled. ‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but yes, I did.’

  She began to cry, her face crumbling with grief.

  ‘Hey, hey, don’t cry.’

  ‘My father died today,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. ‘I’m allowed.’

  I gave her that one. I remembered the feeling all too clearly myself. I sat there for a while, letting her compose herself. One of the first things I had learned as a journalist was to listen. If she wasn’t ready to talk, then I would wait as long as it took.

  Mary’s orange juice must have been getting warm. The ice cubes had long gone. I looked around the pub. The windows were small and the walls were painted Elizabethan cream, above mahogany wood panels that went all the way around the room. The rest of the character was long gone, though, all the rooms knocked through, as it tried to re-create the history that had been ripped out during an earlier refurbishment. Wooden beams painted black ran across the ceiling, the lines broken by witticisms painted in white.

  As the silence lingered, I sensed Mary begin to relax again.

  ‘I’ve got a box of his paintings,’ she eventually said. ‘I don’t know what to do with them.’

  ‘And you think I will?’

  ‘You might do. They go back years, decades.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to keep them?’

  She snorted a laugh. ‘You’ve seen the house he lived in.’ She went quiet, took a deep breath. ‘The house he died in.’ She paused as a sob choked her up, and then she continued, ‘Those paintings ruined his life. Mine as well, if I’m honest about it.’

  ‘They defined his life,’ I argued. ‘He thought he had a gift and wanted to share it to protect others.’

  ‘No, no, no. He stopped living his life, so obsessed was he about his dreams. You saw his house, all boarded up.’

  ‘It was his home.’

  ‘It was his dream studio. He said he didn’t dream when he slept away from that house, and so he worried that if he left he would stop having them.’

  ‘I didn’t get the impression that he enjoyed having them.’

  ‘He didn’t, but he thought they meant something important. He trained himself to remember his dreams, so that when he woke up he could recall them for longer than most people.’

  I looked into her eyes and tried to work out her thoughts.

  ‘You sound like you didn’t believe his dreams were of the future,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘I wanted to believe him, but I didn’t want to encourage him either.’ She considered for a moment and then asked, ‘Did you believe him?’

  I smiled apologetically. ‘I’m a reporter. I can write it and not believe any of it, as long as someone buys the story.’

  She looked away for a moment, and I could see her trying to hold on to the tears.

  ‘So do you think he was misguided, that he wasted all of those years?’ I asked.

  She looked back at me and watched me for a few seconds. It seemed like we were the only people in the pub at that moment. She looked down as she began to shake her head.

  I reached out to her again. ‘It’s okay. You’re entitled to your own opinion.’

  She looked up again as she tried to blink away her tears. ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘It makes me so angry because it ruined his life. And it ended it as well. It wasn’t always like that. Nor was the house. It used to be a normal house. I grew up there.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘She died years ago.’ She smiled, looked almost wistful. ‘If she had been alive, she would have told him to keep quiet about it all. When she died there was no one to rein him in. So he got a name for being the estate weirdo, talking about seeing the future, going down to the shop to get himself photographed with his paintings.’

  I looked quizzically at her.

  ‘To date them,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘There’s a clock on the wall with the date on it. But word got round and the kids would taunt him. And then he started calling the police, trying to tell them what he had seen whenever anyone was killed or abducted. So he became a suspect, and the local kids thought he was guilty. I’ve seen him spat on, shouted at, mothers with their children screaming at him in the street.’

  ‘And so he boarded himself in?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It was the murder of a little girl that caused the problems—they didn’t get anyone for it. Dad called the police every day to tell them what he had seen, and then when they saw him looking around where they found the body, they locked him up so fast.’

  ‘But he was released.’

  She shook her head. ‘After a few months. The kids on the estate don’t see that as a declaration of innocence. Most of them get away with crime. There are no
falsely-accused there. They either get caught or get away with it, nothing in between. So I knew where they thought my dad fitted into the picture. His windows were smashed. Things thrown at the house. The door was always being kicked in. I couldn’t stand it any more so I left, and I tried to get him to come with me, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘If you don’t believe that he dreamt the future, why did you want to speak to me? You could have stopped at Sam Nixon when he said no.’

  ‘Because it’s what Dad wanted. He told me to speak to Sam Nixon if he died, as if he might know what to do. Sam passed me on to you. I’m just following the trail, just so that I can tell myself that I did what I was asked.’ She smiled now, the first real smile I had seen from her. ‘He was a good man. Misguided maybe, but kind and gentle, all the things a father should be.’

  ‘I’m going to write about him. Are you okay with that?’

  Mary nodded. ‘He would have wanted you to.’

  ‘If I write the story, it will be the one I want to write, though, which might not be the same one you want. You understand that?’

  Mary nodded.

  I realised that I needed the raw materials. The paintings. The photographs. Mary must have sensed what I was thinking, because she said, ‘They’re in the boot of my car. I’ve put them in date order, and every time something happened that he thought he had seen in a dream, I cut it out of the paper and put it with the painting.’

  I started to smile. ‘You didn’t believe any of it, but you helped him catalogue it.’

  ‘He was my father. I loved him.’

  ‘There is one more thing I need from you,’ I said. When she raised her eyebrows in query, I continued, ‘I need to know more about your father. And not just the dream stuff. I want to know about Eric Randle the man.’

  She nodded at me. ‘I can do that.’

  Chapter Forty-one

  Jess’s journal and notes were spread out in front of Laura. They’d been checked for prints and there was only one set on them. Jess’s.

  Laura picked up the one containing the pieces she had read that morning.

  ‘Cant see, can’t talk, can’t move. All I can see is red. I can hear someone though, it’s a man, and he is laughing. I’m hurting, and I try to get away, but I can’t move my arms, my legs. I turn my head to try and see, try to open my eyes, but there is nothing there. Just a red mist, but it seems dark, forbidding. I try to scream for help but there is just a noise I don’t recognise.’

  Laura shivered and wondered whether Jess had known at the time that she was the woman in the dream. She looked at the other pieces of paper and saw that they were similar in style, but only one other sounded like it foretold her death. None of it made any sense, but Laura knew that there was something there that provided a clue. She sighed. She just couldn’t see it.

  She picked up a small black book. It was about the size of a pocket diary, but it was thick and worn. The spine was all ragged and sticky tape held it together at the top and the bottom. Laura opened it.

  On the inside, in juvenile pink pen, were Jess’s name and a date: 21 December 1994. Underneath were the words ‘Dream Journal’ and a simple drawing of a flower. Laura thought about the date and realised that Jess would have been in her early teens, just making her way through puberty. Laura thought back to herself at the same age and remembered the turmoil of those years. The worries, the discoveries, the whole confusion of it all. She thought she could remember vivid dreams herself, often nightmares, a mind made too busy by hormones racing through her system. Jess must have started the journal when she thought her dreams were more than just normal.

  As she started to read, Laura noticed that the entries were dated. They were like the notes she had read before, disjointed, but they were more obviously accounts of Jess’s dreams. As she flicked through, she started to notice that they had a theme: disasters and death. No happy dreams, or odd dreams, or even erotic ones.

  Laura started at the front, a description of the first recorded dream.

  21 December 1994

  I’m in bed, shaking, moving from side to side, first one way, then the other. House moving. I get under my covers—hear window smash. Shaking stops and I run to window. Broken glass. Doesn’t hurt. Scared. Look out window. See road-bridge moving. It turns over, like a spoilt child kicked it over. Fires starting. Families in street. Seems like half town is rubble. When I woke up, thought bed was moving. Wasn’t.

  Laura’s attention was drawn to the bottom of the page and ‘Kobe 17/1/95’ scrawled across it. The body of the text had been written in the same pink gel pen as the inscription on the inside cover, so Laura could tell that they were written at the same time. But the words ‘Kobe 17/1/95’ were written in ragged red biro.

  Laura chewed on a fingernail. Was it someone’s name, or a message? Then she remembered, and she felt her mouth go dry. It was an earthquake, in Japan. She remembered the footage now, the images from shops as shelves collapsed, the buildings moving around like someone shaking a box. Thousands had been killed.

  She thought about Jess, wondered how heavily this had all weighed on her mind. The dream had been vivid enough to scare her, but then not long afterwards it had come true. Had there been something in the dream Jess had missed that might have saved some lives? How would a teenage girl cope with that?

  She turned through the pages and read abstract accounts of dreams. Nothing jumped out, but then her eye was caught by an entry the following year.

  3 April 1995

  Big bang, then silence. Screaming. Women covered in blood, men stunned, shocked. Face wet with blood. Hurts. Where’s my baby? Windows smashed, part of ceiling gone, part of floor. People shouting for children. Where’s mine? Feel pain. His. Mine. Looking through dust. People dead.

  I get out. Dark inside. Dusty. Choked. Can’t breathe. Outside warm, sunny. Building big. Many floors. But front missing.

  Two men staring. One in orange jumpsuit. Everyone is crying. He isn’t. He isn’t doing anything. Not smiling. Not crying. Just passive. And he looks at me. He scares me. Cold. Other man dark-haired. Moustache. He speaks with accent. Continental. German? Then turns away.

  Laura put the book down. Jess believed she was having premonitions. Then she noticed the words ‘OKLAHOMA 15/4/95!’ written in large capitals along the bottom.

  Now Laura could recognise the description of the Oklahoma bomb, when a truck rented by neo-Nazis took off the front of a federal building, killing workers and children. She guessed that Jess wouldn’t remember the fine details of the dream later that month when the bomb went off in Oklahoma, but the orange jumpsuit? That was a telling detail. Laura remembered the pictures of Timothy McVeigh being led away—it was the main image people still had of him, the defiant ex-soldier in chains. In some ways that must have been harder for Jess to cope with than Kobe, which would have happened anyway, a natural disaster. If there had been enough clues, the Oklahoma bomb could have been stopped.

  But who would have paid any attention to a teenager from Lancashire?

  Laura sighed and smiled to herself. She was starting to believe in this herself now.

  She turned over the page and saw that the entries carried on. Not all of them had notes at the bottom, and many seemed not much more than the strange and vivid dreams of an imaginative teenager. But the ones with red annotations at the bottom were all events she recognised. Plane crashes. Earthquakes. Murders.

  She flicked through the journal, trying to find something relevant to the case. There was nothing. The last page had an entry dated 16 December 2004.

  On beach. Beautiful. Palm trees. Happy. Sea calm. But then it disappears. Goes out long way. Sea just keeps going out. But then it comes back hard. And just keeps coming, over beach, through streets. Am swept away. Hang on to tree. Being bumped around. Water heavy around head. Which way up? Dark but silent. Chest gets heavy. Have to breathe. Can’t.

  Laura felt her breath catch. She didn’t need to read the note at the bottom to know that Jess had d
reamt about the devastating tsunami that had struck ten days later.

  She put the journal down and wiped her eyes. She felt tired, the words in front of her flooding her brain too fast, making it too hard to see what it was that troubled her. She felt that the answer to Jess’s murder was in front of her, written down somewhere. But she had gone through everything and nothing seemed real. Maybe it was too cryptic, or something was relevant but all mixed up.

  She shook her head. It felt like the answer was almost in front of her, tantalisingly close.