The Calling

by Alison Bruce

  Mike would deal with it. He was a good man who hated vice and sloth and wasted money. She turned to watch the far end of the road, where it joined the main street and where she would spot him coming home. Every minute seemed like an hour, and she began to worry that Steve would awaken and hide the video before Mike caught him.

  But Steve was oblivious of most things, certainly to the passing of time, and so he didn’t hear his dad come home. It was only when his father’s weight beside him made the settee groan that Steve knew he wasn’t alone.

  Then he remembered the video.

  In the second between checking the screen and his father’s face, he snatched for an excuse – something his father would understand.

  But in an instant he knew his father did understand. More than that, he seemed to be looking at Steve with a kind of respect. Steve tentatively tried a laddish smirk. Afterwards he realized that he had the Thunderbird to thank for such bravado, but still felt more of a man anyway.

  ‘I’m getting to be a bit of a film buff actually, Dad.’ He laughed and knew his voice sounded tight with nervousness.

  He needn’t have worried, because his dad was suddenly a teenager again. ‘I’m a film buff too, son. Don’t you worry, nothing wrong with it at all.’ He then winked, and held the Thunderbird bottle up to the light, hoping for some leftovers. ‘Better in the flesh, of course, especially with the ones your age.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I have done it before.’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t tell your mother!’ And they both laughed then as though it was a long-standing joke instead of a newly shared confidence.

  Margaret witnessed all of this from her position behind the hatch. With a restraint that seemed to make her move in slow motion, she pushed the hatch doors further open.

  ‘Tea anyone?’ Her voice shook slightly as she spoke. And that’s the picture that became frozen in her memory: Mike and Steve looking at her stunned in front of a video of two stunning blondes in patent leather boots, mauling one another on a leather couch.

  Margaret finally finished with the laundry pile just as her rage reached its peak. She was alone in the house, so no one heard her. ‘Why today?’ she yelled. She had looked forward to today: her mother’s birthday; a family gathering; a social event shared with Mike.

  ‘Bastards,’ she screamed, ‘how could you?’ She threw the lid of the Aladdin’s basket at the wall, then kicked the basket itself on to its side. ‘Bastards!’ she screamed again and again, until at last the tears came and burnt hot trails down her cheeks. She collapsed on to the washing piles, sobbing and cursing herself.

  Count your blessings, Margaret, she reproached herself. Her mother still loved her – and Michelle and Kaye would never let her down like this. Why had she bothered to have three kids when the two girls would have been enough? She’d have been better with those two: they didn’t humiliate her like this. She drew a shuddering breath, aware she wanted to ring them, pour out her pain to them. She clambered to her feet.

  They probably weren’t at home, anyway, and she’d be seeing them later, at her mother’s.

  She re-boiled the kettle, and eventually did what she always did: she acted as though nothing had happened.

  The sheets were clean and Michelle Whiting had even ironed them. She’d changed the bed to fresh linen especially for this. She could feel the smoothness of stretched brushed cotton under her hands and knees.

  It was weird doing it this way, as she couldn’t see Carl’s face; they couldn’t even kiss. His hands gripped her hips and he kept digging his fingers into her flesh, so she could feel little bruises forming against her bones. Her hair dangled over her eyes, so the ends of it swayed just above the pillow. She wondered whether she should have a trim soon, since they looked a bit straggly.

  ‘Don’t sag,’ he grunted. But her arms were aching from supporting her own weight and Carl’s, too, as he leant heavily upon her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled and arched her back, pushing herself up against him. Her mind kept wandering. This is meant to be a turn-on, she reminded herself. But it just wasn’t as sexy as she’d thought it would be. Tedious was the word that sprang to mind. The first time they’d tried it this way had been on the carpet, and the grazes on her knees had only just healed. At least this wasn’t quite so uncomfortable.

  ‘This is so good,’ she gasped.

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘I’ve never known it so good, Carl. Have you?’

  ‘No, no,’ he panted. ‘I can’t get enough.’

  Michelle smiled, knowing Carl was totally devoted to her, and if keeping him happy meant some of this discomfort, well, that was fine. She loved having his total attention.

  His fingers suddenly released her hips and he leant forward, pushing himself more deeply into her. The palm of his left hand slapped against the wall as he used it to support his weight.

  His thrusting became urgent and the fingers of his right hand grasped her long hair, twisting it tightly close to the scalp. His knuckles ground against the top of her head and her neck ached as it was twisted at an awkward angle.

  But she didn’t complain, instead waiting for the moment when they collapsed in a heap and would cuddle up. She hoped it wouldn’t take long now.

  Carl wasn’t thinking about Michelle’s discomfort.

  He wasn’t even thinking about Michelle at all.

  He’d started out with one of his usual fantasies: how he wasn’t a lowly van driver but a powerful tycoon, and that she was his secretary paid to do whatever he chose.

  But everything felt different today, and those thoughts weren’t enough to stem his frustration. So this time he had turned her over and hauled her up on to her hands and knees. Because he didn’t want to see her face. He didn’t want to be reminded that she was Kaye’s sister.

  Kaye, the elder and more serious sister. The more everything in his opinion.

  Kaye, the one he really wanted.

  But, before he could stop it, she was there in his head. She pulled off her T-shirt and shimmered in front of him, pale and inviting. She drew him towards her but, even in his fantasy, he knew that she’d never let him touch her.

  Because of his association with Michelle? Or because he wasn’t good enough? Or both?

  The word bitch filled his head and, as he tugged at Michelle’s hair and became more frenzied, it pounded like a chant in rhythm with his body. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

  For Carl, climax and satisfaction were not the same. Suddenly he didn’t want to touch either of the sisters.

  So Michelle now waited for a token of affection that Carl didn’t feel like giving. He didn’t even kiss her, just pulled his sweatshirt and jeans back on and said he wanted a coffee.

  Michelle straightened her bed as the kettle boiled. He hadn’t even noticed the fresh sheets.

  Andy Burrows sat inside his old Ford Escort, watching the rain slide down the car’s windows.

  He’d genuinely planned to attend his mother’s birthday dinner tonight, right up to the moment when he’d parked outside the house and spotted them all through the partially open curtains.

  They would have assumed that looked inviting: a family dining happily together, with one space left for him. But to him it reeked of pity.

  He could see his mother at the head of the table, wearing a mauve cardigan. She was probably propped up with a cushion and wearing slightly lopsided lipstick that was the wrong shade. It didn’t matter to him. His mother hadn’t had a favourite child though, all through their childhood, Margaret had succeeded where he had failed – and she had never been disappointed.

  His mother’s present lay wrapped up on the passenger seat, with her birthday card attached. He’d bought her a book on houseplants. Stupid really, since she only had two Busy Lizzies and a spider plant. Margaret would know straight away that it had come from the discount bookshop, but then she could afford something better. Margaret had it all: a nice house, a good family, a steady job. All the trappings of security that he’d never
had, and which he guessed he never would. He was younger than her, and had always lagged behind.

  Don’t be so hard on yourself, he’d told himself at twenty, but now, at forty-six, he had spent too many years believing himself inept to even think of having ambitions. Ambitions and achievements had been the inheritance of his sister.

  He could see Margaret herself fussing around the table, waiting on her family, keeping everything under control, Mike and Steve lapping up her attention. And Michelle and Carl, who were probably going to make her a grandmother one day soon. And Kaye.

  She wasn’t there.

  He watched the window for a few more minutes. No one looked out at him. Perhaps no one missed either of them?

  But they’d miss Kaye, wouldn’t they, for she was special, kind. He wanted to be kind too, but it always backfired.

  Today had been typical, since he’d meant to help. But he felt he was cursed with a kind of reverse-Midas touch. Everything he touched turned to shit.

  He’d be caught out, of course, as he always was. Until then, what? Pretend nothing was wrong or simply avoid them all?

  He decided to go home. He didn’t belong in there.

  CHAPTER 2

  SUNDAY, 27 MARCH 2011

  Gary Goodhew had seen dead bodies. And plenty of them.

  Early on, there were a few that had made his stomach tighten and threatened him with queasiness.

  There had been moments when he’d wished the clock could have stopped for the extra second needed for that cyclist to clear the path of the lorry, or that child to reach the pavement … Goodhew had a particular hatred of dealing with victims of road accidents; and thus normality ripped apart, often without warning. Sometimes the futility of those deaths felt close to overwhelming.

  He’d been the first to arrive after several calls when ordinary people had collapsed in the street. He’d heard words from the lips of the dying, messages that had been too quiet to distinguish, and felt guilty when he couldn’t pass them on.

  And then there were the murder victims. Sometimes maimed or posthumously humiliated, sometimes with shock or betrayal frozen on to their face.

  He could remember two instances when he’d looked away; and two more when he’d cried.

  Just a single body remained nameless, and none of the others affected him in the way that that one did.

  It always visited in the night, and avoiding it was the main thing that kept him awake at night. But most other dreams gave him space to think since he realized he was sleeping and could direct them, rewind and replay them at will. His grandmother had used the term ‘lucid dreams’, but that was all he knew.

  They reminded him of beachcombing: picking up thoughts and ideas, discarding the flotsam and hanging on to the interesting finds; turning them over and deciding where to take them next. He guessed most unwanted dreams were forgotten; the others he could walk through, investigate, explore and resolve. Colours and conversation and even images were conveyed second-hand, like hearsay, but always within his control.

  All the dreams he could ever recall were that way – except one.

  This had been the rarer kind, the first visit, for months, of dead eyes and waxy skin. He’d tried to stay in the dream, to step back and pan the scene but had woken instead, to stare into the dark. It was 2 a.m. He didn’t bother to check, it just felt like 2 a.m.

  He had slept soundly until then: for six months, give or take. Long enough to think that he’d left it behind, or exorcized it or out-grown it. He wasn’t sure if there was a term for being twenty-six years old and conquering a recurring nightmare, but if one existed it was irrelevant now.

  And so were the possible reasons – big and small – that he’d acknowledged for breaking this pattern. He’d been developing the ability to take an emotional step back from cases, and he reckoned he’d balanced that with an emotional step forward in everything outside work.

  Life/work balance: so much for amateur psychology.

  He had felt that a lot had happened during those six months, but the reappearance of that dream told him that nothing much had changed at all.

  He lay still, listening to the faint sounds of sparse traffic coasting through the empty streets. In his imagination, he passed through the early hours of a Sunday morning in the centre of Cambridge, with scattered groups making their various haphazard trails towards home, the drunkest being herded on by the police, while a few continued on foot; the rest dispersing via cars and taxis. He concentrated on the warmth and life and the real world outside his own imagination, until he felt awake enough to consider his dream in a less emotive way.

  It was a single, unmoving image. Not graphic or violent or threatening even, just simple and repetitive but disturbing enough to throw Goodhew from the deepest sleep and kick him into a cycle of insomnia and exhaustion.

  He saw a close-up of half a face tilted to one side, so that the right eye was in full view and the left was partly in shadow. The eyes were fixed beyond him, and he knew the skin would be cold to touch. It was impossible to see more: a shot so closely cropped that even the forehead and lips weren’t visible. But, in his nightmare, it wasn’t a photo. The face was real, and just inches from his own, and no matter how many times he tried to reach out – or move – that was all there ever was.

  This dream had first come to him on the day he applied to join the police force, and most recently occurred on the final day of his last murder case. In fact it had been with him during each of the small number of murder investigations he’d ever tackled.

  Not for the first time, he wondered whether it could be some kind of omen and he noted, as his eyes had jolted open, that the feeling accompanying it hung uneasily between fear and helplessness. Neither of these were emotions that he ever considered sharing, and now, tired though he felt, he stayed awake until the room paled to grey. Then, with his day-off beckoning and normality slipping back in through the gap in the curtains, he allowed himself another hour of sleep.

  It was his phone that woke him. He grappled around on the floor beside his bed and simultaneously checked the time and the caller ID. He was surprised to see it was already 10.10.

  The display read ‘DI Marks’.

  He rose on to one elbow and tried to sound fully awake. ‘Morning, sir.’

  There was no preamble. ‘Gary, how soon can you get here?’

  ‘Straight away.’ It wasn’t possible to see out of his window from where he now lay, but he still turned his head in the direction of nearby Parkside police station. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Missing person.’ Marks paused. ‘I’m up to my ears and short of staff today … I want you to speak to her mother.’

  CHAPTER 3

  SUNDAY, 27 MARCH 2011

  A wave of nausea shuddered through Margaret Whiting, making her sweat and tremble, and pressing hard against her lungs. ‘Keep calm,’ the police officer had told her on the phone, but each time her breathing steadied, another wave of sickness hit her. And, like breakers crashing on a pebble beach, dragging stones in the undercurrent, it clawed across the pit of her stomach.

  She leant on the windowsill and strained to see any traffic coming down Arbury Road. She watched for cars slowing down and indicating. She knew they wouldn’t be that quick, but there was nothing else she could do than wait.

  She removed her glasses and pressed her cheekbone tight against the cold pane. Her breath created a small round pool of condensation, so she scribbled through it with her index finger and watched the dribbles begin to spoil the symmetry. Two daughters and a son had its own symmetry, so why had she complained, she wondered. A heavy rock of guilt weighed down on her. She hadn’t meant it, but she’d thought it, and years of inbuilt superstition told her that this was enough.

  Today she didn’t want to cry, at all. She felt far too numb for tears.

  Another car swung into the road, so she lifted her head above the misty patch of glass to watch. It drove on by, but then it was still too soon – only minutes since she’
d phoned them.

  She felt a trickle of sweat meander from her armpit and head towards her elbow. She massaged the blouse sleeve against it, mopping it, and would have then left it except for the stain which formed darkly on the grey rayon.

  ‘Damn!’ she whispered and, after one more glance at the empty road, she tore herself away from the window to change.

  She tossed the blouse on to the bed and fumbled in the wardrobe for another. She felt clumsy and listless. She pulled at the clothes hanging there, dithering, until she glanced again out the bedroom window. A black saloon hesitated three doors away, then it spurted forward as if its driver were checking house numbers. She pulled the nearest blouse from its hanger.

  The man parked just across the street, and she watched him as she dashed to button up her replacement top. He looked too young. They’d sent a junior.

  Her fingers continued fidgeting with the buttons until, frustrated, she shoved the lower part of her shirt into her waistband and scuttled back downstairs, anxious to open the door as soon as he knocked, to show him how important this was.

  She managed to reach the door before he’d even closed the front gate. She stood with it slightly ajar until he was close enough.

  ‘Mrs Whiting?’ he enquired.

  She nodded and beckoned him inside before he could introduce himself.

  ‘I’m DC Goodhew, Cambridge CID.’

  She nodded again and led him to the sitting room, where she perched on the edge of a low armchair. DC, she thought to herself. That means Detective Constable. A total beginner, then.

  He removed his jacket, before choosing the settee.

  ‘I’ve been briefed on your conversation with our control room, Mrs Whiting, so I know the basics. And you’ve still heard nothing from Kaye?’