by Mark Tilbury
Mel gawped at the letter box as if it was capable of spouting lies.
‘Would you like me to put my ID through the letter box?’
Mel peered through a gap in the curtains and saw a police car parked in the lane.
‘Mrs Hollis?’
Mel opened the door. ‘What the hell’s happened?’
The woman introduced them. ‘I’m PC Murray. This is Detective Inspector Cartwright. May we come in, please?’
Mel stepped aside and let them in. She closed the door. She felt as if she’d been sucked inside a giant bubble, no longer in step with time. Her hands fluttered around her throat as if they were considering strangling her.
PC Murray removed her hat. ‘Would you like to sit down?’
Mel thought the woman looked too young to be a police officer. A pretty girl, with dark, bobbed hair. ‘No… I…’
DI Cartwright took over. ‘Can you confirm you are Mel Hollis?’
‘Yes. What the hell’s happened?’
He referred to a notebook. ‘We had a report of an abandoned car in Spraggett’s Lane around nine-thirty this morning. It was discovered by a farmer attending his cattle. A red Volkswagen Golf, 1.4. I’m afraid a male body was found inside the vehicle.’
Mel’s knees buckled. ‘Oh… my… God…’
‘He was identified by his driver’s licence as Antony Paul Hollis, of Thirty-six St Kilda’s Close, Feelham.’
Mel struggled for breath. ‘That… can’t… be… right...’
‘I’m afraid he suffered gunshot wounds to the neck and head. A firearm was recovered at the scene.’
Mel felt like screaming at him, telling him the Tall Man did it, but how did you explain to the police that your daughter had been murdered in a past life, and this was all somehow connected?
‘Would you like PC Murray to make you a cup of tea?’
Mel gawped at him. Why did people always offer tea, as if it had some magic healing power? The ability to make bad news more bearable.
‘Mrs. Hollis?’
‘I…’
Cartwright nodded at Murray. She walked through to the kitchen.
Cartwright fiddled with his earlobe. ‘I know this has come as a terrible shock. I want you to know that we’ll do everything in our power to get to the bottom of this. Find out what happened.’
You don’t need to. I already know, Mel thought.
‘Perhaps you ought to sit down, Mrs. Hollis.’
‘My daughter’s asleep upstairs,’ Mel told him. ‘What the hell am I supposed to tell her?’
Cartwright didn’t seem to have an answer to that. He snapped his notebook shut. ‘Would you like PC Murray to stay with you for the night?’
‘I’ll tell you what I want. I want my husband to walk through that door and tell me this has all been a sick joke. And then I want you to tell me you’ve caught the sick bastard who’s been trying to kill my family.’
Cartwright seemed unable to provide any of these things. Instead, he once again offered Mel the services of the young constable. ‘It might help to be with someone. To talk. Make tea. Help with your daughter when she wakes up.’
Mel nodded. Not because of anything DI Cartwright had suggested, but because of what might be lurking in the shadows outside Rose Cottage waiting to fulfil its dreadful prophecy to destroy their lives.
47
Bathed and rested, mind soothed to a meditative state by Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata and several glasses of his finest cognac, Peter King reflected on the day’s events. Apart from his ruined coat, it had gone reasonably well.
After examining his face in a magnified mirror for shaving wounds that might invite infection, he’d added copious amounts of Dettol to a scalding hot bath and spent the next half an hour letting the water take care of his numerous aches and pains.
Not long after his bath, a DI had called at the house to inform King of his findings regarding Charles and the hypnotist. The man had pock-marked skin, a nose possibly fashioned in a boxing ring, and eyes that appeared to be squinting through smoke. As far as King was concerned, the DI didn’t look as if he could investigate a case of fleas in a dog kennel.
No, King wasn’t aware of the two men being romantically linked. No, he wasn’t aware of any animosity between the deceased. No, he wasn’t surprised to learn of their relationship. Charles was his own man. Free to do as he pleased. They had what one might call ‘an open relationship.’ It was a poor man indeed who sought to control another’s actions and deeds.
Driven by the detective’s obvious ineptitude, King had told the squinty-eyed frog of Charles’s susceptibility to bouts of depression. His suicidal tendencies. Dramatic outbursts. Detective Inspector Rumble had left the house with a subservient humbleness that bordered on sickly. King didn’t expect him to return. The case was straightforward enough, even for someone of Rumble’s limited ability.
Let’s hope he doesn’t 'rumble’ the truth.
King smiled. His mind was in fine form tonight – if not a little cheesy.
A thought. So sudden and charged with particles of doubt as to ruin his evening. What if one of those nosy coppers interviewed that dreadful transvestite, Olivia, in her now redefined role as a witness? And what if Olivia told the police of Mel Hollis’s visit to Gavin Westwood’s practice?
King sat bolt upright in his leather recliner. Even one of such diminished ability as Rumble might see something amiss in this tragic hotchpotch of apparent suicides. All roads led to him. And forensic science was adept at finding clues in the most unlikely of places. As paranoia gripped him, a mental list of things to dispose of grew in his mind. The petrol can they’d used at St Kilda’s Close. Everything in the boot of the car. Anything they might have touched after returning home from their brief flirtation with arson. All clothes. Charles’s car itself, which was probably hosting enough evidence to get him locked up for the rest of his days. Not to mention Olivia. She would have to go to meet her maker and explain to Him why she was no longer as He had made her.
Driven to act, King went to the kitchen and sat at the breakfast bar with a pen and an A4 notepad. He listed everything that might incriminate him in a court of law. By the time he’d finished, he’d filled two sheets.
He walked back into the lounge and poured himself a cognac large enough to sooth a rhinoceros with a tooth abscess. But the alcohol only fuelled the paranoia. The second one brought the paranoia under control, but replaced it with something worse: murderous intent. This was all Charles Honeywell’s fault. If he hadn’t come home whingeing and whining about the Hollis girl, none of this would have happened.
‘Why dost thou forsake me?’ He asked a picture of Charles sitting on an occasional table near the window. Charles was beaming at the camera, suntanned, smiling, unaware of his ill-judged future love affair with Gavin Westwood. Portuguese sunshine glinted off his spectacles, reminding King of a truly wonderful holiday in the Algarve.
‘I loved you. Gave you everything. Invested my life in you. Took you into my home, fed you, clothed you, wined and dined you, taught you the intricacies of love’s sweet and fragile nature.’
Driven by a sudden urge to write his play, King retrieved the A4 pad from the kitchen, and scrawled his thoughts down underneath the list of things to eliminate from his life. His fevered thoughts made the words unreadable.
‘Inspiration must breathe,’ he slurred. ‘And tonight she breathes from my heart. From my soul.’ King tasted the words, decided they were comparable to some of Shakespeare’s finest, and scrawled them down on the pad. The ferocity of his writing tore ragged holes out of the paper, but King did not see this in his state of euphoric creative flow.
‘My love has been thwarted, tainted, but whilst I live, whilst I breathe, whilst I feel, I shall remain a man of passion, a man of fire.’
A vision of St Kilda’s Close popped into his head, halting the creative process. And then, to further complicate inspiration, Rumble’s froglike features emerged from the flames like the
ugliest phoenix known to man.
King ploughed on regardless, lapsing into plagiarising Shakespeare. ‘“They whose guilt within their bosoms lie, imagine every eye beholds their blame.”’
Lapse over, he continued in his own form. ‘You left me, sir, to float in the vacuum of a deep dark abyss. The blackest of holes in the spacest of spaces. But, alas, you underestimated my resilience. You were blinded by your greed. Your misguided desires. And it is you who shall fall as surely as Beelzebub’s grace.’
King abandoned the pad, walked to the table, and picked up the solid-silver frame containing Honeywell’s picture. It seemed to have an aura shimmering around it. A golden halo of light. And, more alarmingly, two heads.
‘Be warned those who cast stones, for it is they who will have their fragile hearts shattered.’
The Honeywell twins seemed to mock him from their Portuguese sanctuary. King hurled the frame at the fire. His intention to feed it to the flames was thwarted by the new artificial fire. Nothing more than a realistic computer image cast onto glass. The picture smashed and fell face down on the hearth.
Betrayal was one of man’s strongest suits. Trumped only by greed. Charles Honeywell had been a man of simple needs, but his capacity to betray had put him in allegiance with some of the most treacherous men in history. Brutus. Judas Iscariot. Tony Blair.
Honeywell didn’t seem too disturbed by such comparisons. King walked over to the broken photo frame and stomped on it until his legs ached. Satisfied that he’d ground the glass to powder, and Honeywell’s features with it, King left the lounge, staggered through the kitchen, and down the cellar steps holding onto the handrail for support.
Once amongst the familiarity and comfort of the freezers, some of his rage evaporated. He staggered up and down in front of the freezers like a drunken sergeant-major inspecting troops on a parade ground.
‘Purple, orange, yellow and turquoise,’ he slurred. ‘You have lent colour to my life. A vibrant hue.’
The freezers stood to attention. All nineteen heads present and correct.
‘I miss you all,’ he declared. ‘You should be proud to know you have been part of history. Part of something greater than the sum part of its total sums.’
He studied the floor, frowning. ‘I hold you all in the highest e-shteem.’
Esteem, his mind corrected.
King tried to say the word several times, practising like a child reading from its first infant’s book, but gave up when his tongue insisted on adding a H after the S. He stopped in front of the purple freezer and leaned against the door, head swimming in a soup of sentimentality. He’d never loved a woman in his life, apart from his mother. But all things considered, Purple-five had been a special girl. His purple heart.
Until Chloe Hollis ruined everything. Sitting there in Gavin Westwood’s office, barely out of nappies, recounting details of Purple-five’s life with a child’s mouth and an adult’s tongue.
He opened the freezer door, pulled out the drawer, and stared at Purple-five’s head swirling in tendrils of icy mist. ‘Has time yet to be written by the stars that guide our fortunes?’
Purple-five gawped at him with her remaining fish-slab eye, lips parted, as if about to whisper untold secrets. And then, in a sudden flash of knowing, all became apparent. He and Purple-five were forever joined in an inseparable union. Right back to the beginning of time. Purple-five and Chloe Hollis were only the tip of the iceberg. They had all lived a billion lives in a billion worlds.
With this enlightened thought in mind, and an unexpected surge of love in his heart, he walked back to the kitchen and retrieved a carrier bag from beneath the sink. He returned to the cellar, put Purple-five’s head inside the bag and retired to the master bedroom.
He didn’t undress. This was not a sordid tacky relationship rooted in sexual gratification. It was something special. Something forged throughout the history of the universe. Something that would be written about with care and sensitivity when he penned his new play.
He put the head on the pillow left vacant by his erroneous ex-lover, and then lay down beside it. He wished Purple-five the very best of luck for the New Year, and then fell asleep with a smile on his lips and a human head thawing on the pillow beside him.
48
If you’d asked Mel Hollis how she’d spent the last five days since learning of her husband’s murder, she would have been hard-pressed to tell you. After the dreadful experience of identifying Tony’s body, she’d picked Chloe up from Kerrie-Anne’s and returned to Rose Cottage.
Chloe now possessed twenty-two cuddly toys, none of which seemed to be an adequate replacement for Ruby. DI Cartwright had informed her three days after the identification that the case had now been upgraded to a murder enquiry, and they were looking at possible links between Tony’s death and the fire at St Kilda’s Close. Mel had been tempted to ask him if he was always in the habit of stating the bloody obvious.
Kerrie-Anne had agreed to let Chloe stay with her for the weekend. Give Mel some breathing space. Mel had told Chloe that Tony had died in a car accident. It was the best she could do under such tragic circumstances. Chloe, for now, only seemed concerned that her father wasn’t ever coming home.
A police liaison officer had brought Mel enough paperwork to threaten a rainforest. Leaflets for coping. Information about counselling. How to talk to children about death. Services available. Numbers to call. Not one of them offered advice on how to deal with the Tall Man, past lives, and a rag doll possessed by her dead mother.
Mel had already made one decision. An easy one. She would sell Rose Cottage and the fire-damaged house in St Kilda’s Close as soon as possible. Move as far away from Oxfordshire as she could. The Outer Hebrides seemed appealing right now. Somewhere they could start again where nobody knew them or anything about their dreadful past.
Barnaby Bunny, the latest soft toy to go on trial as Ruby’s replacement, was clutched to the child’s chest. ‘Why do bad things happen to good people, Mummy?’
Mel stopped stroking her daughter’s hair, struck once again by the adult nature of her daughter’s words. ‘I don’t know, Pumpkin.’
‘It shouldn’t be like that.’
‘I know.’
Chloe stared at the ceiling for a short while, and then said, ‘I think the Tall Man killed Daddy.’
‘Daddy died in a car accident.’
Chloe ignored her. ‘He’s going to kill us, too.’
Mel wanted to hold her, reassure her, promise her no one would do any such thing, but how did you say something you didn’t believe yourself? ‘Who is the Tall Man, Chloe?’
Chloe seemed thoughtful, and then said, ‘He’s bad. And he cuts off people’s heads.’
Mel shuddered.
‘He’s angry.’
‘About what?’
‘Me.’
‘Why?’
Tears turned her blue eyes to marble. ‘I don’t know.’
Mel changed the subject before Chloe became too distressed. ‘Are you looking forward to seeing Kerrie-Anne tomorrow?’
‘Not really.’
‘But you like Kerrie-Anne.’
‘I want to stay with you.’
‘It’s only for the weekend. Just so I can sort things out.’
‘What things?’
‘Boring stuff.’
‘Like what?’
Your father’s funeral. ‘Finding somewhere to live.’
‘Aren’t we staying here?’
‘Not for ever.’
‘What about St Kilda’s? I like my room there.’
‘We’ll get you a bigger one when we move.’
‘With a TV?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Can I have a puppy?’
‘Now you’re pushing it. Dogs need a lot of looking after.’
‘I’ll walk him.’
‘A dog would pull you over if it saw a cat.’
‘Not if it was a Yorkshire terrier like Toto.’
‘Toto?
’
Chloe gazed at the ceiling. ‘Toto was funny. We took him to the seaside once, and dad let him off the lead. He ran across the beach and bit a lady’s bum.’
‘That’s one naughty dog.’
‘He was just playing.’
‘Biting a lady’s bum?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Was this when you were Amy?’
Chloe didn’t answer.
‘Pumpkin?’
‘Huh?’
‘Toto? Was this your dog when you were Amy?’
‘Amy?’
Mel looked at the puzzled expression on her daughter’s face and changed the subject. ‘Would you like your bedtime story now?’
‘I want to sleep with you.’
‘I need you to be a big girl and sleep in your own bed.’ Mel didn’t want to tell her she was sleeping on the sofa, terrified that the Tall Man would break in and murder them in their sleep.
‘I’m scared.’
Me too. ‘Don’t be. Mummy’s right here with you.’
‘I want Daddy back.’
‘I know you do.’
‘Daddy’s nice.’
‘I know, Pumpkin.’
‘I miss him.’
So did Mel. More than she ever believed possible. It was funny how death had somehow wiped the slate clean. Forgiven his infidelity. Turned him from villain to hero. Love rat to missed husband. ‘Would you like to go on holiday in the summer?’
‘Not without Daddy.’
‘We could go abroad.’
Chloe shook her head. A tear spilled onto her cheek. ‘I don’t want to. I want to sleep in your bed.’
Mel relented. At least they now had a DVD player and some new DVDs. ‘Okay. You can come downstairs with Mummy for a while. We’ll snuggle up on the sofa and watch The Little Mermaid.’
‘Really?’
‘But I want you to promise you’ll go to bed straight after.’
Chloe looked less certain. ‘Okay.’
And so Mel carried Chloe back downstairs, made hot chocolate, and snuggled up on the settee beneath the duvet.
