by Heide Goody
“Unless she’s hiding in the cupboard.”
They made their way downstairs. Sam locked the back door again through the broken pane and pulled the piece of cardboard back into place as fully as possible.
“There’s a niece in Grantham,” said Sam as they walked back round to the drive. “I could call her. Or I could just let Karen from Meals on Wheels know.”
“What was your main concern?” said Delia. “That she’d had a fall and couldn’t reach the phone.”
“I suppose.”
“Or had died in her sleep and was just lying there waiting to be discovered.”
“I hadn’t put that much thought into it.”
“Point is,” said Delia, “you’ve done your neighbourly duty. Oi, Twizzler!” This last was shouted at a turkey poult which had jumped up onto the Piaggio’s tiny dashboard.
“It better not be pooping in my van,” said Sam. “I’ve had enough animals crapping in vehicles for one lifetime.”
“I don’t know how he got out,” said Delia.
Sam shook her head, exasperated, and looked round at the environs. As though some clue to Mrs Skipworth’s whereabouts might present itself.
“I need to pick up the mannequin,” she said as Delia tried to round up the escapee turkey in the cab. “Don’t want to be accused of fly-tipping.”
Delia seized the bird. It flapped frantically for several seconds before Delia managed to get it back in the box with its sibling.
A feather stuck to Sam’s lip as she got in the driver’s side. She spat it away and started the engine. “And you can’t call a turkey Twizzler,” she said. “It’s insensitive.”
She reversed off the drive, went back up the side road and into the lay-by. Consuela was leaning against the wall in a decidedly louche fashion. Sam was surprised that the people of the local parish had let a naked and shameless woman lounge in their village for so long.
“I don’t know if I’ve got room in the back,” she said.
Delia hopped out. “Nice looking mannequin. Could be a Greneker. Shame about the damage.”
“It’s a wasps’ nest.”
“I meant that slice taken out of her neck.”
Delia was right. There was a narrow wedge-like cleft in her neck, like someone had taken an axe to her. Sam crouched beside her and touched the wound, wondering what could have caused it. And then she saw the footprint next to it.
The lay-by next to the church wall was slightly lower than the road. Fallen leaves and other crud had gathered in it to form a light damp topsoil. Pressed into the soil near Consuela’s head was a footprint. There was nothing specifically extraordinary about that, but for the fact she had seen that dot-dash trainer tread earlier in the day.
“Yeezys,” she said.
“What?” said Delia.
Sam felt a puzzling sense of prescience come over her and she didn’t know what to do with it. An empty home, a damaged mannequin, and a distinctive footprint. And, elsewhere, a training shoe found at the bottom of an alligator pool with a tread she was certain would match this. There was no meaningful link between any of them and yet, with a certainty built on no foundations at all, she was suddenly convinced something untoward had occurred.
“I think something bad has happened to Mrs Skipworth,” she said.
“Like what?” said Delia.
Sam took a photograph of the footprint in the muck and shook her head. “I don’t know, but I think it’s something very bad indeed.”
35
Scarborough Esplanade ran between Skegness Pier and the Pleasure Beach fairground. Jimmy wasn’t sure what an esplanade was, but he was prepared to bet it didn’t mean a narrow and badly tarmacked cul-de-sac. With the pier-side lawns on one side and a succession of bars, tattoo parlours and arcades on the other, Scarborough Esplanade was as close to the fairground he could park without actually driving into it.
Jimmy pulled on the handbrake and turned to Wayne. “We’re here. We’re gonna put Mrs Skipworth in the ghost train, yeah?”
Wayne nodded, but his face was slack. He looked like he was thinking about taking a nap right there. The damned horse tranquilizers were still holding sway.
Jimmy tapped Wayne’s face, and not gently either. “Listen, this was your plan, remember? I’m going to unwrap the old biddy so we can get her out and put her in a scooter, like she’s a relative or something, yeah? All I need is for you not to lose your shit and it will all be fine. Understand?”
Wayne nodded again.
“Tell me you understand,” said Jimmy.
“Sure. Understand.”
“Now sit there, just for a minute.”
Wayne’s open mouth spilled drool onto his lap, but Jimmy was past caring about the minor stuff. With the back doors facing a solid wall covered by a mural of images straight out of a saucy seaside postcard, Jimmy could open the back doors and create a four-sided enclosure that kept him unseen.
He pulled the scooter out of the back and lifted the dead pensioner from the van and onto the scooter. The corpse was no longer stiff and she flopped inelegantly into the seat like a cheap drunk. Her face had a waxy sheen that was verging towards silver green, like old bacon. Eventually she was on the scooter. He wrapped a blanket round her and pulled a woolly hat over her head. He really didn’t want to look at her face’s weird colour out here in the bright sunshine, although it would look great inside the ghost train.
He left her momentarily and closed one rear door to go round to drag Wayne out to meet her. “Come on now, check out these wheels, Wayne. You get to drive.”
“Cool!” said Wayne and clattered round to look. Step, clank, step, clank. “It’s electric, yeah? Can I make it— Wait. Is that the dead body?”
“This was your idea, man, and it was a fine idea. It just depends on us keeping our cool. Now get on the scooter behind Aunty Pat and make sure she can’t fall off.”
“Aunty Pat?”
Jimmy gestured at the body on the mobility scooter. “Aunty Pat. Aunty Pat loves the funfair.”
Wayne got on the scooter and nearly fell off. Jimmy held him up. There was a sudden parp of flatulence. Unashamedly bold and brassy, it rang clear like the trump of doom. Jimmy wasn’t sure if it was Wayne’s tortured and medicated innards or escaping gas from the corpse. Whichever it was, Jimmy, a man who had experienced the vilest portaloos and most vulgar brickies in the building trade, was assailed with a sickly sweet stink that caused him to retch.
“Fucksticks,” he gagged.
“I’m ready,” said Wayne, apparently oblivious.
“Yeah, let’s try to pretend she’s a real person, you know,” said Jimmy. “Let’s not squash her to death. I mean, not to death but— Hey!”
Wayne had tried out the scooter controls and run the vehicle into the remaining open door.
“Back up, back up,” said Jimmy.
He closed the door and, fearing his drugged and deranged accomplice might veer off at any moment into a wall or the front pages of the next day’s papers, accompanied the scooter through the gap between a tattooists and an abandoned candyfloss shop into the fairground proper.
High season had passed, but there was still life in the fairground. The Gold Mine runaway train rollercoaster rattled around its track next to the dodgems. The Dumbo flying elephant ride serenely carried toddlers and parents in the shadow of the spinning, flipping, g-force inducing FreakOut ride. And, just beyond the pirate ship (closed for refurbishment), was the ticket kiosk and ghost train.
“Ghost train then, yeah?” said Jimmy. “Aunty Pat can’t wait, can you, love?”
He wanted to hurry this along for any number of reasons, including his lack of faith in the scooter’s battery life. He got Wayne to follow him to the kiosk, and while Wayne tried to perform donuts on the scooter, he bought three ride wristbands from a woman with Libby on her nametag.
“All full price?” asked Libby.
“Yep. All adults,” said Jimmy, shifting a little so Libby couldn’t get a g
ood view.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks, Libby.” Jimmy turned around. “Pop one on your wrist Wayne. You too Aunty Pat.” He held her cold dead hand and slipped on the wristband, trying to keep a smile on his face.
As they came up to the ghost train, a teenage attendant approached. Jimmy brushed off his efforts to help. “I’m their carer. We have some very unusual needs here, so give me some space, will you?”
“If you want, I can—”
“Some space, man.”
“If your … mum? … isn’t well enough to get on the ride then—”
“She’s got that Bell’s palsy thing. Affects her face and limbs. But she loves the ghost train. You just make sure it’s extra slow. My patients have got those, um, cognitive difficulties.”
“I don’t know if—”
“Libby in the kiosk said it would be fine,” said Jimmy firmly. “Don’t want to get done for being anti-disablist, do you?”
“Libby said that?”
Jimmy gave him a fierce look. “Go ask.”
The lad backed away, eyes fixed on Wayne’s drooling face. “I’ll ask,” he murmured.
“You do that,” said Jimmy. As soon as the boy had turned away he wrestled Wayne and Aunty Pat into a carriage, leaving the scooter at the side. Wayne’s metal leg brace wouldn’t fit properly inside the carriage, so he hung it off the side.
“Here we go,” said Jimmy and pushed the big green button on the operator’s console. Jimmy climbed in the second row of seat of the moving carriage and then they were through the noisy swing doors and lurching into the darkness.
“Hey it’s a skellington!” shouted Wayne. “Look Aunty Pat!”
The piss poor day-glo spectre dangling in front of them looked like it had been picked up from a clearance sale at a costume shop.
“Yes, it’s a skeleton,” said Jimmy.
“What? Is there another one? Oh wow, Jimmy, this is so scary, I almost forgot we got a real dead body with us.”
“Shut up. Now, look. You see that pink demon thing against the wall up ahead?”
“Where?”
“There! I—” Jimmy jumped up, stepped out of the practically crawling carriage and hit a red and yellow electrical knock-off switch he’d spotted on the wall. The car stopped dead. The pink light over the demon went out and they were in utter darkness.
“Ooh, it’s really scary now,” whimpered Wayne in a little boy’s voice.
“Let me…” Jimmy fumbled out his phone and switched it to torch mode.
“And I think I’ve sat in something wet,” said Wayne. “Did I wet myself?”
Maybe he had. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe vital fluids – formerly vital fluids – were leaking out of Mrs Skipworth and across the seat. Jimmy didn’t want to think about it.
By torchlight, he pulled the woollen hat and the blanket off the corpse. Its escaped stink enveloped him. For a moment, the insanity of the situation took hold of him and he began to panic. Then, from his mind cave, a tentacle of brutal emotionless certainty soothed that panic away. They had done terrible things, crossed legal and moral lines, and now this was the world they inhabited. One where hiding a decomposing granny in a ghost train was both normal and necessary.
“Over there. Go Wayne!”
Wayne clanked out of the carriage and hauled the dead body with him. He carried her over to the wall where the rubbish pink demon leered, above a set of prison bars through which a bunch of mediocre zombies reached out for liberation, or brains, or whatever zombies craved. Wayne manhandled the corpse round the bars and arranged her so that she had an arm poking out through the bars with the other zombies.
He beamed proudly at Jimmy. “I could do this Jimmy! I could make ghost train rides for a job, look!”
“Come on,” urged Jimmy. “Hurry up and get back in!”
Wayne clanked over towards the carriage and tried to climb back in, but Jimmy could see he was having trouble.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The metal thing is caugh— Aaaargh!” Wayne howled.
Jimmy jumped out of the carriage to take a look. To his horror he saw Wayne’s metal leg brace was crushed between the metal carriage wheel and the rails.
“Crap! How did you manage that? Look, we’ll pull when it moves again, yeah?”
“Moves?”
Jimmy twisted the key in the knock-off switch. The mood lighting came back as the carriage trundled into life. Jimmy shoved Wayne, hauling on his waist. He came free, although the bellowing sound coming from him was far from appreciative.
Something crunched. Wayne fell into the carriage and onto his seat. Jimmy climbed in behind. “Now act natural.”
“I’ve put my hands in the wet stuff!” said Wayne.
As the carriage pulled through the hanging plastic and wooden doors of the exit and back into sunlight, Jimmy was already concocting his explanation to the ride attendant. How there were suddenly only two of them; how Aunty Pat had decided to go on the Waltzer instead. Walked off without her scooter? Yeah, she did have sudden bursts of energy…
Jimmy looked up at the teenage attendant. There were no questions, no claims they’d gone on without supervision. The lad just gave them a single chin-tutting nod of acknowledgement and let Jimmy do all the hard work getting Wayne out of the carriage again.
Wayne flopped onto the scooter seat. All the excitement and exercise seemed to have brought some life and focus back to his expression. “I feel funny, Jimmy,” the useless lump said.
Jimmy looked at Wayne’s foot brace. It was a funny shape now. Whereas before the metal was generally round, it was definitely squashed into an elliptical shape, and the flesh was kind of squeezing out of the metal bits.
“My leg hurts. You got any painkillers?”
“Sure thing, man,” said Jimmy and passed him the box of Tic Tacs. “Knock yourself out.”
Wayne downed two. “They’re minty.”
“Funny that.”
36
Sam dropped off Delia and her new pet turkeys at her home, a small detached house next to the large Otterside Retirement Village. The front garden was overgrown and appeared to be producing a large crop of plastic garden toys. A ride-along Little Tike car lay in the long grass. A stubby plastic slide leaned out of an untended hedge.
“Least the turkeys will have some entertainment,” said Sam, nodding.
“They’ll be in the back garden. Do turkeys eat grass?”
“Thinking it’ll save on buying turkey food?”
“Thinking it will save having to buy a new lawnmower.” She put a hand on Sam’s arm. “There’ll be a rational explanation.”
“You can probably look it up on the internet,” said Sam.
“I meant about the woman. Mrs…?”
“Skipworth.”
“Right. Don’t let it get to you.”
Delia got out and proceeded to the front door. Sam mulled over what Delia had said. She was absolutely right. That didn’t stop her driving straight from Delia’s house and round to the police station on Park Avenue.
She parked in a spot that only a Piaggio could fit in and went inside to the front desk. The police officer at the desk nodded in greeting.
“Is Sergeant Hackett in?” asked Sam.
The woman frowned. “Perhaps I can help.”
Sam produced her company ID card. “DefCon4. I want to talk to Cesar about a break-in I was called to earlier.”
The woman’s eyebrows rose as though it was deeply implausible anyone would seek Cesar Hackett out for any reason, but she picked up a phone and dialled. “Yep. Someone at front desk to see you. A—” she gestured for Sam’s ID again “—Sam Applewhite. Applewhite, like the magician. Uh-huh.”
She hung up. A minute later, Cesar appeared through the security door, his seal-bitten hand still wrapped in a dressing. “Sam. Just in time. You can help me with something.”
“Er, sure.”
He led her through the building. The police sta
tion was a cube of pebble-dashed concrete, odd but boring. They continued the odd but boring theme going inside. There were grey carpet tiles which looked like they had been installed half a century ago. There were grey polystyrene ceiling tiles almost exactly the same shade. It gave Sam the uncomfortable impression that gravity could reverse at any moment and life would go on uninterrupted in the upside down building. It made her want to hold onto something for support.
The journey from the front desk to Cesar’s was long and circuitous. They eventually wound up in an office space barely wider than a corridor, tucked between the boiler room and the station gym. The plate on the door said Peripheral Duties. On a wonky desk looking like it had been reclaimed from a skip there was a computer, a kettle and a missing cat poster with a blank central area with the words insert picture of missing cat here written in biro.
“Someone’s cat gone missing?” said Sam.
“Has it?” said Cesar.
“No. I’m asking.”
He looked at the poster. “No, that’s just the template. All missing cats. They come through this office.”
“In search of rats?”
Cesar frowned and then said, “No, I mean the paperwork.”
“I know. I was being facetious. I wouldn’t have thought the police would show much interest in missing cats.”
“You’d be surprised what work I get involved in.”
Sam didn’t know how long Cesar had been working in Skegness, or where the force had posted him earlier in his career, but there was something about the pokey office, the cat poster, the vague Peripheral Duties nameplate on the door, and her limited understanding of Cesar’s skillset that made her wonder what his precise function was within the Lincolnshire Police. If she was to hazard a guess, and it would be a cruel guess, she would imagine he had been put here, out of the way, where he could do minimal damage and be safely forgotten.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Indeed we do,” he said and put the kettle on. It rattled noisily as it began to heat. “We need a cup of tea if you’re going to help me.” He pulled a sheet from his drawer. “Third round competition,” he said.
