The Night Caller: An utterly gripping crime thriller

by J. M. Hewitt

  ‘I thought,’ Emma went on, ‘if something happened to my son that I would feel it, right here.’ She banged on her breastbone, thumped so hard that Jade winced.

  She knew what Emma meant, though. She thought about Nia, how it would feel if she lost her. Just imagining it was enough to bring a hollow feeling to her belly. She didn’t say it; she didn’t want to remind Emma that she still had her own child, safely asleep – Jade hoped – upstairs.

  Emma’s hair, usually a sleek, straightened, glossy brown bob looked unkempt and oily. Her hazel eyes, normally sparkling with laughter, were lost.

  ‘But I didn’t know, did I?’ Emma went on, her voice rising an octave, nearing the hysteria that Jade had heard through the walls.

  Emma’s hands ripped at a tissue she held, worrying at it in her lap. Suddenly she tilted her head back and drew in three long, jagged breaths. Jade’s tears spilled over as Emma tried to speak, her words cut off by breathless sobs. Jade pulled her into an embrace, shocked at how tight Emma held onto her, her fingers digging into her shoulders.

  Emma drew away, and spotting a packet of cigarettes on the coffee table she shuffled forward, fumbled with the packet. Gently Jade took them from her, slipped one out, lit it and held it towards her friend.

  Emma stared at the glowing tip, and like a mother feeding her child, Jade moved to sit beside her, slipped the filter between her dry, chapped lips. She sucked and Jade blinked back tears as the smoke swirled around her.

  ‘I thought if something ever happened to him, my heart would fracture, at the exact moment that his stopped beating.’ Emma inhaled, blew a plume of smoke to the ceiling. ‘But I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’

  Jade retreated back to her chair, lowered her face, hid from Emma’s gaze behind her white-blonde mane of hair.

  Three

  THE NIGHT OF THE PUSH

  ‘Jordan,’ Emma called for her son, waited the requisite twenty seconds, and shouted again. ‘Jordan! Come here.’

  He wandered in, winding his scarf around his neck at the same time as he picked up his keys and iPhone.

  He didn’t acknowledge her. He barely gave her a glance as he held the long end of the scarf between his teeth and plucked his coat off the back of the door, shoving his things in the pocket.

  She wound the scarf round his neck for him. Taking advantage of his hands being busy elsewhere, she grabbed his face and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  He pulled away at the same time as rubbing his face on the scarf. ‘What did you want, anyway?’

  Somewhere in the back of her mind she buried deep her hurt at the rebuke, the fact that he never let her touch him anymore. She drew him over to the table, moved the sandwich she’d been eating and, still clutching his hand, pointed at the newspaper.

  ‘Look, someone else has been killed, pushed into the canal.’ He pulled away again. A little flower of panic bloomed in Emma’s chest. ‘No, wait, they’re targeting boys, young men, just like you, Jordan. I know you go down to the bars by the canal, promise me you’ll stay in a group, you won’t walk home alone, you won’t—’

  He stared unblinkingly at her. ‘They’re not targeting young men. These guys,’ he interrupted her, flicking his hand over the picture of the youth that stared out of the page, ‘these guys are queers, faggots—’

  ‘Jordan!’ Emma stared at him, aghast, the worry that had been biting turning into anger. ‘Don’t you dare call them that, that’s not how I bloody well raised you.’

  He lowered his face, his fringe of jet-black hair falling across his eyes. From what she could see of them they were dark, expressionless.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ he said, eventually. ‘These men being pushed, they’re… gay. And I’m not.’ He swept his hair back off his face before shoving his hands into his pockets.

  Emma sighed. Moving towards him she picked up the end of the scarf as another memory caught her.

  ‘This looks silly,’ she said.

  They both looked down at it, the Armani scarf that had been the first piece of designer clothing he’d bought himself when he had started work. It was black, thick-ribbed, classy and cool, but through the centre of it, entwined in the material and running the whole length of the scarf, was a long, disjointed strip of lime green wool. It looked like it had been crudely sewn in there by a child. It looked like that because it had been.

  ‘I thought you’d be so mad when you found out what Nia had done,’ Emma said, biting her lip at the recollection.

  * * *

  It was last winter when Jade had popped over with her then three-year-old daughter. Both of them treated Emma’s house like their own, so as Jade and Emma opened a lunchtime bottle of wine, they didn’t pay any attention to how quiet Nia was being.

  ‘Look, I made Jordan a present!’ she lisped as she came in, trailing the scarf behind her, pushing her hair out of her eyes with one hand, a crochet hook clutched in the other. ‘We’ve been learning croching at school.’

  ‘Crocheting,’ corrected Jade absently. And then, ‘What is… oh, no, Nia!’

  Emma wrenched the scarf from the little girl’s hands, exchanging a horrified glance with Jade.

  ‘NIA!’ shouted Jade, and her daughter immediately burst into noisy tears.

  A shadow fell as Jordan appeared in the doorway before stepping over to Nia and picking her up.

  ‘I-I j-j-ust wanted t-to make you a p-p-present!’ Nia screamed, opening her lungs fully at both the injustice she faced and her new, willing audience.

  Emma held out the scarf, waited for his explosion. With his hand he took it, held it up.

  ‘Did you do this, Ny-ny?’ he asked.

  ‘A present… f-for y-you,’ she hiccoughed, tucking her puce-coloured face into his shoulder.

  Jade and Emma didn’t even breathe.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Nia,’ Jordan said, throwing a glare at his mother. ‘Thank you, I’ll wear it always.’

  Nia’s eyes, a blue that matched those of her mother, peeped out from behind her blonde curls. Those too came from her mum, but were far more unruly than Jade’s carefully tamed hair.

  A stunned silence from the two grown-ups as Jordan wrapped the scarf, green wool and all, around both of their necks. As he walked out of the room with Nia still in his arms, Emma and Jade exhaled.

  * * *

  ‘I liked it, I still like it, that little girl…’ his mouth twitched in an almost-smile, just for a single, blink-and-you-miss-it moment before the look was gone. He regarded his mother, an expression on his face now that she couldn’t fathom at all.

  ‘Hey,’ Emma said sharply. ‘Will you call me when you’re finished at the pub? I’ll come down, meet you, walk home with you.’ The newspaper distracted her, and she pulled it towards her, looked at it again. ‘This man, this… this Gary, he was twenty-three!’ she cried, ‘and a big guy.’ She squinted at the photo, her heart catching as she thought of this Gary’s mother, sitting somewhere, probably right here in Manchester, looking at the same picture in the same paper of her dead son. ‘Just be careful, and call me,’ she said.

  Jordan didn’t reply. When she looked up, she saw that he had already gone.

  * * *

  Emma wandered around her house, lost, worrying. Did the concern for your child ever end, she wondered. She had nobody she could ask, no friends who had a child of her own son’s age.

  Briefly, she contemplated whether she’d given him too much freedom growing up, but that had been a conscious decision, never to stifle her son. She had given him the liberty and trust that had always been refused to her by her own parents.

  She’d never denied him alcohol, always allowing him a small glass at Christmas and then, when he was seventeen, offering him a beer on the weekend when she would chill out with a glass of wine. The same went for cigarettes. She never hid her own smoking from him, and when she thought she detected the smell of smoke on him in high school, she sat him down and offered him one of hers.

  ‘If you
’re going to smoke, I’d rather you didn’t hide it from me,’ she had said.

  He declined.

  ‘It stinks, and it gets in my hair and in the curtains and carpets and both of our clothes.’ He frowned at her holding the packet, folded his arms.

  She had smothered a smile of relief, ignored the little voice inside her head that whispered, are teenage boys supposed to be concerned about cigarette smoke in the curtains and carpets? And she made a pact to herself not to smoke in the house anymore.

  Emma had been sixteen when she had him, determined not to be seen as a statistic, but as good a mum as any of those career-minded thirty-somethings who stood next to her at the school gates. It hadn’t been easy. For a long time, she’d worked three jobs. A cleaner, a cashier and the late-night stint in the bookies over the road. The night job had been genius. It was opposite Emma’s house, and her friend Tina who lived a few houses down also worked there. Both their boys were the same age, both were single mums and they would bundle them into one bed and go to work, the baby monitor that they’d gone halves on from Argos under the counter. If either of the boys made a sound they would take turns in popping back home.

  Emma snorted a laugh: you couldn’t do it these days. Social Services would be knocking on the door before you could say the words ‘bad mother’.

  These days life was easier. Emma only had one job as a receptionist at the local walk-in medical centre. It was nine-to-five, paid well, and she enjoyed it. Still the worry about her son remained.

  Sighing, restless, she made herself sit down, getting her rituals in place for a night in alone. Chocolate, wine and Sleepless in Seattle on the RomCom channel. Emma half-watched, having seen the film countless times before, when the newspaper, still open on the article about dead Gary, caught her eye on the table. She picked it up again, the now familiar horror growing as she read the article once more.

  Gary Fisher, 23, is the latest victim to be pulled from the network of Manchester canals. Mr Fisher, a builder from Beswick, was on a night out with pals when he got separated from them. His friend, Finlay, told The Star that at closing time they left together, walking as a group down Deansgate when they realised Gary was no longer with them.

  Three weeks later, Fisher’s body was pulled from the Bridgewater Canal. CCTV has showed someone who may be Gary walking alongside a mystery man, who has yet to be traced.

  Gary is the twelfth body to be pulled from the Manchester waterways in the last six years. His death is currently being treated as unexplained.

  ‘Unexplained, bollocks,’ she whispered to herself as she stared at Gary’s photo.

  It was perfectly explicable in Emma’s eyes. There was a nutter out there, a killer, someone who took pleasure in ending the lives of men who had barely started living. Men who – if the rumours were to be believed – were homosexual. The word on the street was that the police knew this, but were keeping a low profile on it. Vigilante action or mass panic was the last thing they needed.

  Realising that the credits of the film were rolling over Jimmy Durante crooning ‘As Time Goes By’, Emma slipped the newspaper down the side of the sofa and switched to the local news, turning the volume down so it was nothing more than background noise.

  10p.m. At least another hour until Jordan even thought of coming home. She wondered who he was with tonight. Old uni mates, or work buddies, perhaps, maybe even a girl. She wished she knew for sure. Twisting in her chair, she turned back to the television.

  It was the scene behind the reporter that made her sit up. The Matchstick Man, the pub on the quay that was popular with young people, framed the woman on the television. Emma leaned forward in her chair, watching the place, only a few hundred yards away from her own home, musing at how different it looked in the winter moonlight; eerie, the dark sky whitened somehow by the semi-permanent mist that seemed to hang in the riverside air.

  The camera had cut back to the studio, the local weather report now on, the canal scene gone. Emma blinked, a half-thought of something not quite right forming in her mind as she thought back to the reporter on the quayside. Sweat pricked her underarms. She hit the rewind button on the Sky controller and hit play. Clutching the remote to her chest she moved up to the screen. Still she didn’t listen to the reporter. With narrowed eyes she looked past her, to the black metal railings that separated the path from the water, and she pressed pause.

  There, draped over the fence, clearly visible in the cameraman’s light, was a scarf. And it wasn’t just any scarf. It was black, but running all the way through the length of it was a strip of lime green wool.

  Emma breathed out, a jagged, harsh hiss. It was loud in the silence of the room.

  She rewound the programme again, listened this time to the woman.

  ‘… following eyewitness accounts that an incident took place and a man went into the South Bay section of the canal earlier this evening…’

  It was rhythmic now, rewind, play, listen, rewind, play, listen, over and over, Emma alternating between giving her attention to the woman reporter and scanning the shot behind her. The scarf, limply hanging, made her feel slightly nauseous each time her gaze landed on it.

  Finally, she hit the power button. The subsequent silence and darkness of the room propelled her into action. She grabbed her mobile, scrolled through to his number. The heat left her body with each ring that went unanswered until she was ice-cold all over.

  She flung the phone onto the chair, tried to think straight. Jordan would hate it if she turned up at the Quays in front of his mates, but for once she didn’t care. She would fetch the scarf, she decided. Poke her head into the pubs by the water. Once she’d seen him, she would come home, safe in the knowledge that he wasn’t involved somehow in this ‘incident’, as the reporter called it.

  Flicking the electric fire off, Emma moved through the house, gathering up her coat and keys. Going back into the living room she picked her mobile up from the chair and slipped it into her pocket.

  She heard the car then, in the silence of the house. Rolling down the usually quiet street, travelling down Riverside Drive – her road – and she froze.

  Emma closed her eyes.

  Keep going, keep driving. She didn’t know if she thought it or spoke it, but like a child she held her breath, crossed her fingers inside her pockets.

  The car engine idled outside before the noise faded and all was quiet once more.

  Emma moved across the room to the window, drew the curtain back and stared out. Her breath caught in her throat, she dropped the curtain, backed up to the corner of the room until the wall stopped her.

  The sound of a car door, two doors, the soft thump of them closing.

  Emma remained where she stood, still with her hands in her pockets, still hardly breathing.

  When the knock came it shattered everything.

  Four

  THE NIGHT OF THE PUSH

  Carrie spotted Paul who was still in his car, the interior light bathing him in a glow as he surveyed the canal. She dodged around the crowds, opened the passenger side door and slid in.

  ‘This is too soon.’ He spoke as soon as she got in, not taking his eyes off the scene. ‘The latest one only just hit the news, and now this?’

  Carrie nodded. ‘I don’t want anyone leaving here, I want names, witnesses, who saw what and when. We need to get as much information as we possibly can, even if it seems insignificant, I want to know about it.’

  She wanted to close her eyes at the scene in front of her; the flashing blues, the lights, the people. No matter how many times she was called to the water, the shock, woven through with anger, never abated. She looked at Paul’s profile beside her. What had he been doing when the call came in? Had he been in bed, in the shower or at the late-night gym she imagined he frequented? His naturally tanned skin glowed under the fluorescent blue lights that shone into the car. As she stared, she realised how little she knew him, despite their working together for years. He was slightly younger than her,
twenty-five to her twenty-eight. Had he left a partner at home to come out into the late night? Carrie found she was saddened slightly that she gave so little of herself; it discouraged her colleagues from sharing too.

  Paul made a move to jump out of the car. Carrie almost reached for his arm, then pulled back, saying, ‘Wait.’ Paul looked at her. ‘Nobody leaves the waterside.’ She swallowed against the panic that pushed in her throat, back to work now, nostalgia and regret for things she hadn’t done shoved aside. ‘Eyes everywhere, okay?’

  With a small nod and a flash of deep brown eyes he was gone.

  Carrie got out of the car, watching Paul as he began to push the crowd back with the help of the uniforms already on the scene. He moved with speed and urgency, just like he knew she wanted. Already he had his notebook out, confronting bystanders, all the while watching for those who tried to move past, catching a hold of their arm, throwing them a smile which suggested they were important and needed and had nothing to fear by talking with him.

  Confident that he would find her if he gleaned anything of importance, Carrie made her way to the edge of the canal. Not a ripple in sight, much less any evidence of the splash that a body would have made. She looked around, her eyes lingering on the stragglers who had not yet moved behind the cordon. Moving back to Paul’s car she quickly divested herself of her high visibility coat that she had thrown on out of habit over her own jacket. Moving confidently now that she blended in, she moved into the crowd to mingle among the public.

  She stood among the onlookers in a shadowy corner near to the spot where it had happened. From there, she watched, studying every face, every movement. She looked for a nudge between mates or men, a smirk, a person who emanated a cool and calm exterior, or someone who slipped away while trying to remain unnoticed. They would be the people to speak to. To pounce on, to question.