DYING EMBERS an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  Siân’s mother was not pleased to see Geri.

  ‘I was wondering how Siân is,’ Geri said, feeling an unfamiliar nervousness.

  ‘Right enough, given what happened.’

  Mrs Walsh folded her arms and planted her feet apart. She was a tall woman, heavyset, with dark unruly eyebrows and a flat, broad face. Geri could only imagine that Siân got her fey, delicate looks from her father’s side of the family.

  ‘Could I see her, d’you think?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think—’ She shoved her face into Geri’s. ‘I think she’s in enough bother on account of you.’

  ‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding,’ Geri began.

  ‘That’s the trouble with lasses like you — too much thinking, not enough common sense.’

  ‘Mum!’ It was Siân. Even in the shadows of the hallway, Geri could see she was ghostly pale. The girl hurried to the door, elbowing a place on the top step, clearly embarrassed by her mother’s rudeness. The bruising on her face had turned greenish and the scratches were scabbed and beginning to heal, but if anything, she looked worse than she had done on Monday. ‘It’s not her fault!’ she protested. ‘She helped me sort it out!’

  ‘Sort it? Bringing police to my door?’

  Geri lost her patience. ‘Would you prefer it if I’d left a man to die?’

  ‘He attacked my daughter!’

  ‘He was afraid — they both were. But I’d say he came off worse.’

  ‘That what you think is it?’ Mrs Walsh was red in the face. ‘You want your head testing, you do. Taking a young lass to a place like that.’

  Siân began protesting that she had gone on her own, and Geri interrupted. ‘I’m leaving. I’m glad you’re feeling better, Siân, and—’ She touched the girl’s hand briefly. ‘I’m truly sorry about Ryan. He was a lovely lad. And I know he loved you.’

  Siân’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Get that from your Ouija board, did you?’ Mrs Walsh asked.

  Geri turned and walked away, her nerves jangling; her limbs felt out of her control and she had to concentrate just to keep upright.

  ‘Kids need protecting from the likes of you!’ Mrs Walsh shouted. ‘Call yourself a Catholic!’

  Geri got to the car with Mrs Walsh’s insults ringing in her ears; as she pulled away from the kerb a car horn blared and she slammed on the brakes, catapulting forward and hitting her head on the windscreen.

  The driver of the other car tapped his temple and drove off, leaving her stalled. Her face burning, and her head beginning to throb, Geri willed herself not to look round at Mrs Walsh, but as she restarted the engine and drove off, she caught a glimpse of her in the mirror, meaty arms still folded across her chest, standing on the path outside her house, a look of gleeful malice on her face.

  It hadn’t taken long for word to get around about Mrs Connelly’s visit to the spiritualist church. And it hadn’t taken much persuasion for Mrs Walsh to label her irresponsible. She was sure that that, too, would soon be spread via the school grapevine. Rumours and gossip like these could finish her teaching career at St Michael’s.

  Dispirited, Geri returned home, vowing not to have anything to do with any controversy from that moment on. She was hoovering to keep herself from thinking, when she heard something above the insistent whine of the machine. The phone must have been ringing for some time. Geri dropped the vacuum-cleaner hose and ran to her study.

  ‘Miss?’ It was a girl’s voice.

  ‘Miss Simpson speaking,’ Geri said, slightly out of breath.

  ‘Will you meet me?’

  ‘Is that Siân?’

  ‘At the bus stop. Derby Street.’

  ‘No!’ Geri exclaimed. ‘No way! Siân, you can’t go there.’

  ‘Okay,’ the girl said, stubborn, perhaps a little fearful. ‘I’ll go on my own.’

  Geri couldn’t believe she was pulling the same stunt that she had on Monday. ‘You heard what your mother said,’ she protested. ‘Anyway, it’s getting dark. Leave it till tomorrow, then we’ll talk about it.’ No answer. Geri groaned. ‘This is a bad idea.’ Bad idea? Geri Simpson, you’ve a genius for understatement. But how could she leave Siân to do this alone? She spoke into the silence at the other end of the line: ‘Derby Street . . . When?’

  ‘Ten minutes. I’m on the bus, now.’

  Geri ran out to her car still pulling on her coat. Siân was waiting for her when she arrived, hollow-eyed and sickly, wearing her uniform dark-coloured long dress and coat and carrying a bunch of flowers. She looked like a mourner at a funeral. In a sense, she was. The girl cut a macabre figure, standing by the deserted roadway. Her sombre clothing absorbed what little light there was, so that her body merged into the blank wall of the warehouse, and her face seemed to hover, disembodied in the darkness. If Geri hadn’t been expecting to see her, Siân’s sudden appearance out of the shadows would have given her a jolt.

  Geri reached across and opened the passenger door.

  ‘What changed your mind?’ Geri asked as she moved away from the kerb.

  Siân glanced at her, puzzled.

  ‘You didn’t intend to phone me, did you? You obviously left it till the last minute.’

  She shrugged; what was the point in lying? ‘I was going to go anyway,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t want to give you the chance to change my mind.’

  * * *

  He had returned to the terrace again. The place drew him. Bee to a honeypot, he thought. His heart rate quickened; Ryan was so . . . beautiful. It was easier to remember what they had shared together when he was here, outside the place where it happened. He recalled running his fingers through the boy’s hair — the silky sensation of those soft, glorious curls — the warmth of Ryan’s scalp under his hands. Gently — he was always gentle, and even at the last, he made sure Ryan felt no pain — he showed the boy what he wanted, and Ryan, because he had no choice, had submitted. That was what he had relished most, the submission.

  A car rumbled along the cobbled side street leading to the cul-de-sac where he stood.

  ‘Shit!’ He ran for cover, furious at the interruption, moving instinctively into the shadows. Police patrol? He thought they had packed up their little circus days ago. What then — ghouls?

  * * *

  Geri drew up outside the artisans’ cottages and turned off the engine. A fleeting glimpse of something caught her eye, then was gone. The darkness, the silence and the dereliction of the streets seemed to crowd in on them and shroud the car in a sinister pall.

  Siân looked at the flowers in her lap.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ Her voice sounded too loud, unnatural after the silence, in which only the tick of the cooling engine could be heard.

  Siân shook her head. ‘I want to go alone.’

  The interior light flashed on as she stepped out of the car, and the figure hiding behind a low wall had a clear view of the driver. That bloody woman! What did he have to do to get her out of his life?

  13

  Lauren was nearing the end of her Sunday shift. By rights she shouldn’t have been on overnight duty, but one of her colleagues had called in sick, and she had got a call asking if she could fill in. She had been busy: a drugs overdose — this one had let them get an ambulance to her; a woman needing help to get away from her violent husband. Then an old man, worried he was wasting her time, sick with loneliness since the death of his wife. Four in the morning was the toughest time for dealing with the myriad ways in which humankind could be unhappy.

  Someone handed her a coffee and she took it gratefully. Around her, their voices muted by the walls of the cubicles, rose the soft murmur of her colleagues, consoling, reassuring, gently probing, drawing out the misery of the callers, helping them to work out the next step, sometimes trying to persuade them that it needn’t be suicide. There were no quick-fix solutions, no instant remedies, but for some a first step was an alternative to continuing terror, or guilt, or fear — of dying, or of living.
r />   Her phone rang and she picked it up. ‘Samaritans, can I help?’

  Silence, then, ‘Don’t know why I’m phoning.’

  Male? Teenage? He sounded truculent, tearful.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you, and we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘You won’t be able to help.’

  ‘Sometimes just talking helps.’

  She heard a sigh at the other end of the line.

  ‘My name is Lauren,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have to give you my name, do I?’ He sounded panicked.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to. But I’m here to listen.’ She waited, not wanting to spook him again with the wrong question.

  ‘I don’t know what to do . . .’ His voice rose, and she sensed he was fighting tears again. ‘I think he killed Ryan.’

  Lauren felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. ‘Ryan . . .’ she said, neutrally. She had seen the name in the logbook. An anonymous caller. Ryan Connelly’s death was no accident, the caller had said. Ryan Connelly was the boy from Geri’s school, the one who had died in a fire, stoned on solvents.

  ‘It was in the papers,’ the boy said.

  ‘Ryan Connelly.’

  ‘Yeah, Ryan. Only — I think he knows. He keeps looking at me like he knows.’ He was slurring his words a little, perhaps because he was so upset, but Lauren thought it more likely he was drunk, or high on something.

  ‘Someone knows that you suspect him?’ she asked. She heard a whimper that could have been a yes. ‘What makes you think he killed Ryan?’

  ‘The stuff he’s into. Look, I’m not making this up.’

  ‘No,’ Lauren agreed. ‘I don’t think you are.’ She paused and when he didn’t continue, she asked, ‘Have you thought of taking this to the police?’

  ‘No! You don’t understand!’

  She sensed she was losing him, that he would hang up at any moment. ‘Perhaps you can help me to understand.’

  She heard him breathing hard, trying to get himself under control. ‘They wouldn’t believe me. Not with him. The others’ll back him up. They’ll do whatever he says.’

  ‘Are they afraid of him?’

  ‘They should be. Bastard Georgie.’ There was a lengthy pause. ‘Look,’ he went on at last. ‘It’s hard to explain. He comes over as okay most of the time, but he’s got this way of looking at you . . .’

  Lauren saw what he meant. He couldn’t go to the police on the basis of an uncomfortable feeling and a funny look.

  ‘What do you feel you should do?’ she asked. Maybe he knew already but was afraid to go ahead and do it.

  ‘I just needed to tell someone.’ He hung up.

  * * *

  Lauren lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Nick and Geri had left for work an hour earlier. She had managed to avoid both of them, and had fallen into bed exhausted, but was unable to sleep. She tried telling herself that she was a professional, that she had done her best and she had to let it go, but that didn’t help.

  In her early days, just after her probationary period, she’d had a call from a woman — she called herself Vicky — who was convinced that her husband was sexually abusing her two little girls. She didn’t know what to do.

  Lauren wanted to scream at her, ‘Get them out of there. Get them away from him!’ Instead she had spoken calmly, rationally, in that neutral tone she had worked so hard to perfect. She drew Vicky out, got her to say how she felt about it, listening carefully and summarizing what she had told her, trying to help Vicky understand that what she had told Lauren in essence was that she wanted out.

  They would get so far, Lauren would think that she had made the breakthrough, then Vicky would say, ‘But he’s a good man, really he is.’ or, ‘What would we do for money?’ and the discussion would take a new turn.

  Vicky would hang up when she least expected it, sometimes mid-sentence.

  It went on like that for two or three months. Vicky refused any suggestion that she could talk to another Samaritan, that she could call any time — could even have a face-to-face interview: she only wanted to talk to Lauren. She phoned when Lauren was on duty, and Lauren spent the intervening hours and days with a burning dread in the pit of her stomach for the two girls. She would see children in the city centre, at the library, in the park. Walking with Daddy, holding his hand, and she would wonder is that them? She would look for signs, agonising, torturing herself with the notion that she might have walked past the two girls, might have stamped their books at the issues desk at the library, and never known. It would obsess her until the next telephone call.

  Lauren began to suspect that Vicky was gaining some perverse pleasure from the situation, that she was enjoying her undivided attention, perhaps in some twisted way revelling in the drama of her predicament, in her status as the wronged wife. Then, without warning, the phone calls stopped. Lauren was almost mad with worry. She checked the log feverishly as soon as she got in each week for her stint on the phone lines, but there was no record of Vicky having spoken to anyone else. Lauren asked her mentor for help. She remembered pacing the floor of one of the private consultation rooms while Julia, her counsellor, tried to persuade her to sit down, to calm herself.

  ‘How can I? How can I be calm? It’s been weeks, Julia — what’s happening to those little girls?’

  ‘You can’t think like that, Lauren. You’ll never survive if you think like that.’

  Lauren stopped and turned to Julia. ‘I can’t eat. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since she started calling. Why the hell doesn’t she call?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s made her decision.’

  Lauren clenched her fists in frustration. ‘But what is it? Has she decided to stay with the bastard? Has she left? What’s happening, Julia? I need to know.’

  Julia was quiet, but firm. ‘We have to hope that she’s made the right decision.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But it’s not ours to make for her. And she doesn’t owe us an explanation. We’re not here to make ourselves feel better, Lauren.’

  Lauren had used those same words in guiding new Samaritans. Sometimes they could stomach it, sometimes not. The impossibility of following through was the hardest thing for people to adjust to in their work as Samaritans.

  A boy, probably one of Geri’s pupils, was convinced that Ryan Connelly had been murdered; he was terrified that the killer would turn on him. And Lauren could do nothing about it. She couldn’t even tell Geri. She had written up the call in the log, of course, and spoken to the duty manager, but when it came down to facts, all they had was a nameless boy who was making unsubstantiated claims. They could only hope he called back.

  14

  Few people at the spiritualist meeting would have recognized Agnes Hepple as she was dressed on Monday evening. She wore a low-cut burgundy dress, false nails painted a shade or two darker than the dress, and her eyes were subtly made up in the sludgy greens and greys she knew would not emphasise the fine lacework of wrinkles that had gathered on her upper eyelids in the last few years. Her lipstick was chosen to match her dress and applied to emphasise the fullness of her lips.

  It had taken her just forty minutes to apply, file, varnish and buff her new nails when she had arrived home last Thursday, £250 better off than when she had walked into the musty hall in Erskine Street. It was good money, and worth the ‘voluntary’ £50 donation to the church, which she knew would guarantee her an invitation later in the year. Mediumship was her vocation, but there weren’t many who made a living out of it, and she didn’t get a booking every week, so she relied for her regular income on her work as a beautician.

  Agnes could do anything from a manicure to a complete make-over, and she was equally at home with glamour or the natural look.

  She finished the last coat of gloss on her client’s right hand and splayed her fingers out under the drier.

  ‘Your fella won’t know you, chuck,’ she said, smiling. Her
voice was earthy, with a definite nasal Mancunian tone, quite unlike the high, childlike trill she adopted for psychic consultations.

  The girl admired her long, painted fingernails under the infra-red lamp, comparing them with the finished and hardened left hand. Her real nails were weak and bitten to the quick, and Agnes knew that she’d need regular maintenance to keep them looking nice. This one would be one of her frequent fliers, she thought with satisfaction.

  The little bell over the door tinkled merrily as someone came in. Agnes caught his reflection in the mirror but continued talking to the girl.

  ‘You’ll have to mind how you do things with them — ’specially things like getting your tights on.’

  ‘I’ve always found getting them off is the hard bit,’ the man said, with a wicked grin.

  The girl blushed, not sure whether to feel insulted or flattered.

  ‘You want to try a more subtle approach,’ Agnes said. The girl glanced at the man in the mirror, then away, disconcerted by his appraising stare.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ she said, then after checking the positioning of her client’s hand once more, she, swung her chair around to face the newcomer. ‘What can I do for you, sweetheart?’ she asked.

  It was six short weeks since he had first come into her salon, introducing himself as a local businessman.

  ‘Oh,’ she had said, measuring him up. He didn’t look like a hairdressing sales rep. ‘What’s your line?’

  ‘Erotica.’ It was the twinkle that had hooked her. That twinkle could win your heart or break it right in two.

  Since then, he’d become a regular visitor. Agnes had to admit, he was easy on the eye, and she didn’t pull away when he placed his hands on her upper arms and slid them slowly, sensuously up to her shoulders. He swivelled the chair so that she had her back to him, then began massaging her neck. Agnes stifled a groan of pleasure and her client stared hard at her hand under the lamp, willing the nails to dry.