by Jack Benton
He read over the list of names Croad had provided. It didn’t surprise him not to find Ellie among them; he had long surmised that her position at Vincent’s was an unofficial one. In order to hunt the man he had seen with the sheep carcass, he needed to add faces. He could get no WiFi signal in the cottage so he put his old laptop in a bag and headed up to the community hall.
He was just reaching the brow of the hill when his phone rang. Two rings, then it hung off. The number was unrecognised, so Slim called back.
‘Yeah? What do you want?’
Kev. Borderline hostile but lacking the same conviction as when he had been with Jimmy.
‘It’s Slim Hardy. Do you remember me? You nearly kicked my arse.’
‘Um, yeah, well—’
‘Look, I don’t care about what happened. I just want to know more about something you said.’
‘I didn’t say nothing. Jimmy did all the talking.’
‘Yeah, you did. When I asked about Dennis Sharp’s old car in the woods, you said—’
The phone line went dead. Slim stared at his phone, suspecting the battery, but his old Nokia still had a couple of bars. Kev had just hung up.
Slim called back. Kev answered on the fourth ring.
‘Sorry, I just—’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I don’t want … I mean—’
‘Just tell me. I’m not going to go snitch to Jimmy, or tell any of your mates. I just want to know what you were going to say about that old car.’
Kev sighed. ‘Look, I was drunk. It was one of those kid things. We all went down there, chugged some Diamond White, whatever. The boys dared me to go sit in there.’
‘The car?’
‘Yeah. The front seat. Driver’s side.’
‘And you did?’
‘Yeah, course. I ain’t no wimp. The boys waited by the road. It was afternoon, like, wasn’t proper dark. I could see the boys cheering me on so I wasn’t scared.’
‘And so you got in the car?’
‘Look, if you tell anyone about this—’
‘I won’t.’
‘I don’t want no one saying I was a wuss because I weren’t.’
‘I know you weren’t.’
There was a long pause. Slim looked at his phone, but the call was still live. He wondered if Kev had put the phone down and walked away.
‘Kev?’
‘Yeah, I’m here.’ A long sigh. ‘I … I sat in that seat and someone spoke.’
‘What did they say?’
Kev groaned as though his confession were physically painful. ‘I was drunk, like, so I could have just imagined it. But it sounded like, “Get out of here”.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘What do you think I did? I ran like a bastard.’
‘You didn’t see anyone?’
‘No. Only the boys when I got back to the road.’
‘What happened?’
‘They thought I was full of crap. A couple went down but nothing happened. Reckoned I made it up, took me years to live it down. Wasn’t the only one though so I know I wasn’t crazy.’
‘Not the only one?’
‘Yeah. Loads of people have sat there and heard it, just no one’ll say. Don’t want to look like they’re mental.’
After making Slim promise again to keep quiet, Kev hung up. Slim carried on to the community hall. Inside, he set up his laptop and went through Croad’s list of names, searching for each across various social media sites. Most had an online profile somewhere, but none of those he found matched the face of the man he had seen in the woods. He had narrowed it down to about half by the time he decided to take a break.
He took a coffee out onto the back terrace and sat gazing down into the forest. What further secrets did it hide? Was Dennis Sharp down there right now, hiding out, or was he really dead after all? Slim could no longer be sure either way.
He pulled the second doll out of his pocket and turned it over. It was crude, the kind of thing a child might make in art class: limbs stumpy, an over-large head, a press of cotton wool on its neck where an attempt at hair had failed.
Slim frowned. If Dennis had left it for him, it had to be for a reason. It was either a hint at something, or a warning. If Dennis was playing a game, it had no logic. The figure had to have something to say.
The door to the terrace opened suddenly, surprising him. Mandy leaned out, holding a duster in her hand.
‘Thought it was you.’
‘Just getting some air.’
Mandy’s gaze moved to the table and Slim realised he’d left the doll in view.
‘Where’d you get that?’ she asked.
‘Uh, I found it.’
‘Out the back?’
Slim stared. ‘There’s more?’
‘Boxes of them. Old stuff from one of those fetes. They keep anything nice that doesn’t sell if they have room. I had to go through it all once, give it a clean.’
‘Could you show me?’
‘Sure.’
Mandy led Slim through into a storeroom behind the library. The cramped, windowless space was piled high with community junk: fold-up tables and chairs, boxes of Christmas decorations, wooden skittles pins, even what looked like a small bouncy castle stuffed in a corner. With Mandy offering instructions, Slim dug his way into the back and retrieved two sunken cardboard boxes.
‘Pretty sure they were in there,’ Mandy said.
Slim took the boxes through into the main hall and put them down on a table. The contents were a mixture of homemade jewelry and little wooden figurines, the detail on most far better than the one Slim had found, as though the creator had let his skills go to seed.
‘Who made these?’ Slim asked, certain he already knew the answer.
‘Most were done by Dennis Sharp, but a few of these were other local kids. He used to do the odd workshop, if I remember right,’ Mandy said, picking a cow made of twigs out of the box and holding it up to the light as though to examine it. ‘I mean, I don’t remember much but there was a craft table at the parish Christmas festival and Dennis was sat there, showing kids how to make them. I had a go. Got my picture taken for the magazine.’
Mandy was beaming, staring off into space. Slim looked up. ‘Any chance you could hunt out a copy of that magazine? I’d love to see it.’
Mandy nodded, but her smile had faded. ‘I remember there was some trouble. A bit of a commotion. I don’t know what about.’
‘With Dennis?’
Mandy nodded. ‘Someone started shouting at him, so he got up and left.’
‘Do you remember who?’
Mandy shook her head, tossing her hair back. ‘How would I know? I was still in primary school.’
‘And you’re seventeen now?’
Mandy pouted. ‘Nearly eighteen.’
Slim looked at the teenager with the strands of pink hair and the pregnancy bump and felt a sudden pang of regret. His own child would have been of a similar age by now. Would he have had a daughter? Someone with a skewed view of the world who needed his protection?
And if he had, what would she think of him, a stumbling, homeless drunk slowly blagging his way through each day?
‘Stop looking at me,’ Mandy said. ‘Are you drunk again?’
Slim felt the press of an unopened bottle in his pocket. ‘I quit,’ he said. ‘I think.’
Mandy grinned. She reached into her pocket and held out an empty cigarette packet. ‘I quit too. I threw the last ones away. I keep this to remind me.’
‘Good for you.’
Mandy patted her stomach. ‘I told you. I’m gonna be a good mummy.’
‘And what about the father? Have you told him yet?’
Mandy scowled. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘He deserves to know.’
Mandy shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
Slim decided not to press her. ‘Let’s have a look for that magazine.’
They found it in a book of a years�
� worth bound together. The parish Christmas festival was a four-page colour pullout. Most of the pictures were of various stalls and displays, but there were a couple of the mingling crowd.
‘That’s me,’ Mandy said.
She was kneeling on a blanket laid on the floor in front of a table covered with little wooden dolls. A string of tinsel hung along the table’s bottom edge. On the blanket were various items used in the construction of the dolls: twigs, nuts, pieces of wool, and a couple of glue guns to stick it all together. Another older boy was sitting beside Mandy, while behind them a man was leaning over, half obscuring the display.
‘That’s Jimmy,’ Mandy said with a petulant hint to her voice as she pointed to the boy. ‘Our first meeting, I suppose.’
‘And that’s Dennis Sharp?’
‘Yeah.’
At the back of the display, a handwritten sign read, Woodwork of the Forest, while beneath it was taped a smaller piece of paper with more description, too small to read.
‘Is that sign still back there?’ Slim asked, feeling a sudden flush of excitement.
Mandy shrugged. ‘Might be. I’ll go look.’
As she wandered off to the storeroom, Slim picked a couple of the dolls out of the box and put them down on the floor, matching them to the ones in the picture.
One was lying down, its arms over its head. Another was leaning forward, looking at the first one’s stomach. In the background, something on all fours lay beside a clump of white cotton.
Slim frowned. It was a tableau of some kind, perhaps a scene from a book or a local story.
‘Got it,’ Mandy said. ‘This what you were after?’ She held up a browned square of paper. ‘It was crushed at the bottom of the box.’
‘That’s it, thanks.’
Slim practically snatched it out of her hands, turning it over to read. Some of the words had faded and a corner had broken off. It was a simple paragraph talking about man’s connection to the forest. Slim spotted a couple of spelling and grammar errors but it was the note itself that had him excited.
Kay Skelton was a trained forensic linguist, his field of specialisation after leaving the army. But even Slim, an amateur at best, could see the handwriting on the note was completely different to that on the message received by Oliver Ozgood.
50
Slim said goodbye to Mandy and headed out. He tried to call Kay but his friend didn’t answer, so he left a message. Back at the cottage, he found the copies he still had of the letter and the work ledger and compared them with the paper from the woodwork display, doing his own analysis. There was a clear difference.
But if Dennis hadn’t filled in the ledger, who had?
There was an obvious answer.
The man who had slowly taken over Dennis’s job.
Croad.
Slim felt an immediate sense of discomfort. He went around the house, checking the locks on the windows, peering into every cubbyhole as though expecting a bogeyman in an old soccer shirt to come jumping out. Remembering the cameras he had set up, he retrieved Alan’s tablet from under the bed and accessed the saved information, but aside from a crow which had used the doorstep as a nutcracker for a few minutes, only his own return had triggered the sensors.
Nothing.
He had left his phone on a window ledge, and as he sat down at the table it buzzed, startling him. With just one signal bar flickering on and off, it had been unable to maintain enough signal to receive a call, but it had nevertheless caught a voicemail. Slim picked it up. Not Kay, Don.
He tried to call back, but today he was unable to get enough signal, even when he stood on a chair and held the phone up to the ceiling. He wanted to know what Don had to say but couldn’t face another uphill hike into Scuttleworth.
He pulled out the folder of maps Croad had left and looked one over. He could reach a field edge if he headed straight through the forest behind the house and then headed uphill.
And if he continued on in a leftward arc, he would reach the road that led up to Ozgood Hall, entirely bypassing a hill in the middle.
He frowned.
‘Huh.’
Still frowning, Slim found a ruler and laid it across the map, nodding as the measures confirmed what he had suspected. It made so much sense now. Dennis Sharp’s cottage was down a meandering road to Scuttleworth’s south, leaving him an awkward drive or a long up and down walk to work. Dennis, however, not being a man of civilisation, would surely never have taken a narrow, winding road if he could go quicker through the forest. Cutting through the trees, following a river north and then hiking up through forest to the back of Ozgood’s estate, the route was less than half the journey as that by road.
Slim packed a bag, keeping the bottle in his pocket for safekeeping, and headed out. He soon found himself in a section of the forest he had not been in before. The trees closed in through a steep-sided gorge, rocky outcrops outlining a dry riverbed which connected to the stream. Near the water Slim found signs of regular passage. Near a couple of larger pools in which trout glided lazily, he found items of fishing tackle left behind as though for explanation, trod into the mud.
It was all too mundane, too serene. Slim slowed his pace, squatting low every few steps, pausing, listening, looking for something out of place, something that shouldn’t be.
He had just intersected with Dennis’s likely route up to Ozgood Hall when he spotted it.
In a patch of mud, pointing away from the river, uphill into the thick, seemingly impenetrable thicket of brambles and low-lying hawthorn, a single boot print.
His heart screamed at him to follow the direction of the print up into the thicket, but the old soldier in him retained more sense. Keeping low to the ground, he looked around, assessing from which angles he was covered, from which he was exposed. If someone had a gun trained on him right now, where would they be holed up? If there was surveillance equipment, where might it be?
Back across the river, the undergrowth was thinner, the fallen leaves crisp enough to betray an observer should they make any movement. Slim slowed his breathing, cutting out all unnecessary sound, tuning himself to the forest. Up and down the stream the path angled out of sight, leaving few viewing places, while an observer from the thicket above would have to watch through several metres of tangled vegetation.
Careful not to move any other part of his body, Slim twisted his head and looked up into the branches overhead.
Nothing.
Satisfied he was unobserved, he considered the possibilities.
A single footprint ought to be harmless, perhaps left by a walker peering uphill, assessing the possibility of a way through. But from the depth of the sole mark compared to the heel, Slim could tell the person had pushed off, climbing up the slope.
Slim looked around for the best option to follow, spotting a gully of exposed rocks that shifted around the edge of the thickest brambles. Moving slowly and as quietly as he could, he followed the rocks, staying off the leaves where possible. The rocks rose up out of the gully until he reached a point where he had to jump back down. He now had a rocky wall on one side, a tangle of brambles on the other. A thin gap lay between, so Slim squeezed through, emerging in an open plateau with a carved rocky slope on one side and a mass of brambles on the other.
The bowl of rocks rising around him had an artificial look to it. Slim sensed he was in an ancient quarry, perhaps one begun speculatively and later abandoned. As he followed the rock wall he saw bore holes from a drill in some of the breaks in the rock.
And against a slope steep enough to act as a back wall, he found a small, abandoned brick building.
Three walls remained, the other covered with a black plastic sheet. The roof had been replaced by a couple of pieces of corrugated plastic. No attempt had been made to hide that someone was squatting here: a square of broken bricks was filled with fire ashes.
Slim lowered himself to the ground, felt around under the leaves, and pulled out a fist-sized rock. Holding it like a club, he a
pproached the hut’s front.
No movement came from inside, and as he skirted around the opening, he saw the hut was empty.
Someone was definitely squatting here, though. A green sleeping bag lay in one corner, while a table made with bricks held a plastic bag of wild mushrooms.
Slim lifted the bag, turning it over. The man he had seen, it had to be.
A crunch came from behind him. Slim spun, catching a glimpse of a shadow bolting between the trees.
‘Dennis, wait!’
Too late, the man was gone. By the time Slim had reached the break in the gully, all that was left of Dennis Sharp was the faint, receding crackle of running feet on leaves.
Slim threw his bag down, swearing as he did. Dennis would no doubt go to ground, perhaps find somewhere else to hide. Slim had missed his opportunity, but on the off-chance Dennis returned, he pulled a piece of paper from his bag and scribbled a quick note.
I mean you no harm. He paused, then added: I’m on your side.
He put it on the bag of mushrooms and headed back to the river. As before, Dennis had left no trail to follow. Slim looked along the river, but Dennis, it seemed, had already staked out where the dry ground that would leave no tracks lay.
Slim threw the rock he was still carrying to the ground, kicking at the leaves in frustration. His original purpose forgotten, he headed back to his cottage. The bottle was in his hand without him realising it was there, half of the liquid inside him with no remembrance of it going down. The cottage appeared out of the forest like a shimmering mirage, and if Slim hadn’t been walking with his head lowered, he might have missed the figurine lying on the mat entirely.
He scooped it up and examined it, wishing his vision would stop wavering. It was smaller than the previous one, its body scorched as though by fire, its twig arms aloft.
‘You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?’ Slim whispered, aware as he entered the little dining room that the papers were no longer properly aligned, but already too drunk to know if any had been taken.
He slumped down on the bed, feeling like a failure. Dennis Sharp seemed to be looming above him, multi-faced, some expressions laughing, others scowling, others with eyes filled with tears.
