The Nightmare Place (13 page)
Regardless, that was supposed to be the end of it. I never expected to see him again.
I had no idea what a problem he’d become for me.
He seems so diminished.
That was my first thought when I saw John now.
The hospice was built on two storeys, centred around a reception area below and a communal sitting and eating area directly above. From each, a web of corridors led off to the residents’ rooms. After I signed in, a nurse led me to John’s, which was up on the first floor.
‘Mr Carlton had an unsettled night.’
She walked slightly ahead of me, her brown ponytail swinging.
‘He’s having problems with his liver and kidneys, and he required attention for his breathing on a couple of occasions. We’re doing our best to make him comfortable. But he’s settling in well overall.’
‘That’s … good. I guess.’
Good on the one hand, and yet it still brought a pang of sadness. The corridors were clean, but partially obstructed by wheelchairs, half folded up, as though hunching their shoulders to let us pass, and laundry trucks with faded yellow hazard stickers plastered to their sides. It brought it home to me that this was the last place John was ever going to live. That he was no longer in the end stages of his life, but the very last. I didn’t want to think of him
settling in
to that.
‘He’s been a joy,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s a lovely man.’
‘Yes.’ There was no need to be uncertain about that, at least. ‘Yes, he is.’
‘Are you a relative? I’m sorry, I can’t remember.’
‘A friend.’
‘You’re very lucky.’
Given the circumstances, that could easily have sounded glib or out of place, but her tone of voice assuaged that somehow. It’s amazing how different something can sound when it’s obvious the person saying it actually cares.
Dinner was being served in the open-plan space upstairs, and the smell of food cooking in a distant room permeated the area: an artificial but comforting aroma that reminded me of school dinners; the smell of being looked after, of having things prepared for you. Barely half the seats were taken. The nurse had explained to me that many patients had their meals in private, and that included John. Most of those who were there now were dressed in papery white gowns, and they ate slowly and in silence, accompanied only by the gentle clink of cutlery.
I glanced into some of the open doorways we passed. The bedrooms were utilitarian, but well decorated, and not as uncomfortable-looking or prison-like as I’d been expecting. It wasn’t even quite like a hospital. Each room had an adjustable single bed along one wall, an armchair, a desk, a television. There was a narrow wardrobe, and the kind of partitioned-off bathroom unit you find in cheap hotels – identikit blocks of plastic that are simply slotted into place and drilled in.
‘Here’s our boy.’
The nurse rapped once on the door, although it was slightly ajar, and pushed it carefully open. A doctor was sitting on the bed, making some notes on a clipboard resting on his knees. It took a moment for me to recognise that the man sitting beside him was John.
He seems so diminished.
He was dressed in a white gown with a V neck that partially exposed a wiry tangle of grey hair at the top of his emaciated chest. Through the fabric, his ribs looked oddly misshapen – tangled, almost, like the roots of a tree. His legs were bare below the knee, and the mottled, hairless skin there gleamed as though it had been shaved and polished. His forearms were painfully thin, and his hands fretted in his lap, knotty fingers rolling nervously over each other.
But it was in his face that the deterioration was the worst. Viewed side on, his head seemed too large for his neck to support, and the shape of his skull was clearly visible. When he turned to look at me, his eyes were small and set back in their sockets, almost lost in the dark skin surrounding them. It was only when he smiled – and the lines at the sides of those eyes crinkled slightly – that he finally resembled the man I’d known for so long.
‘Hello, John.’ I said it too quietly, scared that my voice might somehow bruise him.
‘We’re nearly done,’ the doctor said.
The nurse headed off back down the corridor. I lingered by the doorway as the doctor felt John’s chest, his lower abdomen, unsure at first whether it was all right to watch, or even be here. He prodded his fingers gently beneath John’s ribs, quickly removing them when John cried out: a sound that cut through me. But I felt a responsibility to be here for him, the way he had been for me in the past. For his part, he didn’t seem remotely self-conscious about my presence.
A minute later, the doctor had made his notes and left. John remained on the bed, and I sat down in the armchair opposite him, leaning forward so as to be closer to him.
‘It’s good to see you,’ I said.
‘Is it?’ He seemed bemused by the idea. ‘I know how dreadful I look. I can’t imagine it is.’
‘You don’t look too bad to me.’
‘Considering.’
There was some relief: he sounded more lucid than I’d become accustomed to over the last few months. Perhaps fighting the physical decline had been taking up too much of his energy, and now that he had stopped, that energy could be concentrated elsewhere. All his remaining heat, burning in a single room.
‘I thought I was gone last night,’ he said.
‘Don’t be silly. You’re not going anywhere for a while yet.’
‘No, I mean it. I kept waking up because I couldn’t breathe properly. But then when I was awake, it was hard to do anything about it.’
‘You should have called the nurses.’
‘I did. In the end, they had to put me more upright.’
‘Is it easier to breathe like that?’
He chuckled. ‘Don’t you remember anything I taught you? It’s easier to do everything when you stand up straight.’ But the chuckle died away. ‘I still had to concentrate, though. It’s like when your sinuses are very blocked and you try to breathe through your nose, and so, so little will go in. Like that, but everywhere somehow.’
‘John—’
‘Everything was very grey and distant. Just the tiniest little thread of breath keeping me here. And I thought maybe I wouldn’t really care if it snapped.’
‘You might not, but I would.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you did too, or else you wouldn’t have called the nurses.’ I gathered myself together. ‘So enough of this crap, John.’
‘I just panicked.’ Another chuckle. ‘I surprised myself, actually. Because I thought I’d made my peace; that I’d accepted what was going to happen. But it turned out I hadn’t. When it felt like it was coming to it, I realised I wanted to live. So much.’
‘Fight to the last. Something else you taught me, remember?’
‘You never needed me to tell you that.’ He smiled at me, his eyes watering slightly. ‘You always had more than enough fight in you. I just turned you slightly, pointed you right. Maybe not even that. You’d have got there on your own.’
‘Yeah.’
But it gave me pause, because I knew deep down that it wasn’t true. After that night at the police station, I began to see John more and more – just around the estate or thereabouts. I didn’t realise at first that he was keeping track of me, but when I did, I think I was more flattered than annoyed. From my mother to my ‘friends’, nobody had ever seemed to care that much about my future, or encouraged me to make something of myself, and here was this stranger who was doing both, simply because it was in his nature to help people. To do the right thing.
Over the weeks and months that followed, a strange thing happened. I found myself moving away from Sylvie and Nat and the rest of them. Even Jem. I spent more time on my own, I worked harder at school, I applied myself. It was a gradual thing, but it happened. And looking back, I really wasn’t sure I would have had enough fight in me to do it on my own.
So a part of me wanted to reassure John now. To disagree. To let him know how much he’d quietly done to make my life better – me and so many others. But it was hard to admit that I’d never been as self-sufficient as I liked to pretend. Chris’s words came back to me again.
You always have to do everything yourself, don’t you?
And he was right, of course.
In the end, John broke the silence first.
‘It’s okay.’
‘What is?’
‘Not knowing what to say. It must be hard. It is for me.’ He frowned. ‘I am very frightened, you know. I’m not ashamed to admit it. For the first time in my life, I think. I’ve never been this scared.’
I leaned further forwards.
‘Do you remember what you told me once, when we talked about death?’
‘Not as well as you do, I imagine.’
‘You said death was nothing to be frightened of. That you weren’t scared about growing old and dying.’
‘That sounds like something I would have said. People do say things like that, don’t they?’
‘You said it was because death would either be wonderful, or else it would be like nothing at all.’
‘Maybe tonight I’ll stay asleep and find out.’
‘You won’t. But the point is, nobody knows. And if it turned out to be nothing, then being scared of it would be like being frightened of the time before you were born, when you didn’t exist. And nobody’s frightened of that, are they?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I do remember that. I have to say, I stole that from somewhere. It was an observation from someone else. I can’t remember who.’
I leaned back. ‘Still true.’
‘In a way. But I’m not scared of being dead. Maybe I’m not even frightened by dying. Perhaps it’s … sadness. Because I know there’ll be a time without me. There’ll be so much happening that I’ll miss, and it doesn’t feel fair. You, for example. I’d love to see you grow up properly.’
He gave me a pointed look, and I shifted in my seat.
‘Yes, well. Can we talk about something else?’
‘Of course. Tell me about work.’
‘I can do that.’
So I did. I told him about finding Drew MacKenzie, and how I’d handcuffed him to the staircase, which got me another chuckle – I loved that sound. Then I told him about the creeper investigation, and how I thought – or hoped – that we might have had a breakthrough of a kind. I even lost my temper a little when I was explaining about the obfuscation at Mayday, but it got me another chuckle, so it was worth it.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t handcuff him to the desk and rifle through his filing cabinet.’
‘Huh. If it was as easy as that, I would have done. Should have dragged him in for obstruction, at least. Court order’s being fast-tracked, though. We should have the number tomorrow morning.’
‘And then this man.’
‘Fingers crossed.’
There was another night to get out of the way first, though. Another night when he could be hurting a woman the same way he’d hurt the others. That image of Sally Vickers came to me again.
We are going to get him for what he’s done to you.
If we didn’t do it in time, the temptation to revisit Richard Oakley at Mayday was going to be strong.
When I was done recounting it all, we both fell quiet for a time. John still looked mildly amused, and I was reluctant to break the mood. Then I realised there was something I wanted to ask him.
‘When I arrested Drew MacKenzie, I saw someone else. A woman.’
‘A woman?’
‘She was in the pub. I only got a quick glimpse of her, but I’m sure I recognised her from somewhere. She had long brown hair, and these scars on her face.’ I made a motion across my own. ‘Maybe just one scar. I wondered if you knew who she might be?’
He frowned. ‘How old was she?’
‘Late forties, early fifties.’
‘It does ring a bell …’
And it obviously did, because he was frowning, an expression more reminiscent of the John I’d become used to over the past few months. A man struggling to recall something that should be where he’d left it, but that had been inexplicably moved.
Please, John
.
I wasn’t sure why it was suddenly so important, but it was.
Please remember.
After a moment of thinking, he blinked and shook his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s gone.’
You don’t need to come in tonight
.
Jane sat in her small flat. As usual, she was alone, but for the first time in a while she also felt lonely.
The worst thing about the phone call from Richard was that he hadn’t even sounded annoyed. The phrase ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ had kept coming to mind during the brief conversation, and Jane had found herself wondering if Richard ever got angry about anything. Perhaps he was just treading carefully for legal reasons. Regardless, she could hardly imagine a more polite sacking.
The closest he’d come to addressing the issue was to remind her that confidentiality was key to Mayday, and that whatever the merits of the action she’d decided to take, it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to come in for her shift.
You don’t need to come in tonight
. He hadn’t added
or ever again
, but it had been implicit enough for both of them to hear it there anyway.
So that was it. She was no longer a volunteer.
With the evening now free, she ate a quick dinner on her knee in front of the television. The news continued to cover the attacks, but there was nothing she hadn’t seen before. Not yet, anyway. Assuming the police managed to gain access to the phone records at Mayday, there might be a development soon, and as upsetting as the reports were at present, there was some comfort in knowing that when this man was caught, she would have played a part in making it happen. However miserable she felt right now, it was a worthwhile sacrifice in the grand scheme of things …
You see? You couldn’t do it after all.
Her father’s voice, stronger than it had been in weeks. Jane put her plate to one side on the settee and looked across at the telephone. Her therapist’s number was on a small business card beside it, and she considered calling her now. Eileen had told her it would always be fine to do so, and anyway, it wasn’t as though the circumstances were normal.
You couldn’t do it …
She stared at the phone for a few seconds longer, then looked away. No, she wasn’t going to call. She was going to deal with this herself.
I couldn’t do it, no. But there were other things I
could
do.
She closed her eyes and, as she’d been taught, worked methodically through her feelings about the day. As she thought back on everything that had happened, the foremost sensation was a cringe of embarrassment, left over from how she’d felt at the police station, and then in the car. It was the same feeling that always prompted her to apologise – not for doing something wrong, but for doing anything at all. It had been there again during Richard’s call, as though she had been caught talking in class and was being told off by the teacher.
But that wasn’t fair.
Here are some of the things I could do.
For one, she had felt scared of going to the police. There had been the fear of making herself the centre of attention, and of not being taken seriously, but there had also been the risk of losing something that had become very important to her.
And I did it anyway.
It had turned out that she wasn’t being ridiculous – that the information she’d provided to the police might be crucial to their investigation. She had been correct that the man on the phone was the man they were looking for, and they now had a much better chance of catching him before he hurt someone else.
That’s because of me.
And no, she hadn’t been able to abide by the rules that Mayday set down, but she’d been good at the work while it lasted. The old Jane wouldn’t have dared to volunteer there in the first place,
but I did it
– and yes, Mayday was closed off to her now, but there would be other challenges. She’d always been petrified of running into life’s knots, but she was beginning to learn that she could often untie them when it came to it. Challenges were never half as frightening as they seemed.
And when I find a new one, I’ll face that too.
But most of all, this:
I did the right thing.
After washing up, Jane went through to her bedroom.
She didn’t turn on the main light, but flicked on the lamp on the desk and sat down there in the soft glow. If she wasn’t volunteering, she might as well get some extra translation work in. She opened up the laptop in front of her make-up mirror and loaded up a linked pair of documents: the French file she was translating, and the one she was gradually assembling in English. They sat side by side on the screen, different versions of the same story.
Fiction was her particular speciality, and the original file was a short crime novel. It was time-consuming work, but it paid reasonably well, and she enjoyed the process. Jane had always been a reader, and still harboured vague dreams of writing a book herself – dreams which, she told herself often, were on hold rather than dashed. While she suspected she had little flair for writing, she knew that was pretty much how she thought about
everything
. In the meantime, the translation work gave her a degree of creative outlet. The original text was set, of course, but she still had to use her imagination to pick the right words for the English version. She aimed not just to recreate the author’s sentence in her own language, but to convey the exact meaning as well. To get it precisely identical below the surface.
Eileen, her therapist, had seemed interested in the whole process, and especially by her choosing this profession in the first place. By then, Jane had been clued up enough to realise what the woman was getting at. In some ways, the work did reflect her personality, because it made her a conduit – a catalyst, even. She changed one thing into another, but she was invisible throughout, and she vanished at the end. While essential to the finished translation, she was never obviously present in it.
She worked for a couple of hours now, losing herself pleasantly, and then decided to have an early night. She saved the documents and closed down the laptop.
As she did so, she glanced sideways at the photograph she kept on the edge of the desk. Her and Peter: an image captured in different, better times. The two of them were embracing, and Peter was holding out the camera to take a self-portrait, with a lush green garden and fountains behind them. It had been good enough – even Jane agreed – to print and frame.
But right now … the position of it was slightly off.
She was used to seeing it from this perspective, and she was certain. Only a little, perhaps, but it had definitely been moved. It was as though somebody had picked it up and looked at it, then put it back down at a slightly different angle.
A shiver ran up her back.
Without moving her body, she turned her gaze to the mirror at the back of the desk. It gave a view of the bedroom behind her.
Of the bed.
And of the wedge of black space underneath it.
She stared at the bed, the silence growing louder in her ears until it filled the room with a high-pitched ringing sound. In the mirror, it seemed like the dark space was moving closer to her.
But there couldn’t be someone under there.
Could there? The door had been locked when she got home. It was locked again now. She felt the pressure of the keys in her jeans pocket. But then … was that what the other women had thought too?
The dark space stared back at her. For a moment, Jane imagined she could hear soft breathing, but then she swallowed and the sound disappeared. Maybe it had just been her.
With her eyes still on the space below the bed, everything else seemed to be whiting out of view. She forced herself to blink. How quickly could she reach the door and get out? But that was the wrong question. If she was going to get out, she needed to move
slowly
. If someone really was there, he’d know she was panicking and come straight out after her. If she gave the impression that she didn’t know, she’d have more of a chance.
She sat there for a few more seconds, wondering what to do and how to make her body do it. She listened very carefully.
Just that ringing silence.
You can do this
.
As calmly as she could, Jane pushed the chair back and stood up. No longer able to see the reflection of the room, she could feel her back tingling, but she made herself stand at the desk for a moment, faking a yawn and stretching. Feigning that she didn’t have a care in the world.
Then she walked steadily to the bedroom door.
Everything behind her remained silent.
At the doorway, she hesitated, then turned slowly around. The bed seemed somehow alive now. Humming with presence, like an animal down on all fours that might pounce at any second.
She slipped the keys out of her pocket, finding the one for the front door between her finger and thumb. Ready to walk quietly downstairs and let herself out …
Yeah, and then what?
It would be even more ridiculous than before to go to the police over this. After the second interview, Zoe Dolan hadn’t seemed to think there was any reason for Jane to be concerned – or she certainly hadn’t mentioned it if there was. And confidentiality went two ways, didn’t it? There was no way the man could find out who she was. It was probably just the events of the day. The crime novel she’d been working on. She couldn’t just
leave
.
No …
Instead, she moved across the hallway and into the kitchen, taking out the largest knife from the drawer. She had absolutely no intention of stabbing anyone – doubted she even could – but an intruder wouldn’t know that. Then she moved back to the bedroom doorway and got down on her knees. She leaned forward slowly, pressed the side of her face against the carpet. Looking under the bed.
There was nobody there.
Jane’s heart thudded suddenly, as though starting up again, and relief ran through her like water. She stood up quickly, feeling a little foolish. Nobody there. Of course. It was just her imagination playing tricks. Except for the photograph, obviously, but when she looked at it again now, she began to doubt herself.
Just her imagination.
Even so. She kept hold of the knife, and spent the next twenty minutes checking every nook and cranny of the small flat. The air still felt tingly, but she was totally alone. The downstairs door was locked, and the chain was on. Every single window was shut and bolted. There was nobody in here with her, and no way anybody could get in without making a hell of a lot of noise.
You’re safe.
Lying in bed later, Jane made sure that her phone and keys were within easy reach on the bedside table. It took her a long time to fall asleep.
Tomorrow, she told herself. She’d look into something. It was unnecessarily paranoid, perhaps, but regardless, she’d do it: find some way to make the house even more secure.
Because however safe you are, you’re never safe enough
.