The Nightmare Place (3 page)

‘Fortunately, a floorboard keeps coming loose in the bedroom, so I have a hammer nearby.’

‘Even so.’ He shrugged awkwardly. ‘You never know, do you? It could have been our creeper knocking around down here.’

Our creeper.
As a title, it hardly went far enough. But even though it was the force’s major case right now, a few officers had taken to calling him that, as though minimising him by name might make the details of the attacks somehow easier to deal with.

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ I said. ‘We’d have him now.’

‘Or he’d have you.’ But he caught the look on my face, and finally, my mood filtered through the veneer of masculinity. ‘No, you’re right.’

‘And
our creeper
’s not in the habit of drilling out door locks.’ I nodded in the direction of the kitchen, where the locksmith was still working. ‘Or stomping around people’s front rooms like an amateur. Maybe if he was, the women would have had more of a chance.’

‘You’re okay. That’s the important thing.’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

‘And I bet the uniforms were pleased.’

‘What? That I’d solved the crime for them? Yeah, they were thrilled.’

The name of the man whose face I’d seen had come to me while I was waiting for them to arrive. It would have come more quickly, but I didn’t know him that well, and it had been a long time since I’d seen him. The kind of people I used to run with, back when I was a teenager growing up on the Thornton estate, were very different from the people I worked with now. I’d done my best to distance myself from all that, and I’d hardly thought about them since dragging myself up and out of the place. But here it was now – a small part of my past breaking into my present.

Drew MacKenzie was the little brother of one of the girls in the same gang as me. I remembered meeting him a few times at his sister’s place. He’d been a cute kid – must have only been about ten at the time, and I remembered that he’d seemed clever. He had the attitude already, of course: the one children get when they grow up in that type of world, as inevitable a wrapping as the cheap second-hand clothes. Presumably the attitude had won out over the smarts, and he’d followed his sister into the family business.

Chris said, ‘You’re going to leave him to the rat-catchers, though, right?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Zoe?’

‘
Yes
. All right? Do you want me to write it in blood? I’m going to leave him to the rat-catchers.’

Chris was about to say something else, but he was interrupted by the locksmith, looming in the doorway holding a box of keys and a handful of paperwork.

‘Excuse me. All done. I’ve left the old barrel on the counter. Just need a couple of signatures and then I’ll get out of your hair.’

‘Thanks. Be right there.’

‘When are SOCO due?’ Chris said.

‘Any time now. I’ll be in afterwards.’

‘You don’t have to. Maybe you should—’

‘
Be in afterwards
.’

I gave him a look. If anything, the puppy-dog expression seemed to intensify in the face of it, but we both knew why I had to be. It was now two days since Julie Kennedy had been attacked and raped in her own home. The latest victim of
our creeper
. She’d been in hospital ever since, and it looked like the doctors might finally allow us in this afternoon to interview her.

I looked around my front room again. It was just mess and missing things, and that could all be cleaned and replaced. More than that, it could wait. In the face of what had been done to Julie, the damage here was utterly insignificant.

‘I’ll be in afterwards,’ I said again quietly. ‘That’s what I should do.’

Three

You can’t do this
.

Jane sat down in the partially enclosed booth and waited for the button on the telephone to light up, indicating that she had a call. Thinking:

You can’t do this
.

Her father’s voice, of course. Since his death, she’d spent a great deal of time trying to push that voice out of earshot, or drown it out with more positive thoughts.
You
can
do this. You’re perfectly capable
. Sometimes she even managed to believe those things. And yet he was always there in the background, and at stressful moments he came through loud and clear.

You can’t …

The light on the phone flashed red.

Jane picked up the receiver immediately. One thing she
really
couldn’t do was allow herself to hesitate, because when she did, her body had a habit of freezing up. School, and even university, had been a catalogue of awkward pauses that lengthened into embarrassing silences: moments when she knew everyone was watching and waiting, and all she could do was sit there, growing red under the spotlight of their attention. Act immediately, her therapist had told her since. Fear stems mostly from anticipation, so don’t give yourself time to think. If she’d let the phone ring any longer, it would have rung out.

‘Hello.’ Her voice was surprisingly strong. ‘This is Mayday. How can I help you today?’

There was no reply at first, but the line wasn’t empty. She could hear the man breathing – a slow, heavy sound that made her wonder if this was going to be a sex call. They’d been told about them during training, but nobody in her group had received one yet. She’d get one eventually, but
God
, she thought,
please not now
. That would be a baptism of fire.

Finally, the man spoke. ‘My name’s Gary.’

‘Hello, Gary.’ She didn’t have to give her real name, but she decided to. ‘My name’s Jane. What would you like to talk about?’

‘I don’t know really.’ He sniffed. ‘I’m not sure why I even bothered calling. I just took the number with me.’

‘You took our number with you?’

‘Uh-huh.’ The sound changed slightly, and it took her a moment to realise that he’d started crying. Or an approximation of it, at least. ‘I didn’t really bring anything else. I’m not going to need it. I’m in a hotel.’

I’m not going to need it
. That was the moment when Jane recognised the nature of the call she was receiving. Her stomach dipped, and she looked around the small booth dividing her off from the rest of the room, fighting down the panic that was beginning to rise. Right now, she’d have given anything for a sex call. Instead, she was about to be faced with what the Mayday trainers called a ‘SIP’. A suicide in progress.

Keep calm
, she told herself.

You can do this.

‘Please take your time, Gary. We can talk about anything you want. There’s no hurry.’

‘I want to talk about Amanda.’ He sniffed. ‘Sorry – that’s no use, is it? You don’t know Amanda. Or maybe you do, for all I know. No idea who you are, have I?’

‘Just take your time, Gary.’

‘I know her, though. Better than anyone. She just doesn’t realise it.’

‘That’s fine. We can talk about Amanda.’

‘I’ve known her for years. We worked together, and then we – you know. Hooked up. Christ, this time last year we were
living with each other
.’

That brought a fresh round of tears, and Jane felt a ghost of the man’s emotion mirrored inside her. It was just enough to bring on the familiar sliding sensation of empathy, that movement towards understanding another person. Jane had always been good at that – too good, perhaps – and she took hold of the connection now.
This time last year
. She had plenty of her own examples to draw on. Her father’s death. Peter.

You can do this.

‘It can feel strange, can’t it, looking back?’ she said. ‘You remember how different things were only a short time ago. It’s sometimes hard to believe.’

‘Yes. Exactly that.’

‘You just take your time, Gary.’

As the story came out, in stops and starts, whatever Gary had taken – alcohol or drugs, or some combination of the two – began to cause him to slur his words. After a few minutes, Jane’s palm grew sweaty, and she had to swap the receiver between hands. Throughout, she did her best to stay calm: to put herself in his place and imagine what he was going through; to help him, as much as she could.

For most of the call, that seemed to involve remaining silent. The longer Gary spoke for, the more obviously superfluous her presence was. He just wanted to know that there was someone on the other end of the line, listening to him.

Amanda and Gary had been in a relationship for several months, and for a time, it had been wonderful – or so he claimed. But then things had cooled. Amanda had started going out by herself more, and Gary hadn’t trusted her. He’d check her text messages and emails, and find things: nothing directly incriminating at first, but enough to pass the baton from one suspicion to the next and send it running on towards another.

‘She was texting her ex. They’d always been in contact. I fucking hated it. Sorry. But she said I had to accept it, and I wanted to trust her. I tried to.’

Jane imagined this wasn’t the whole truth, but did her best to suppress the thought. It was important to resist the urge to judge, or even to interpret the story he was telling her. Instead, as Gary recounted the details of the break-up, and the way Amanda wouldn’t return his calls and texts, she concentrated on empathising with him: pulling similar feelings from her own experiences, emotional playing cards that she could match with Gary’s own. It wasn’t difficult. Breaking up with Peter had been an unhappy time. Even if she had known that it was right for both of them, the feeling of loss had seemed insurmountable at times. There had been genuine grief for the relationship, as though it had been a living thing, and the final few weeks a prolonged period of watching it suffer and die. Jane knew how much it hurt. As she listened to Gary now, she felt it again.

‘She’s on holiday.’ The first words came out like
sheezon
. ‘Here with him. Last year we were living together and now she’s here with him, and so I’m here too.’

‘You’re there too?’

‘Yes. Same hotel. It’s on the coast. So when they find me, she’s going to know how much I cared about her. She won’t be able to ignore me then, will she?’

Jane licked her lips, thinking quickly. She understood now what Gary was planning to do. Not just take his own life, but do it close to his ex-girlfriend. After all the unanswered calls and texts, he was going to force Amanda to listen to him.

It sent a frisson of horror through her – but then, she wasn’t here to judge. She wasn’t here to stop him, either. It was against the rules of the helpline to intervene; she could only do so if he explicitly asked her for help. Even if she’d wanted to, there was no obvious way of doing so.

She thought carefully.

‘Do you want to tell me which hotel, Gary?’

‘I saw them earlier.’ His words were increasingly slurred: hard to make out now. ‘This morning – from out of the window. There’s a settee in the room here, and you can just sit. They were walking down the promenade. Hand in hand. I don’t know when they’ll be back. I don’t care any more.’

‘Gary,’ Jane said. ‘I have to ask. Would you like me to call someone for you?’

‘Don’t.’

‘I won’t,’ she said quickly. ‘Not without your permission. But if you change your mind about what you’re doing, I can get someone out to you very quickly.’

‘It’s too late. It feels good.’

Jane’s heart was beating too fast, and she forced herself to breathe slowly. Sensing that there was nothing more for her to say, she allowed the silence on the line to stretch, imagining Gary filling that space with whatever he needed to.

‘It feels good,’ he said eventually. ‘It feels far away.’

And a moment later, the line went dead.

Jane felt light-headed as she walked out of the open booth and rejoined her training group. She’d been too lost in the call to notice, but reality had set in now, and her whole body felt feathery and strange. She sat down carefully.

The volunteers were divided up at random at the start of each session. This evening she was with Simon, Brenda and Rachel. Rachel – a small, punky PhD student in her mid-twenties – was the only one she’d really talked to before, and she gave Jane a smile now, along with a small thumbs-up from the hand resting on her thigh.

Jane smiled back weakly.

A moment later, Richard emerged from a second partitioned-off space, beside the one she’d been seated in. He was holding the sheaf of papers he’d been reading from.

‘Well. That was pretty intense, wasn’t it. Are you okay, Jane?’

She nodded. ‘I think so. But … yes.’

‘Intense. You did really well, though. That was a difficult one, and I thought you handled it brilliantly.’ He sat down with the volunteers. ‘Okay – questions from the group. Do any of you have any thoughts? Anything Jane might have done differently?’

Jane looked around the group, nervous. While talking to ‘Gary’, she’d been able to suppress the nerves and self-doubt and disappear into the conversation. It had been like she didn’t exist, but now she was very much present again, and the other three were looking at her. She could already feel herself blushing, and her eyes began to water slightly.

Don’t look at me
.

Rachel said, ‘I thought she was perfect, actually.’

Jane dared a look at her, and the girl gave her another smile, then looked away. It was a nice gesture, Jane thought, offering encouragement but not wanting to put any pressure on her. It was like when a friend called to check you were okay but knew enough not to stay on the line too long.

Simon and Brenda both tried to offer more substantive criticism, but it was clear they were struggling. Richard listened and nodded anyway, because that was what they did here at Mayday, but Jane was surprised to find that the dissection of her performance was considerably shorter than the others’ had been, and at the end, Richard gave her a big smile of his own.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘That was really good.’

No it wasn’t
, she thought.

But at least she didn’t say it out loud. Even just a few months ago, she had still been doing that: throwing people’s compliments back in their faces.
So that’s progress
, she thought. She was getting better.

After the training session was over, the volunteers either mingled with the other groups, drinking coffee and chatting, or else headed off. Jane was usually one of the first out of the door, but tonight, she dawdled a little. The conversation with ‘Gary’ had stayed with her. Of course, she’d known all along that it wasn’t a
live
call, but still, it had felt like one at the time. And just because it hadn’t been happening then and there, it didn’t mean it wasn’t
real
. The names had been changed, she knew, but all the test scenarios were roughly based on real calls the trainers had received.

Before she left, she spotted Richard wiping down one of the tables, moving plastic cups to one side. She hooked her bag over one shoulder and plucked up the courage to approach him.

‘Richard?’

‘Jane. Yes, hello. Oh – are you off?’

‘Yes.’ She felt awkward. Richard was in his fifties, and tall, with a halo of short grey hair. Although he was friendly enough, there was an intensity to the way he looked at you that she found disconcerting. It was as though maintaining eye contact was a matter of life and death for him. ‘I just wanted to ask about that call.’

‘Yes, you handled it really well.’

‘Thank you.’
That’s real progress.
‘I suppose I was just wondering … was there really nothing else I could have done? At the end, I mean.’

‘Ah. Right. I see what you mean.’ He stopped cleaning the table and turned to face her properly. ‘There wasn’t, no. And the thing is, I know you
want
to help them, believe me. But you just can’t. What you have to remember is, it’s a confidential service. And if it wasn’t, you’d never be in a position to help them anyway.’

‘No, I know.’

It was true. If someone like Gary had suspected that she would – or even
could
– find and stop him, he’d probably never have made the call in the first place. There was almost a paradox there, in a way. Richard looked at her kindly, and she could tell that he wanted to put a hand on her shoulder and reassure her. A fatherly gesture. He didn’t, of course.

‘It won’t ever stop being distressing,’ he said. ‘What you have to remember is that the caller is an autonomous adult. They’re responsible for their decisions and actions. Not you.’

She nodded. It had all been covered in the earlier training sessions; she had made notes on each one. Even so, her conscience was ticking.

Richard sighed, sensing her conflict.

‘Do you know one thing I do,’ he said, ‘which I find really helps me cope with the more difficult calls? I tell myself they’re not real.’

‘Not real?’

‘Exactly.’ He spread his hands. One of them was still holding a tea-stained tissue. ‘You won’t ever really know if these people are telling the truth when they call. We have callers who tell the same story each time they phone, just changing a few details. You know they’re making it up. But even the ones where it isn’t obvious, you never know.’

‘Right.’

‘The real Gary,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what happened to him, and I never will. But the thing is, it really doesn’t matter in terms of what I’m here for. So I can tell myself anything. I can imagine he was making it all up, or that he just drifted off to sleep and was totally fine.’