The Various Haunts of Men (4 page)

‘I must get back and relieve Chris from pony duty. Work tomorrow then?’

Simon’s face relaxed. They were on safe ground again. Fifteen days abroad, completely
cut off from home and his job, was more than enough for him, Cat knew. Her brother lived for his work and his drawing, and then for his life here in the flat. She accepted everything about him completely, and only occasionally wished that there was more. She knew of one thing, but it was a subject they only discussed if he raised it. He rarely did.

She gave him another hug and left quickly. ‘See
you next Sunday.’

‘You will.’

When his sister had gone Simon Serrailler showered, dressed and made a second pot of coffee. In a moment, he would unpack and go through the work he had done in Italy, but first, he put in a call to Bevham CID. Work might not begin again officially until the following day but he could not wait until then to catch up, check which
cases, if any, had been closed in
his absence and more importantly find out what was new.

Two and a half weeks was a long time.

I wonder if you ever realised how much I hated the dog? We had never had a pet of any kind. Then, when I came home from school one afternoon, it was there. I can see you, sitting in your chair with the brown leather pouffe under your feet and your spectacles and library book on the table beside you. For a second, I didn’t notice it. I went over to kiss you as usual, and then I saw it
– the dog. It was a very small dog, but not a puppy.

‘What is that?’

‘My pet.’

‘Why has it come?’

‘I’ve always wanted a pet.’

The dog’s eyes, bright as beads, gleamed out at me from between long strands of silky hair. I hated it.

‘Don’t you love her?’ you said.

I can tell you now how much I hated the dog, hated it because it was your pet and you loved it but also hated it just for itself.
The dog sat on your lap. The dog licked your face with a lilac-pink tongue. The dog
took titbits from your hand. The dog slept on your bed. The dog hated me as much as I hated it. I knew that.

But strangely enough, if it had not been for the dog, I might never have discovered what I wanted to become, what my destiny was.

I know you remember the day. I was lying on the hearthrug teasing the dog
by waving my fingers under its nose until it snapped, then whipping them away. I became very good at timing it to the split second and I know I would never have been caught if I had just continued in the same way, doing the same thing over and over again. But I made one mistake. Afterwards I was angry with myself for my own stupidity. It taught me to make a plan and then stick to it. I learned
a lot that day, didn’t I, from a single mistake? Instead of waving my fingers under the dog’s nose I leaned over it and made a growling noise, thinking I would confuse it and that it would be frightened of me. I wanted it to be frightened of me. Instead, it sprang up and bit my face, tearing a piece of flesh out of my upper lip.

I was sure you would have to take the dog to be destroyed, for doing
that to me, but you told me that it was my own fault.

‘Perhaps that will teach you not to tease her,’ you said. Can you understand how hurt I was by that? Can you?

I had never been to a hospital. You took me there on the bus, with a clean handkerchief pressed to my lip. I did not know what a hospital would be like. I had no idea that it would be an exciting place, and
beautiful, and dangerous,
and yet also a place of the greatest comfort and safety. I wanted to stay for ever among the white beds and shining trolleys and powerful people.

What they did to me hurt. They bathed my lip in antiseptic. I loved its smell. Then they stitched my upper lip. The pain was indescribable yet I loved the doctor who did it, and the nurse in the shining white cap who held my hand. You had stayed outside.

So, you see, the fact that you loved the dog more than you loved me and that you betrayed me with it, did not matter in the end because I had found my way. I can even forgive you for the betrayal because yours was not the worst. That came later. I got over your betrayal but the other never, because I was betrayed by what I had to love. I did not love you.

I have never told you that. But now I
am telling you everything. We are agreed on that, aren’t we?

Thursday morning and the dawn just coming up through a dove-grey mist. Mild air.

On the Hill, a velvet green island emerging out of a vaporous sea, the trees are all but bare, but the patches of scrub and bramble which lie like body hair in the hollows and folds are still berried and have the last of their leaves. Halfway up the Hill are the Wern Stones, ancient standing stones like three
witches squatting round an invisible cauldron. In daylight, children run in and out of them, daring one another to touch the pock-marked surfaces and at midsummer, robed figures gather to dance and chant. But they are laughed at and known to be harmless.

At this hour in the morning a few runners are making their way up and down and round the Hill, pounding intently, always alone, noticing nothing.
Two are out this morning, men running seriously in silent shoes. No woman. After a time, as the light strengthens and the quilt of mist rolls back upon itself, three young men on mountain bikes race up the sandy track to the summit, straining, panting, aching, but never dismounting.

An old man walks a Yorkshire terrier and a woman two Dobermanns, around the Wern Stones and briskly back down to
the path.

At night there may be people on the Hill, though not the runners and cyclists.

Later the sun rises, blood red over the scrubby bushes and brambles and mossy grass, touching the Wern Stones, picking out scraps of blown paper, the white scut of a fleeing rabbit, a dead crow.

No one sees anything unusual out on the Hill. People walk, run, ride there but find nothing, report nothing to
alarm them. It is just the same as always, with its standing stones and crown of trees, yielding no secrets. Vehicles keep to the paved paths, and in any case it has rained; any tyre marks have been washed away.

Debbie Parker lay in bed, curled tight, knees drawn up. Outside her window the sun shone, bright for a December morning, but her curtains were dark blue and closed.

She heard Sandy’s alarm, Sandy’s shower water, Sandy’s Radio BEV, but none of what she heard meant anything to her. When Sandy had gone to work Debbie could sleep again, sleep her way through a silent morning, shutting out the
sun, the day, life.

There was always a split second when she woke and felt OK, felt normal, ‘Hey, it’s day, here we go,’ before the crushing, blackening misery crawled across her brain like a stain seeping across absorbent paper. Mornings were bad and since she had lost her job were getting worse. She woke to headaches that fogged her mind and dragged her down, lasting half the day. If she made
a mighty effort, went out and walked around the town – did anything – the pain got slowly better. Mid-afternoon and she felt she could cope. Evenings were often quite good. Nights were not, even if she had had a few drinks
and fallen into bed if not cheerful then at least not caring. She woke around three with a start, heart beating too hard, sweating with fear.

‘Debbie …’

Go away. Don’t come
in here.

‘Ten to eight.’

The door opened, shooting light across the wall.

‘Cup of tea?’

Debbie did not move, did not speak. Go away.

‘Come on …’

The curtains were rasped open. The noise was like having her teeth pulled. Sandy Marsh, bouncy, bubbly, bright – and concerned. She sat on Debbie’s bed.

‘I said I’ve brought you some tea.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘You’re not OK.’

‘Am.’

‘Tell me I’m right
out of order here, but I think you need to go and see the doctor.’

‘I’m not ill,’ Debbie mumbled into the yeasty hollow of bedclothes.

‘You’re not well either. Look at you. Maybe you’ve got that thing called SAD … it is December. It’s a fact that more people top themselves in December and February than the rest of the year.’

Debbie sat up, throwing off the duvet in one fierce thrust. ‘Oh great.
Thanks.’

Sandy’s bright, cheerfully made-up face was creased with concern. ‘I’m sorry. Kick me. Sorry. Oh God.’

Debbie was crying leaning forward on her arms. Sandy reached out to hug her.

‘You’ll be late,’ Debbie said.

‘Stuff late. You’re more important. Come on.’

In the end, Debbie got up and trailed to the shower. But before the shower came the mirror.

The acne was worse. Her whole face
was scarred and blemished by the angry, infected rash. It spread down her neck and on to her shoulders. She had been to the doctor about it once, months ago. He had given her foul-smelling yellow ointment to spread on twice a day. It had greased her clothes and made the bedclothes stink and done her spots no good at all. She hadn’t bothered to finish the pot and hadn’t been back to the surgery.
‘I hate doctors,’ she said to Sandy, sitting in their kitchen, full of cheap DIY units whose doors kept falling off. Sandy had made toast and two more mugs of tea.

They had known each other since primary school, grown up in the same street, and rented the flat together eight months ago when Sandy’s mother had remarried and living at home had become difficult. But what should have been good fun
somehow never had been. Debbie had lost her job when the building society closed its Lafferton branch and then the blackness had started to creep up on her.

‘All the doctor will give me is a load of pills that’ll space me out.’

Sandy dipped her teaspoon into her mug of tea and tipped the liquid back, dipped and tipped again.

‘OK. Well, maybe there’s someone else you could see.’

‘Like who?’

‘Those sort of people who advertise in the health shop.’

‘What? Like that creepy acupuncturist? Healers and herbal people? Bit cranky.’

‘Well, a lot of people swear by all that. Just take down some names.’

Doing something made her feel better. There was a flicker of cheerfulness as she went into the newsagent and bought a notebook and biro, walked down the Perrott to the health shop, looked
up at the Hill beyond the rooftops, its crown touched by lemon-coloured sunlight.

The health shop was in Alms Street, near to the cathedral. I might be OK, Debbie thought. I could get fit, lose two stone, find something to clear my skin. A new life.

The cards were pinned on top of one another, crammed together anyhow on the cork board; she had to lift and unpin several to start getting at the
names and numbers. Alexander technique, reflexology, Brandon healing, acupuncture, chiropractic. It took ages to work her way through. In the end she took down the details of four – aromatherapist, reflexologist, acupuncturist and herbalist – and, after dithering a moment, one other … the address and phone number of someone called Dava. She felt drawn to the card, a deep, intense blue dusted with
a swirl of tiny stars.
DAVA. SPIRITUAL HEALING. CRYSTALS. INNER HARMONY. LIGHT. WHOLE-PERSON THERAPY
.

She stared at it, felt herself being pulled into the depths of the blue card. It did something to her, there was no doubt. When she came out of the health shop, she felt – different. Better. The blue card stayed in her mind and now and then, when she thought of it during the day, she seemed to
be able to draw something from it. At any rate, the blackness shrank back like a cowering creature right to the far edges of her mind, and stayed there.

‘I would like to see someone in higher authority, please. A CID officer.’

Running a care home for fifteen elderly people in all stages of dementia had trained Carol Ashton to be patient and firm, in the way of a teacher of small children – the two jobs, she often thought, had much in common. She was also skilled in getting even the most recalcitrant to do as she asked eventually. All of
which the desk sergeant recognised.

‘You mustn’t think we take reports of missing persons lightly.’

‘I’m sure. But I also know that a name goes down, together with a very brief description, on a list which is circulated to various agencies after which – unless the missing person is a child or in some other way especially vulnerable – that is that.’

She was not wrong.

‘The real problem is,
Mrs Ashton, that a surprisingly large number of people go missing.’

‘I know. I also know that a good many of them turn
up safe and well. I am also more than familiar with the word “resources”. All the same, I would still like to see someone who will take the matter further. And as I said, I am not trying to belittle the uniformed police when I say that I would like to talk to a detective.’

She turned away from the desk and went to sit down on the bench seat against the wall. There were small tears and splits in the upholstery here and there, through which grey stuffing was escaping.

Knowing that she might have to wait for some time, Carol Ashton had brought a book, but in fact she had barely time to read one paragraph. The desk sergeant had recognised a woman who would get out of
his hair when and only when she had what she came for.

‘Mrs Ashton? I’m DS Graffham. Will you come through?’

Daft, Carol thought, to be surprised that it was a woman, but somehow in her mind, though there were plenty of WPCs, detectives were always men. Just as nurses were women.

The room she was ushered into was no surprise of course – a dingy little featureless box with a metal table and
two chairs, beige paint. You’d confess to anything just to be let out of it.

‘I understand you are very concerned about an employee who has not been into work for a few days?’

She was pretty – elfin haircut, sharp features, big eyes.

‘Angela – Angela Randall. Only that sounds wrong –
employee
.’

DS Graffham glanced down at the sheet of paper in front of her. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve only just seen
the information …’