Weirdo (21 page)

“And if he’s going to make mistakes,” Maureen thought of the conversations she’d been having with Philomina next door recently, “he’s got to make them himself and learn from them. You can’t tell him, love. You’ll only bring him closer to her if you do.”

Debbie bit her lip. Something told her that on this point, her mother was right.

“Now then,” said Maureen, “let’s put the kettle on, eh?”

“OK,” Debbie demurred. On the radio, Ian Masters was introducing his regular Saturday morning guest, Old Barney, a farmer who dispensed homespun wisdom in the Norfolk dialect. The pair of them burbled away as Debbie watched her mother brew a pot, soothed by this connection to the Saturday mornings that had come before.

“Do ya keep a traaashin’?” said Old Barney from the radio.

* * *

Corrine waited until Lizzy was holding up the hand mirror, allowing Sam to view her new haircut from all angles. Then she picked up the broom and walked into the salon, watching
Sam’s face reflected, seeing the expression of satisfaction fall away as their eyes met through the looking glass.

“Happy?” Lizzy was asking her.

“Great, thanks,” Sam recovered her composure swiftly. But not so quickly as Corrine had begun sweeping up her hair.

“Hi, Corrine,” Sam said in her sweetest voice, “I didn’t know you worked here.”

Corrine smiled back. “Learn something new every day, don’t you?” she replied, getting on with her task, carefully catching every last strand.

Sam’s smile faded. Lizzy lifted the apron from around her neck, brushed away some more trimmings onto Corrine’s pile.

“Well done, Corrine,” the stylist winked at her. “Bringing me another satisfied customer. You two friends from school?”

“That’s right,” said Samantha, getting to her feet, brushing yet more hair from her lap onto the floor. If she thought she was making Corrine’s job harder, she couldn’t have been more wrong. “
Special
friends,” she added, twisting the word for emphasis.

Corrine saw the hatred in her eyes but did as Noj had taught her. Made herself glass, reflected it straight back from whence it had come. Finished piling Sam’s hair into her dustpan with slow, methodical care. “See you then,” she said, lifting it all up.

“Yeah,” Sam sneered down at her. “See you around.”

Corrine found it very hard to stop herself from laughing as she took her bounty away. Emptied the hair, not into the dustbin, but into the little wooden box Noj had given her.

“Now I’ve got you,” she whispered to herself. “You
witch
.”

There were no nightmares this time. Sean woke at six-thirty feeling like a switch had been flicked in his mind. During his sleep, his subconscious seemed to have worked out the obvious course of action. He settled down to work straight away, making calls, checking his emails, firing out others, collating information and ringing the courier service his employer used to despatch Sheila Alcott’s files to Mathers’ chambers. He even managed a plate of Full English, his appetite returned with a vengeance.

He called Rivett on his mobile as he stepped outside.

“Top of the morning to you, Mr Ward,” Rivett’s voice rang in his ear. “What can I do you for today?”

“Morning, Len,” said Sean. “I was wondering, do you think you can get your hands on some swab kits for me?”

“I reckon,” Rivett sounded intrigued, which was what Sean had been hoping. “Mind if I ask what you want them for?”

“All Corrine’s KAs you gave me yesterday,” Sean walked towards his car. “The bikers and the drinkers from Swing’s. I was wondering whether, as a sign of good faith and their own innocence, they might like to volunteer a sample, just so we can rule them out of any further enquiries.”

“I like your thinking, boy,” said Rivett. “How many d’you need?”

“Six should do it,” Sean said, though at the moment, he was only interested in two. “D’you reckon DCI Smollet will be OK with that, or should I have a word with him first?”

“Don’t you worry about him,” again, Rivett responded as expected. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks, Len,” Sean unlocked the car door and slid inside. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours. If I’m running any later, I’ll let you know.”

“I can make a start on it for you, if you want,” Rivett sounded hopeful. “I do miss the thrill of getting shiftless toerags out of bed in the mornings.”

“All right then,” said Sean. “How about starting with Messrs Woodhouse, Hall and Prim?” He couldn’t help but smile at the real surnames of men who preferred to call themselves Whiz, Psycho and Scum.

“Their check-ups are long overdue,” Rivett concurred. “Consider it done. See you back at the office?”

“Yeah. Cheers, Len. See you then.” Sean cut the call, happy. He didn’t expect any of them to be a match, but it would keep the old sweat occupied, and more importantly, feeling as though he was in charge of things, for the morning. Sean intended to make good use of this time, starting with his visit to Paul Gray.

Under scudding clouds, he drove back down towards the station, turning right when he got to the roundabout, across the top of the market and down into Nelson Road Central. Past the long walls of the cemetery, where, according to one press report he’d read, Corrine had once sat up a tree, trying to conjure up the Devil.

The streets turned residential after this. Sandringham Avenue was in an area known as Newtown, built in the ’30s, neat rows of mock-Tudor cottages under bare trees.

Gray had the front door open before Sean was halfway up the garden path. He was as tall as a man had to be to get in the force in his day, still lean and with a face that wasn’t easily forgotten; high cheekbones and a hooked nose, startling, pale blue eyes under black brows. His hair would have been that colour once, now it was grey, cut short and neat, brushed off a high widow’s peak.

“You must be Mr Ward,” he said, offering a long, cool hand to shake. “Paul Gray.”

“Thanks for seeing me, sir,” said Sean. “I hope not to take up too much of your time.”

“D’you want to come in?” Gray’s gaze was penetrating and his handshake was brief.

“Well, I was wondering,” said Sean, “if we could go for a drive instead.”

“Oh?” Gray frowned. “Where to?”

“I’d like to see the murder site,” said Sean. “I know it’s not far from here, and I have looked for it on the map. Only, I’d rather go there with someone who knows the territory. I thought we could talk on the way.”

Gray stood in silence for a second, assessing both Sean and his words. He looked like a hawk, Sean thought, a man who was good at keeping a still surface. It was a trait that Sean had often noted in men of his father’s generation. Not so frequently of his own.

“Len in’t run you out there, yet, then?” Gray said.

Sean shook his head. “He’s been too busy digging up old files for me.”

“I see,” said Gray. “Well, all right then. Let me just get my coat.”

* * *

“That’s a pretty bleak spot,” said Gray. “As you’d most probably expect.”

They had stopped in a pub car park, the other side of a bridge that marked the end of Newtown, a few roads north of Gray’s address. The Iron Duke was the last hostelry in Ernemouth, on the end of Marine Parade. Behind it was a middle school that backed onto the racecourse. In front of it, only the beach and the sea.

“We’ll have to walk from here,” Gray undid his seatbelt, “but that in’t far. Be a bit bracing, mind you.”

Sean got out of the car, the wind raw in his face. Above their heads, a flaking portrait of the Duke of Wellington creaked on its hinges. On the horizon, the wind farm, rows of giant turbines, their blades turning rapidly against the wind.

“Used to do a lot of stake-outs in this pub,” Gray did up the top button of his black overcoat. “Thieves bringing in stolen goods and hiding them out here. Between the beach,” he swept his arm in an arc that took in a hundred and eighty degrees of the landscape, “the field behind the school and the racetrack, there’s plenty of opportunity. There’s a holiday park beyond that and I in’t joking, that was always filled with villains, too.” He shook his head. “Talk about a busman’s holiday.”

Gray led the way from the car park and down the steps from the sea wall out onto the dunes, Sean falling into step beside him, wishing he had a thicker coat, bowing his head against the wind. The sand was soft underfoot and he soon felt out of breath.

“What made you come out here that day?” asked Sean.

Gray’s brow furrowed, but his eyes stayed locked to the horizon.

“I’d been out here not long before,” Gray recalled, “on the May Day bank holiday weekend. I’d been at the school the Saturday night; George Clifton, the old headmaster, needed some assistance. School was always getting done over. George had an alarm that went straight to the station, he ended up out here most weekends.

“Anyway,” Gray reached the top of a dune, “this time, he’d found a family camping out on his field.” He turned to Sean with a wry smile. “Not the kind that were inclined to move when he asked ’em nicely. So I dropped by, introduced ’em to one of our dogs. Said I’d let him off the leash if they didn’t get out of it. They soon changed their minds.

“So after we seen them off,” he went on, “I got back to the car and another call was going out, local resident reporting a party on the dunes. I was the nearest to it and I had the dog, so I took it. You could already see bonfire smoke rising over that way,” he pointed northeast and Sean could make out a flat, grey concrete roof in the middle of a gulley. “Found a whole bunch of them weirdos down there, having a party.”

He stopped again, on the top of another dune, letting Sean catch up. Lost in his memories, he hadn’t seemed to notice his companion was struggling. But now a look of concern softened his eyes. “You all right, boy?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Sean nodded, “don’t mind me, I’ve got gammy legs, but I’ll be OK. Please, go on with your story.”

“You sure? Well,” Gray nodded, “Corrine Woodrow was one of ’em. So, when Len told me one of them lot had gone missing, that’s the first place I thought of, reckoned that was
their hideout.” He stopped, a look of pain passing over his features. “I was right, and all.”

“It can’t be easy …” Sean began.

But Gray had resumed walking. “Look,” he pointed ahead, “here we are.”

Sean followed him down another dune. The old sea defence was sunk between two humps, sand nearly piled up to the slit where the soldiers of the ’40s would have set up their machine gun. The concrete was pockmarked, covered in yellow lichen, ragwort sprouting from the cracks and crevices.

“We go in this way,” Gray ducked under a doorway.

It was dark inside, took a few moments for their eyes to accustomise to the gloom, while the lamentations of the wind shrilled in their ears.

“You’d come across Corrine before, hadn’t you?” Sean asked.

“A few times,” Gray said. “She didn’t exactly come from a good home. Her mother was what you might call notorious.”

“Yeah,” said Sean, “so I’ve heard. But there was one time in particular …”

Gray lifted his index finger to silence him.

“Hold you hard,” he said, “just a second.”

He crouched down. “Don’t move no further,” he said. “Ha’ you got a torch with you?”

Sean fumbled in his bag. His hands seemed to have turned into two blocks of ice during their short walk here.

“Hang on,” he said, fishing it out. “Here,” he passed it down.

“Look at this.” Gray switched the flashlight on, ran it across the floor.

Someone had been here before them. Swept all of the sand off the concrete floor and then, right in the middle of it, they had drawn some kind of diagram.

“My godfathers,” said Gray.

A white pentagram, that glistened as the torch beam ran over it.

Sean stooped down for a better look, resting his hands on his knees. As he did, a musky scent filled his nostrils. Of lilac, lavender and cloves.

“Funny,” said Gray, touching it with the tip of his finger. “That look like,” he lifted up his finger to his nose, small grains falling as he did so, “salt.”

He took a cautious lick. “Yeah,” he said, spitting it out. “That is salt.” He put his hand down again, swirling the line with his finger. “They’ve drawn it in salt.”

He looked at Sean. “This has been done recently. Another day or so and the wind would have blown sand in over it. And what’s this?” he leaned forwards. “Wax,” he said, poking at a congealed substance in the middle of the diagram. “Candles.”

Gray stood up, running the beam of the torch across the walls. Stopped when it picked out a dark, pear-shaped object suspended from under the look-out slit.

Without a word, both men walked forwards, picking their footsteps between the lines of the pentagram. Gray reached it first, lifted it up in the palm of his hand.

“Well, I’ll be …” he said.

It was an effigy, a little doll, of a man wearing a black coat and a black trilby with a feather in the side. Hung there on a length of string, tied around an old rusty nail and fashioned into a noose around its neck. A brace of coloured pins stuck into it.

For a long, drawn-out minute, Sean and Gray stared at each other, the wailing wind making such an eerie soundtrack
that each one felt the hairs prickling up along the back of their necks. Then Gray let go of the doll.

“Black magic?” said Sean, thinking of Noj.

Gray whistled. “Or someone’s seriously taking the piss.”

His cool surface was shattered. The look on his face was one of pure shock.

“The book,” Sean pressed the advantage. “Corrine had a book with her when you caught her that time, with the pervert under the pier. A book of black magic.”

“So I been told,” said Gray, still staring at the effigy of his former boss. “Only …”

He stopped himself, turned his face back to Sean’s, his eyes hardening again.

“Who you been talking to?” he said. “Who else know why you’re here?”

Noj had not been lying. The book she had told Sean about had not been mentioned in any of the old case files, not even Sheila Allcott’s report that he’d been over with a fine tooth-comb the night before.