Woodhill Wood (17 page)

"I'd better be off to bed," Gurde said, "I've got to be up early tomorrow."

"Why's that?" Dad asked.

"Um.. I just feel like an early start."

They both smiled as Gurde stood up and left them to their discussion. He glanced back just before he left the room to see the father refilling the mother's glass from the bottle. Then he climbed the stairs and settled down to wait.

The parents climbed the stairs together two hours later. Gurde had started to think they were going to talk all night, so it was a relief to hear them getting ready for bed: the sink running in the bathroom, the sound of scrubbing teeth, the toilet being flushed, the door closing and silence falling over the landing.

There was a certain satisfaction that Gurde had managed to bring them together, even if it was only for one more night. He wondered what they would think if they knew he had planned it that way or the reason why he had done so.

Gurde waited another quarter of an hour before he crept out on to the landing and tiptoed downstairs, carrying the black book, carefully avoiding the two creaky steps on the bottom flight.

He shut the study door without a sound. The Chronicle Yearbook slid neatly back into position on its shelf. Gurde had already taken a written copy of the Who's Who entry and hidden it with the collection of newspapers.

The telephone was sitting on the far corner of the desk surrounded by scattered sheets of paper covered in the father's scrawled notes. Gurde sat in the chair where the mother performed her conversations and stared through the gloom at the numbers on the dial. He took a deep breath, planned his opening line and reached for the receiver.

It seemed heavier than usual as he put it to his ear and grew heavier still as he tried to imagine what the police would say. A wave of doubt crashed over him and Gurde put the receiver back.

The room was dark, lit only by bright moonlight. He hadn't dared to put the lamp on. The shadows of the bare trees against the garden wall lay across the floor and Gurde imagined seeing the shadow of a crouched figure creeping amongst the uprights, sniffing the air, watching.

Once again Gurde snatched up the receiver and held it tightly to his ear. He put a finger on to the number nine and tried to distract himself as he turned the clicking dial forward and back three times.

A gruff male voice came on the line. "Emergency. Which service do you require?"

"Er.. Police!"

"What's the problem?"

"I think... I think that man in the newspaper is... is coming to kill my Dad." It sounded ridiculous.

"Name?"

"Can I have the police please!"

"If you don't give me your name, I can't help you."

"Are you the police?"

"Name, sonny."

"I..."

"Come on, son. You're keeping off somebody who really needs to..."

Gurde slammed the receiver back down and held it there, trying to squeeze any remaining life out of it, cursing how he must have sounded to the man in the white room at the other end. He thumped the desk, buried his face in his arms and stayed there until he was afraid he might fall asleep and have to explain it to the person that found him in the morning.

He didn't feel like crying. He felt nothing, as if this was the way it was going to be no matter what he did. There was no reason to feel. All he could do was wait.

As Gurde slipped back into the hall the pounding six-word thought returned: there had to be another reason. It was too big. Gurde glanced towards the front door, expecting to see the handle moving in the gloom and a silhouette leaning against the wall. A noise from the kitchen sent him scuttling upstairs towards the covers, even though he knew it was only the washing machine changing cycle.

The sun and moon shared the morning sky. Gurde had not slept well. He ran down the frost-covered road to buy the newspaper.

"You again?" Mr MacKenzie said from his chair. "You're getting to be regular. Let's see? News of the World, is it?"

"Er... yes please."

"Anything else?"

"I'd better take a Sunday Times as well."

"Right you are." Mr Mackenzie prised himself upright and tottered to the far end of the counter to pull the papers from their piles. "No sweets?"

"No thanks."

"You no' finished the last lot?" Mr MacKenzie said with a wry grin.

"No. They weren't all for me, anyway. They were for a party."

They exchanged money and Gurde hauled the newspapers back up the hill towards the house. As he climbed he looked around, watching for figures amongst the trees. He tried to guess what the black letters would spell out. It was too cold to take his hands out of his pockets. He waited for the warmth of the bedroom before opening the paper and reading the new headline.

Gurde threw the heavy paper on to the dining room table and carried his own lighter read up to the room. He unrolled the paper across the bedclothes, wondering what clues the fresh black letters might spell out. His guesses at the headline were wrong, but it was up to their usual standards: KILLER HEADS NORTH.

He read the few words on the front page. Then he opened the paper to be confronted by a pencil drawing that filled half of the third page. It was a side-on, head and shoulders sketch of a man with thick, dark curly hair and a long sharp nose. The eyes were drawn wide and staring and seemed to bury into his head under a wide brow. The bones of his cheeks were drawn long and black and he had a short slit for a mouth.

Below the sketch was printed a short explanation claiming that this was the man, as seen running away from the scene in Edinburgh.

As Gurde stared at the picture, he was aware that he had never tried to imagine a face, as if by denying the man humanity he could more easily keep him away. Without warning, it was no longer just a bad dream, but real, made of flesh and blood. Even if the drawing looked nothing like him, the man suddenly had a nose and ears and eyes and so could breathe, hear and see. He looked young, almost normal, apart from the size of his eyes and the way they had distorted his profile to make him look mad.

Gurde stared at those eyes, putting colour into them, making them flit back and forth and roll in their sockets to turn to look straight back. Another of the familiar shudders wormed its way up Gurde's spine and ran its fingers around the back of his neck. It was like the face staring out from behind the darkened mirror.

He climbed off the bed and walked across the room to pull out the other newspapers from their hiding place behind the chest of drawers. He laid the headlines across the floor in front of him and added the latest one to the end. The words seemed to have become increasingly desperate as time had moved on.

The man would be reading this too, knowing that his time was shortening. He would be looking at their pencil drawing of him and inspecting his own face in the mirror.

Gurde had telephoned the police but they hadn't believed him. Should he try again while the study was empty? The parents were still in bed, the same bed. That might never happen again. Gurde had expected the police to listen and yet there in the newspaper was the repeated demand that anyone with information should come forward, and there was even an interview with one of the Kent mothers pleading for the same. If only his voice had been deeper they might have listened, but he couldn't expect them to believe that a boy of fourteen could have the answer. How many similar calls must they have had to turn away since the story laid claim to the news? Yet the papers still cried out that there was no pattern, that the killings were random and brutal.

To Gurde the pattern was clear: but designed so that only one person would see it. And the father, the lawyer, had no idea. The father would never accept that such a thing was coming, even when faced with the evidence. Gurde knew it all but he wasn't meant to know. But still there was a place left for him to fill. He just couldn't see what it was.

He pictured the parents lying together in bed for the first time in a fortnight, facing in opposite directions with a wide, hot space between them.

There had to be a reason, something the father had done, something so terrible that it had driven another to this extreme revenge. The father was a lawyer after all, so it had to be linked to that. Nothing else Gurde knew about him could explain it. Gurde knew nothing of the father's work other than it was important and that he kept it locked away in the drawers of his desk.

Gurde wondered if the father ever looked back once a job was done. Once a book had been closed and a new one opened, were there regrets or worries that lingered on? There had to have been mistakes, even though Gurde had never heard him admit fault. It was always somebody else that caused his misjudgment through deceit or error. The father believed that he always did the right thing and that it was the start of a flood to admit that he could be mistaken. It wasn't that the father was particularly stubborn, just that he could not believe that he could be wrong. Gurde could see why that made him good at his job, never allowing doubt to creep in and undermine his position in the office or in the court or in the family. The father could move between problems, surrounded by those who made mistakes, knowing that his duty was to see such errors exposed and punished.

It was frustrating to know that sometimes the father was wrong, and that any attempt to tell him so would be seen only as either a personal attack or a sign of possible madness. There was no way to argue. The father would not believe his son's story, especially if it was a legal mistake that was the cause. If it had been a mistake then, even with the knife to his throat, the father would feel only anger at being accused of error.

But despite the father's belief in the purity of his actions, people liked him. With his eccentric wit and constant playing with words he could disarm even the most determined accuser and have them wishing only that they could speak the way he did, able to hold an audience for as long as he felt inclined, and then to leave them smiling. Everything in Gurde's room had been paid for by the father's ability to twist words.

The book that he had been writing was finished at last. The father had always been writing that book, working on it late into the night when there was no other work. It was almost unbelievable that it might have come to an end, that he might venture out from his desk to play football on the grass. If the man was coming then the father might never see the book published.

It had taken so long to write that it had to be important, but Gurde could imagine the father spending another ten years changing the order of the words. Gurde didn't know what the book was about but he knew that it would change the Law in some crucial way. The mother had always told him that.

It struck Gurde then that there wouldn't be time for the father to perfect his manuscript. It lay there, in the top right drawer of the table by the window, on which the lock had long been broken. If Gurde were to borrow it and send it off to the publishers, then it would be accepted and the father would get his recognition. Gurde had no idea how long it would take for the answer to come back from the publishers. When the letter came he would be furious. The father would not understand. He would think that his son had tried to ruin him, but at least he would know that the book had been accepted, and that could never be taken away from him.

Gurde had to do something.

If Gurde was right, but did nothing, then when the time came it would be too late and the father would never know if his book was good enough. And if Gurde was wrong, and the man was not coming, then Gurde would lose some trust, but the father would still know that the ten years of work had not been wasted. At last there was something that Gurde could do to help.

He gathered up the newspapers and put them back in their hiding place. With the new addition there was only just enough space to squeeze them down out of sight. One more murder and he would have to find a new place to keep them.

Gurde unlocked the bedroom door and went downstairs to the kitchen to put the kettle on. It was already mid-morning and still there was no sign of the parents. He cringed to think of what they must have said after the condom conversation. Gurde had played the innocent and it had worked brilliantly. And all for nothing. At least the parents had got something out of it.

He wondered if they did use condoms. The father had joked about it but that was no indication. Gurde couldn't imagine the mother and the father having sex like he'd seen in the photographs scattered across the playground. It just didn't seem possible that the parents, who rarely seemed to touch at all, could bring their bodies together and enjoy it as they were supposed to do.

Gurde took a sip from his cup of coffee before carrying it through to the television room. He picked up the magazine from the Sunday Times on the table and sat flipping through the shiny pages, waiting for the others to get up.

The mother came downstairs a little later. She seemed in a good mood. Gurde could hear her humming as she poured cereal into a bowl. She was still wearing her dressing gown.

"Good morning," she said with a smile.

"Sleep well?"

"Yes, thanks. You've already been for the paper?"