Pretty Little Dead Things (15 page)

  Besides, I wasn't yet sure if I wanted him to know that I'd been dragged into all this stuff about the missing girl.

  "Would you drive?" I dangled the car keys from my middle finger, giving a little cock of the head as Ellen rolled her eyes.

  "You still don't like to, eh? Even after all these years?"

  There had been a time, immediately after the accident, when I'd refused to even get into a car. That feeling passed, as feelings do, and bit by bit I talked myself around and finally forced myself behind the wheel.

  "If you wouldn't mind." I smiled.

  Ellen took the keys and opened the driver's door, and then she climbed in and popped open the passenger door as I walked around the front of the vehicle. I remembered something my father had said, decades ago and long before his early death: if a woman opens the car door for you, she's a keeper. I don't know what data he based this theory on, but right then it seemed like sound advice.

  "Are you sure you don't mind coming back to their place?" Ellen started the car, pulled out from the kerb and headed off down the hill. "It's still not too late to say no." Despite her words, her face said quite the opposite.

  I sat in silence, hoping that she read my unwillingness to talk as an affirmative. I could easily have asked her to drive me home, or back to her hotel, but events had conspired to ensure that I became involved with the disappearance of Penny Royale. If I'd felt like a screw was turning before, I was certain now that some kind of knot was tightening around me. The fact of Mr Shiloh's presence linked everything in some way, and I felt that I needed to hang around and find out what that connection meant. In other words, I was by now too far into this to back out.

  Ellen swung the car around a corner and we passed a row of shops that looked like they were stuck in the late 1970s. The streets were filthy, with litter gathering in the gutters and plastic bags gusting on the breeze. The front doors of many of the houses we passed were barred by metal gates fixed to the external brickwork – drug-doors, as we used to call them in my younger days. The gates could be locked from the inside, giving a dealer ample time to either flush their stash down the lavatory or escape out the back way if the police came calling.

  Before long we arrived at a small cul-de-sac with a street sign covered in spray paint. As far as I could tell, the street name was Tilly Road, but some wag had adapted the letters so it read Titty Rod. At least the local vandals had a sense of humour, however primitive their jokes might be.

  The street was filled with cars; they lined the verge on both sides, some of them double-parked. A few of the neighbours were standing out in their front gardens, gossiping over the fences, and others merely peeked out of their windows, unwilling to let themselves be seen in full view. A TV camera crew had set up on the corner, but they were otherwise occupied drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups and chatting idly as we approached.

  "All I'm asking you to do is meet the family. Let them tell you a little about Penny, and see if you pick up on anything." Ellen had turned off the engine and she sat staring through the windscreen, her eyes large and moist. "I don't know how this works, but maybe you'll see or hear something?"

  "I'll do what I can, Ellen, but you must know that I have no control over what it is I do. I could pick up everything, or I could pick up nothing. There's no way of telling which way this will go."

  She turned to face me at last, a gentle smile warming her features. She slipped a hand onto my thigh and blinked. "I know, Thomas, but it's enough that you're willing to try. If you can pick up nothing that might mean that she's alive, yes?"

  I nodded. "But it also might mean that I simply pick up nothing."

  We left the car and headed towards the Royale house, with me bringing up the rear. A few men stood outside on the untidy lawn, smoking stubby cigarettes and staring aggressively at anyone who passed by the gate. They stared at me, too, even though I was with one of the family. Ellen strode by them, all business, and pushed through the unlocked front door. I followed, feeling wired and paranoid and wishing that this would all just go away. Somewhere overhead, thunder rumbled. I glanced up, but could detect no sign of rain.

  At the end of a long hallway was an open door. Low voices drifted from inside the room, and Ellen went in without knocking. The woman from the press conference was sitting in an overstuffed armchair in the far corner, dabbing at her face with a paper tissue. An older woman with the same badly bleached hair was kneeling at her side, clucking like an old hen.

  "Shawna," said Ellen, going straight to the chair. "I've brought him."

  Shawna Royale looked up at our approach, and the light that flooded her face made me queasy. What I saw there, behind her waxen features, was a combination of unalloyed hope and something darker, something that did not quite fit in with the rest of her bloated washed-out appearance. But the tears she'd shed at the press conference were still visible, and my heart went out to her for her loss.

  "Mr Usher," she gasped, standing unsteadily.

  I went to her and took her outstretched hand, almost pulling back because of the desperation I sensed. I felt no presence in the room but that of the living. If Penny Royale was dead, then her shade had not yet found its way back here to this tawdry little room on a dead-end street populated by the lost and the forgotten.

  "Please, don't stand. Sit yourself down, Mrs Royale."

  "Call me Shawna," she said, doing as I'd asked. She sank too far into the seat cushion, and her black skirt rode up to reveal a bare patch of pale, blotchy thigh.

  The older woman drifted away across the room, as if she were a phantom. I had to look twice to make sure that was not the case, but she was certainly alive and well, if a little absent.

  "My neighbour," said Shawna. "She's been good to us."

  I nodded and patted her hand, unsure of what else to do. Someone pushed a kitchen chair behind me, and I eased myself down onto its hard wooden seat.

  "I'm not sure what Ellen has told you about me, but I can offer you no promises. The particular ability I possess is rather random, I'm afraid. I have no active part in what happens. Sometimes I see things, and sometimes I am given clues and messages. That's all. I don't really communicate directly with spirits, but I can often understand what it is they need. They don't talk to me directly, just through signs and gestures. I am, basically, what my name suggests: a simple guide."

  It felt like the whole room had gone silent and everyone was listening to my spiel. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure, but no one would meet my gaze.

  Shawna Royale leaned slowly forward. "I know about what you do. But right now, any help that we can get is better than nothing. We just want our Penny back, and whatever information we can get our hands on might just be the one thing that leads us to her." As if confirming what she'd just said, her hand gripped mine. The bones in her knuckles cracked, and I tried my best not to wince in pain.

  "I'm not sure what it is exactly you'd like me to do, but for what it's worth I offer you my services. Ellen is an old friend, and I owe her more favours than I could ever repay."

  Shawna smiled, showing her yellow teeth and swollen gums. Up close, her hair was greasy, and I wondered when the last time was that she'd bathed. As if in response, I caught a sour whiff of body odour. Turning away, I scanned the room, looking for something to divert my attention. There were photographs of Penny Royale everywhere, on the walls, on shelves, even resting on the dusty tiled area around the base of the fireplace.

  "Help me find out if my daughter is still alive. It's all I ask." When I turned back around Shawna's face was far too close to my own, and I almost reeled back in shock. "I want my baby back." Beyond the hope, beneath the despair, was another emotion I could not quite name. I have a knack with understanding the dead, but often the obscure demands of the living are simply beyond my ken. Whatever is was – this other, hidden emotion – it was lost on me. For now.

  "I'll do my best, Mrs Royale – Shawna. I promise."

  She would not let me go; her hand gripped my forearm as if someone had bolted it there. "Do you feel her now? Is she here? In this room?"

  Now everyone was looking at me. As I stood, turning to inspect the crowded lounge, I noted that every eye in the place was upon me. "No," I said, as clearly as I could. "No, your daughter is not here… but that doesn't mean that she isn't elsewhere, waiting to be seen." I felt like I'd let her down, dashed her slim hopes.

  "I hope you're wrong, Mr Usher. I hope you don't feel her anywhere, not ever."

  I nodded, smiled, and let Ellen lead me out of the room, along the hall, and out past the smoking doormen. She drove the car again; I was not up to any kind of additional stress.

  "I think that went… well? Is that even the right word?" She shot me a glance, looking nervy and on the verge of tears.

  "As well as can be expected, I suppose, under the circumstances. I just hope that your cousin isn't expecting too much. Whatever the hell it is I can do, I'm not the master of it. And whenever I do seem to think I have any control over it, there's always a disaster of some kind."

  We didn't speak for a while, and I stared out of the window as Ellen drove back towards the city centre. I knew that we were heading for her hotel, but I didn't quite know how to react to the situation. Things were moving too fast; the world was spinning like an out-of-control carousel, and the ornamental horses were coming apart, sending wooden heads and hooves flying off in all directions like deadly debris.

  That was exactly how it felt: like I was dodging mental shrapnel.

  "Did you feel anything in there, or were you telling her the truth?" Ellen still stared ahead, through the windscreen. The car in front stopped suddenly, the driver slamming on his brakes as a cyclist veered into his path. Ellen reacted calmly, as if expecting the sudden halt. I closed my eyes on old, worn out memories.

  "I felt nothing, Ellen. I can only see them when they want to be seen, but I can feel them when they're near. There were no ghosts in that room – in fact, it was remarkably free of activity for a house of that age. Usually, in every home I enter I can sense layers of the dead, going back through time to before the building was even constructed. It's actually rather strange when I don't feel that, but it does occasionally happen."

  Ellen drove down the ramp into the hotel car park, not even asking me if I was interested in accompanying her inside. "I need a drink," she said, pulling into an empty space. "So do you." She turned off the engine, handed me the keys, and stared at me like it was a challenge.

  "Yes, you're right. A drink would be… well, crucial, if I'm honest."

  She smiled, the moment broken and the tension dissipating. "I'm sorry, Thomas, I'm just a bit stressed. All this is just too much. I mean, seeing you as well as Penny going missing. Everything at once… it's just too damn much."

  I opened the door. "Come on. The first round's on me."

  We entered the hotel and made straight for the bar, where a bunch of men in business suits had commandeered most of the tables. We sat at the bar, squashed into high stools like oversized children, and raced each other to the bottom of the glass. The whisky tasted like fire; it should have been cleansing but it simply stirred up old memories, ghosts I thought I had put to rest.

  "Another?" Ellen was already signalling the barman.

  "Fine. Make it a double." I decided to leave the car there, at the hotel, and whatever happened later would happen without my resistance, even if it meant me getting yet another taxi home on Baz Singh's tab. I didn't want to think about it too hard, not yet. Thinking could come later, after I'd loosened the cogs of my brain with alcohol.

  We went upstairs sooner than I expected, Ellen in the lead and armed with a bottle of decent single malt and two glasses. The afternoon was darkening; the sky looked black through the tinted lobby windows. Rain began to spatter the glass, but gently, as if it were attempting to lull us into the right mood; a drizzly serenade for reluctant lovers.

  The lift seemed to be moving much too slowly, and as it climbed I felt us drawing together, as if by some form of magnetic attraction. Ellen's leg brushed against my thigh; her gaze caught mine, unable to let it go. We stared at each other, her holding the bottle and me grabbing onto the glasses. Time seemed to bend. Seconds overlapped, folding into one another. The decades fell away like shed skin.

  We did not kiss. We should have, but we didn't. I couldn't quite break through the barriers the years of hurt had built around me like a callous.

  Once inside Ellen's room, however, those barriers began to fall, breaking apart and tumbling like the walls of a biblical city breached by a single supernatural note blown through a blessed horn. We sat on the bed and sipped our drinks, all talk forgotten. The forces around us were larger than we dared think, and I almost expected the walls to crack and the floor to shudder, sending us sprawling into each other's arms.

  But that did not happen. It took natural forces, human desires, to bring us within touching distance.

  "I don't think I can do this," I said, gritting my teeth.

  Ellen's hand went to my face. Her fingers traced the line of my jaw, fingertips rasping on the stubble. She said nothing; she did everything. Her other hand went to my chest, stroking me there, massaging me through the thin material of my shirt. I reached out and cupped her heavy breast, hurtling backwards in time. She gasped; I twitched in shock; we both began to breathe in synch.