Pretty Little Dead Things (2 page)

  It is only much later that I will identify that passing emotion as fear.

  I head for the motorway slip road, the night sky almost as clear as day but clusters of dark clouds closing in to obscure the view. Rebecca fiddles with the stereo as we descend the slope to join the motorway, and the sound of easy-listening music fills the car. "Whoo!" says Rebecca, pressing back into her seat. "Groovy!"

  Laughing, I stifle a sudden yawn. Perhaps I should have let her continue driving after all. I shake my head and work the muscles of my jaw, trying to overcome the sensation of falling.

  When Billy Joel begins to sing about an
Innocent Man
, Rebecca closes her eyes and starts to sway her head to the music. Joel is one of her favourites; she has all his albums at home, and never sickens of playing them. I will burn them all exactly a year to the day after that night. Even now, the sound of the singer's voice as he hits a high note is enough to make me weep with loss.

  I fight to remain focused on the road ahead, but the unusual lack of traffic and my overactive brain make it difficult to focus. I think now that if there had been more cars on the road it might have been easier to keep my act together. I would have been forced to concentrate.

  The music lulls me; my eyes begin to feel heavy and the road ahead blurs and blends to form an endless swirling ocean of grey. The lights far ahead and on either side of the car turn to watery streaks of illumination, and what few other vehicles there are present on the road recede, swallowed up by distance and the burgeoning weight of something soft and heavy that is pulling me down, down, down…

  We enter a narrow aisle formed by traffic cones, where the two lanes are forced into a single passage because of some mysterious, unseen roadworks. The cones flash past. My vision flares.

  In that moment I fail completely to see the other car speeding towards us along the left-hand lane, its extinguished headlights and radiator grille looming like the eyes and jaws of some giant mythical beast, like a dragon. Perhaps if I'd seen it earlier I could have turned the wheel to avoid the collision but the dull red Ford Sierra just ploughs on, its dusty (how on earth can I pick out such a minor detail while so much else remains out of reach?) front bumper and number plate growing larger and more terrifying in the windscreen.

  Terror bears down on me, coming towards me faster than I could ever have expected.

  When at last I truly notice that something is amiss about the way the car is racing towards us on the wrong side of the road, the opportunity for action has long passed and I simply brace myself for impact, throwing one arm out instinctively to protect my wife.

  Rebecca has her eyes closed, lost in the simple pleasure of a good song; Billy Joel's bruised voice is fading to make way for the next tune. Ally – thank God – still sleeps in silence in the back, so she is completely unaware of what happens next.

  But I am aware of it. All of it: every hellish second.

It was raining again. Why does it always rain in situations like this, when you're stuck out on a street that you aren't too familiar with, on a dark night in a rowdy part of town? It's like some kind of immutable law, perhaps akin to the strange household hoodoo that ensures you lose one sock from every pair you put in the washing machine, or whenever you put something down it's no longer there, in the same place, when you go to pick it back up.

  Some call it Sod's Law, but I just call it life.

  A grey blanket of sky hung over the maze of flat grey streets, the horizon line nothing more than a vague, slightly greyer demarcation located somewhere beyond the edge of the city. Clouds and sky were indistinguishable, a vast metal-grey sheet hanging above me, waiting to drop onto my unsuspecting head.

  Leeds is a pretty hostile city at the best of times, but on the night in question I felt that hostility rushing at me in waves, pulsing through the heavy air and into my mind like a small mental battering ram. The pubs had chucked out some time ago, but the late bars and nightclubs were still jumping. Bassheavy music spilled out onto the slick streets, mixing with the vomit and kebab meat that lay in unappealing fleshy patches on the glistening footpaths. Raised voices combined to create a rumbling undercurrent of chatter, but no actual words were audible within the shuddering din.

  Cars passed by at a slow pace, their drivers and passengers watching the roadside carnival from behind a protective layer of glass. Most northern cities after nightfall are like zoos, but by that late hour the animals had already been let out of their cages and allowed to roam free for a while. Giggling young women in short skirts and high heels stumbled off kerbs, sweaty men in thin cotton shirts sank to their knees and prayed to some drunken deity, large figures in dark suits watched from neon doorways – uneasy sentinels trained to spot the flame of violence before it even flared beyond a tiny spark.

  The girl I was waiting for was standing in the doorway of a pub opposite the Metropole Hotel. She was just twenty-one, wearing a fake fur coat over an expensive Japanese designer dress, and her feet were clad in the latest pair of Jimmy Choos – bought with her father's money, of course. Despite the suggestion of glamour, the girl was more "sauce in the suburbs" than
Sex and the City
. She stood in the recess, leaning against the wall, one knee bent and the corresponding foot resting flat against the dirty brickwork. She was smoking a short handrolled cigarette and warbling along to whatever tune was playing inside the pub, her eyes bright from the ingestion of cheap narcotics and expensive alcohol.

  I stepped back into my own dark doorway, wary that she might see me. I'd been following her for a couple of days, ever since her father agreed to my slightly inflated fee proposal.

  Baz Singh was a well-known Bradford businessman. He owned three curry restaurants, an off licence, and a small strip club in the centre of Bradford which – if the rumours were true – also doubled-up as a brothel. The girl was his daughter, Kareena, and in my considered opinion she was certainly worth watching.

  Let me get something straight right from the start. I am not a private eye or some glorified down-at-heel shamus; I do not have an official licence to run around investigating things the police are paid good tax money to look into. My days are not dedicated to Chandleresque sleuthing and I certainly don't spout sudden bursts of clipped dialogue while I hunt down Maltese Falcons or tarnished McGuffins. No, I just try to help people out, people who ask and who are willing to pay me for my trouble. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn't. Often it all goes horribly wrong. But it's a damn sight better – and safer – than what I used to do for a living: better by far than mingling with the dead.

  My name is Thomas Usher and I am – well – that's part of the problem. I don't really know who or what I am, not any more. Not since I began to feel the maggot of self-doubt gnawing away at my guts, not since the potentially true nature of my peculiar abilities were revealed to me in a glimpse too brief even to be considered fleeting. Since then I have tried to stick to the right path and avoid all things…
unearthly
, for want of a better word. These days I was more likely to be looking for someone's missing teenage daughter or absent spouse than gazing into the heart of the abyss.

  But it wasn't always that way.

  I used to be gifted but now I feel cursed. At one time I thought my purpose in life was to help the dead find their way through the dark, but these days it seems that I might have been mistaken.

  These days I can't even help the living.

  Kareena Singh stubbed out her cigarette against the wall and pushed away towards the middle of the footpath, like someone kicking off from the side of a swimming pool. A small burst of sparks remained in her wake, held in the air for a moment like a tiny swarm of fireflies before being washed away by the rain. The intensity of the rainfall had diminished, leaving behind that fine, wispy rain that seems to get you even wetter than its heavier counterpart. My scalp was soaking and my coat was stuck to my back.

  "Come on, Byron." Her voice was pure Bradford: dull, dour, an ugly sound from a pretty mouth.

  "Yeah, yeah." The large shaven-headed Caucasian man she was shouting at shook the hand of the even larger bouncer he'd been locked in conversation with and approached Kareena as she opened her arms to take him in a loose embrace. He ignored the gesture and grabbed her slim forearm, guiding her instead out into the centre of the road, where he stood trying to flag down a passing taxi. His hands, as he waved them in front of his face, looked as big as shovels, and just as lethal.

  I watched the couple without leaving my hiding place, studying the way they moved, the subtleties of their body language. One of the downsides of my particular type of insight is that I am often unable to read people. The dead are easy to understand if you know the rules – they follow straight lines of logic – but the living rarely think or act in a linear manner, and I am sometimes left feeling confused. I manage to fumble through, but whatever insights I have come from darker regions than those inhabited by the sunlit folk I meet on a daily basis.

  The truth is, only death could help me read the living.

  The muscle-man's name was Byron Spinks. I'd gathered enough information on him to know that he was a low-level criminal involved in everything from house burglary through car crime to prostitution. Kareena was seeing him simply because her father disapproved – that fact was obvious to anyone who took the time to look, even to me. Baz Singh had already arranged his daughter's marriage to a wealthy Indian business partner, but Kareena wasn't playing ball. She liked the freedom Western culture offered her, the right to make her own decisions and see any man she liked. The right to try before you buy.

And this was where I came in.

  Baz Singh had retained my services and asked me to watch his daughter and report on her movements. He was terrified that she was planning to run away with this yobbo Spinks, and that any business capital to be gained from the proposed arranged marriage would go down the drain like so much discarded confetti during a storm.

  The couple crouched and climbed into a taxi, so I ran for my car, which was parked at the kerb a few yards away in a No Parking zone where I knew I'd get away with it. I dodged a group of weaving late night revellers and climbed inside, following the taxi as it passed through a series of amber lights and headed out of the city towards the inner ring road. I'd seen enough cop shows on television to know that I should keep at least one vehicle between myself and the car I was trailing, but I was also worried that my lack of real experience in covert pursuit would ensure that I lost them in the heavy night time traffic. The fact that I hated cars and driving was yet another obstacle to overcome.

  I didn't like this kind of work. It wasn't what I was made for. Then again, I wasn't really made for anything – that was the other part of the problem.

  During my years as what can only be described as a psychic sleuth I'd honed and utilised many specialised methods. Seeing the dead, being called upon by spirits to help guide them to the next level, is a very esoteric field – I had no business rivals and I paid no income tax on my earnings. It was hard work, thankless for the most part. But after the death of my wife and daughter it was the only thing in my life that meant anything. My talent – my ability to see ghosts – was like an anchor, ironically tethering me to the physical world. Without it, I would've taken a hot bath with a cold razor, or dived off the nearest bridge with rocks in my pockets.

  But that's another story.

  After a few miles the taxi left the ring road at an exit marked for Bestwick, and I cringed at the thought of pursuing these people into what I knew was a rough area. But the taxi continued, passing through the outskirts of the mean-looking estate, and carrying on towards a disused industrial complex called Clara Heights. The place consisted of a wide concrete access road leading to several warehouse units, most of which had been gutted in a serious fire a couple of years ago, and some vacant office space which had miraculously survived the blaze. Prefab huts and squat redbrick buildings were scattered among the blackened shells of the warehouses. I knew the place was dangerous. If red-top news reports were to be believed, the area was used regularly by junkies and sex pests.

  "Welcome to the Terror Dome," I muttered, reciting the line from a film, or a book or a song – I'm still not sure which.

  The taxi stopped at the kerb and the couple climbed out. By this point Kareena looked slightly worse for the evening's drugs-and-alcohol intake: she was stumbling and her clothes were dishevelled. It looked to me as if she and Spinks had been getting more than cosy on the back seat.

  Kareena's black stockings were rolled down to her knees.

  According to Singh, his daughter had been seeing Spinks for six weeks – long enough for her to trust him but not long enough to really know him. I had the suspicion that the promise of danger associated with this thug was half the attraction, and that Kareena knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it. Pure bloody-mindedness and the desire to hurt her father were the motivating factors in this particular soap opera.

  My heart sank. Over the years, I'd seen the bloodied remains of too many women who'd made similar mistakes, the sorry victims of abuse and murder and sexual mutilation, the torn, shredded bodies of those whose only crime had been to make a bad choice on a lonely night. I'd watched them, these murdered women, as they tried and failed to speak to me from somewhere else. They often wept as they failed to communicate the depth of their pain through the barrier of death.