Pretty Little Dead Things (25 page)

  "A couple of witnesses who arrived after the attack began told us that Spinks didn't seem to be putting up much of a fight. They say he just sat there, on the floor, and let the other man cut him. One of the men said that Spinks was smiling. Another said that he was praying, but in no language he could understand."

  I clenched my teeth and tried to stop the dizzy feeling that was building inside my head. "Anything else, Tebbit? Is there anything you're leaving out?"

  "There were some words, Usher. A weird phrase scrawled on the cell wall."

  I knew what was coming; it was clear as day, obvious as the sunrise. "Was it a message, Tebbit?"

  The room felt vast, like an empty amphitheatre. I hoped that Ellen would stay in the bathroom just a little while longer, so she would not see the panicked state I was in. My hands were shaking. There was sweat on my face.

  "Yes," said Tebbit. "I think so. Remember those words he said to you, just before you left?"

  "Memento mori," I whispered, hearing once again a rush of air inside the earpiece and sensing that someone else, someone other than Tebbit, was listening.

  "The strange thing is," said Tebbit. "The really strange thing…"

  "Was it written in blood?" Again, I already knew the answer but was hoping for something else, something different.

  "No. It was written in ash."

  "Thank you, Tebbit. You've given me the answer I was dreading."

  "What does it mean, Usher. What does it all mean?"

  
Written in ash.

  "Memento mori? It's Latin. It means 'remember you shall die'. The world of the arts is littered with examples of this throughout the ages. Medieval Europe was obsessed with the notion. It's a reminder… a reminder of our mortality." I knew what he was asking – that he meant everything, and not just that damned message, but for some reason it was all that I could focus on, so I chose to bore him with sterile facts.

  "Don't bullshit me, Usher. What's going on here? My arse is on the line – I have those fucking hangings and now Penny Royale to deal with. It's too much, and now
you
seem to be what's linking the two cases." I could hear the rage in his voice, but he was doing a good job of holding it back, strapping it down so that it could not escape and do any damage.

  I closed my eyes. The wind-sound was now inside my head.

  "The two cases are linked. You're correct in that assumption at least. But it isn't me that ties them together. The common denominator here is the MT. That gang, those seemingly invisible thugs. Baz Singh has something to do with it, too, but I'm not yet sure what or how deep his involvement might be. Spinks was the string, I think, that held it all together, and now someone's gone and cut that string, leaving a whole lot of loose ends." Of course I knew more than I was letting on, but my own understanding of this knowledge was limited. I couldn't very well tell him about Mr Shiloh, or the clumsy illusion of the Russian witch spirit that had been torn down and revealed to be just another false front, another sham.

  Everything about this was intangible, tough to pin down, and I couldn't risk sending Tebbit and his officers off track in their investigations. Let them do the official stuff, the legwork, and I would take care of the rest.

  I always had to take care of the rest.

  "What is it you're not telling me, Usher. You promised me full disclosure." His voice was hard as slate, sharp as the blade that had killed Byron Spinks.

  "I don't know. I honestly don't know. There's so much more going on here, and we've only glimpsed the very tip of it. I think it all goes back a long way, but perhaps even farther back than even I can imagine. There are forces at work here that I don't understand. Another reality is converging with our own, and believe me when I tell you it's bad news for everybody."

  That seemed to shock him. He went quiet for a moment, and then I heard the sound of his breathing. "My head hurts, Thomas. I've been getting these headaches…" I thought of the tumour I knew was growing inside his skull, and of the promise I had once made his poor dead wife not to mention it. Right now, that promise was more difficult than ever to keep. "My head hurts so I'm going to go now. Just let me know when you have something… tangible. Something I can move on without my boss sending me to the fucking loony bin."

  With that, Detective Inspector Donald Tebbit hung up the phone and I was left listening to the crackling of dead air on the line. Deep within that pulsing white noise, for the briefest of moments, I could have sworn that I heard someone giggle.

  When Ellen once again emerged from the bathroom I told her that I was going home for a change for clothes and that I would meet her in Bradford later that day, so that we could both attend Trevor Dove's ridiculous public sham of a mass séance, or whatever it was he had planned.

  "Why don't I pick you up and we can go together?" she said, towelling her hair. She had put on her underwear, and the banal sight of her drying herself off made me feel slightly uncomfortable: I could not shake the conviction that we had once again become too familiar and just like last time, the timing was all off. My previous good feelings about this were fading fast. Now it all seemed like just another bad move in a game that had been lost from the very start.

  But my involvement with Ellen was not a game – it was serious, and I knew that I was messing with her life. With both our lives. I didn't want this to go wrong; I needed it to work out this time.

  It had to work. Because right now it was all I had.

  "Do you know how to get there – to my house?" I knew she'd never been there before, even in the old days, or in the older days before that.

  "No, but if you write down the address on that cute little hotel notepaper I'm sure I can find it. I'm a woman of the world, you know. I've even been in a space rocket." She grinned, despite the darkness that even now was closing in on us both.

  I jotted down my address and directions how to get there, then we kissed – rather awkwardly, I thought – and I left.

  Another taxi: yet another chitty to claim back from Baz Singh. I knew that I would have to contact Singh again, and soon, but other things kept diverting my attention. I wondered if he'd heard yet about Byron Spinks's murder, and if, like me, he suspected darker motives than a simple prison-ground difference of opinion.

  Once I was home I went straight into my room and took off my clothes. I felt grimy, as if I'd been wearing the same outfit for weeks, and the house seemed like a mausoleum. Cold, dark, filled with nothing but death.

  After a shower and brush-up, I put on one of my usual dark suits and trudged upstairs. The three girls were still there, but only just. They were fading for real now, their outlines barely even visible against the patterned wallpaper, like old stains.

  They swung slowly to and fro, as if caught in a strong breeze, and they no longer had the strength to acknowledge me. They had become just another reminder, a gentle prod to push me in the right direction – part of the vast
memento mori
my life had somehow become. Spinks was there with them, and even he wasn't much more than a heavy blurring in the air. He sat in the corner, with his back against the wall, gazing calmly up at Kareena. His position reminded me of when I'd found him in the warehouse, staring up at her body and keening like an animal.

  "Don't worry," I said, quietly. "I'm still on your side. I'll find out who did this so you can move on."

  I turned around and left them there, four wan phantoms jittering in and out of focus like pictures from a faulty television signal. Their increasing lack of solidity felt like a warning that time was running out, and I needed to help them before that happened.

  I had made a promise a long time ago that I would always do what I could to help the spirits that came to me. Sometimes my help is the exact opposite of what they need and their names join the ever-expanding list tattooed upon my back. Three – now four – more names would take up a lot of skin. I feared that I might run out of space.

  But now it was time for some research, before I once again entered the tide of insanity. Knowledge is power, and at the minute I felt completely unarmed.

  Downstairs, I booted up my laptop and logged on to the search engine I always used. The first name I typed in was Mr Shiloh, but the majority of the search results that came up seemed to relate to the Biblical location of the same name. It was an ancient city in the Ephraim hill-country, and considered by scholars as the capital of Israel – indeed the centre of Israelite worship. The Hebrew bible mentioned it as an assembly place for the people of Israel, where there was once even a sanctuary containing the Ark of the Covenant.

  Blah, blah, blah. So far so Indiana Jones. It was all very interesting, but there was nothing to link the mythical place to Leeds street gangs, a Russian witch, an abducted child and three hanged girls.

  The next search result was a transvestite nightclub in Essex called Lady Shiloh's. That didn't sound too promising either.

  The name of Mathew Torrent brought up even more obscure links: a baker in Leicester, the obituary of an American writer of pulp science fiction novels, a Swedish printing company specialising in religious pamphlets. To my stressed mind, even these seemed linked in some way to what was happening all around me. Part of the darkness I could feel creeping towards us all.

  I killed that window and opened another, heading straight for a few websites of my own. Over the years I had seen hundreds of specialist sites appear online dedicated to the subject of the paranormal. Most of them were superficial and aimed at the credulous, with faked photographs of "ghosts" and orbs and spooky little kids in white dresses. The ones I wanted were far more esoteric.

  I know little about computers other than how to hit the keys with my fingers, but I do accept that the internet is a rubbish dump for information – just not always the right information. Looking for absolute truth online is like looking for a diamond in a council tip. It just isn't going to happen. But if you are careful, and use common sense, it is possible to glean a few salient facts from the endless pages of puerile nonsense at your fingertips. And if you wade through enough garbage dumps you will eventually find a hidden gem, probably one that somebody else has thrown away, thinking it useless.

  None of the usual sites provided anything regarding Mr Shiloh or the mysterious Torrent, so I logged on to the last resort, a little place on the web where the real weirdoes hang out. I didn't like going there often as it tended to attract extreme personalities, usually with their own strange and sometimes borderline psychotic agendas.

  The site had started life as a sort of repository for Fortean stories and anecdotes, but over the past five years it had transformed into something a little bit scarier. People with avatars like Deadmum, Bileduct and Lady Oesophagus gathered there to trade insults and information. Some of what they said was even interesting. A small amount of it often proved valuable.

  The site search function failed to bring up anything pertinent regarding the names of Shiloh and Mathew Torrent (although, apparently, the transvestite club in Essex has a ghost called Matt), so I headed for the site's discussion forum. Keeping a low profile, I logged in under an anonymous account and scoured the discussion threads.

  After an hour of wading through disturbing tales of suburban poltergeists, a demon in a toilet bowl, and a harrowing account of a Catholic rite of exorcism carried out in 1971 on a pregnant woman on a camp site somewhere near the Lake District, I found a single abandoned post from another anonymous user with no responses attached. The message was dated over a year ago, and according to the site's records only seven people had ever logged on to view it.

  In the body of the post I discovered that someone had uploaded an old, slightly degraded black-and-white photograph – obviously scanned from a historical newspaper article – and asked the question:
Who is the man in the photograph? There seems
to be the ghost of a little girl sitting on his shoulder.

  These odd websites are littered with such stuff: old photos apparently containing images of the departed. Again, most of them are either faked or simply flawed.

  I couldn't see the supposed ghost, but what I did see shook me a whole lot more than any photographic phantom. The man was standing outside a shop with a large awning proclaiming "Torrent Fabrics". He was wearing an old-fashioned suit with a bow tie, and with what looked to be a white handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. A trilby hat was perched upon his head, so I couldn't tell if he had any hair beneath it, but there was little doubt that the face and sturdy physique belonged to Mr Shiloh.

  My new friend; my nemesis; my horror – they call him Mr Shiloh.

  So Torrent and Shiloh were one and the same. I was slightly ashamed that I hadn't seen this one coming, and in retrospect it seemed obvious. Shiloh/Torrent had created the street gang known as the MT. An ex-member of the MT was linked to the three hanged girls. Hooded youths had been seen following Penny Royale home on the day she disappeared. Mr Shiloh knew the Royale family. Baz Singh knew Mr Shiloh. Baz Singh's daughter was one of the hanged girls… blah, blah, blah. Fill in the blanks.

  Round and round we go: wheels within wheels, stories wrapped up in stories.

  I switched off the laptop and poured myself a drink, stared at the rather beautiful and expensive amber liquid as it sat in the glass, and then drank it down like it was medicine – which, of course, it was.

Ellen arrived at two o'clock that afternoon. I glanced out of the window and saw a little red Smart Car coming up the drive. I guessed that she must have rented it, and then I thought how absurd she looked driving such a tiny, stylised vehicle: like a kid in a clown's car.