Road of the Dead (6 page)

I scanned the faces and spotted Red Suit almost immediately. He was sitting at a window table with a couple of hoods in tight T-shirts and an older man with amber eyes and a Quaker’s beard. Red was smiling at us. The bearded man looked as if he’d never cracked a smile in his life.

All in all, it was a pretty scary situation. The only good thing about it was the presence of a uniformed policeman sitting at the end of the bar. He didn’t look like much of a policeman—his face was flushed, his eyes were glassy, he was smoking a cigarette and guzzling beer—but I guessed he was better than nothing.

I’d soon find out I was wrong.

The staring faces didn’t bother Cole. He just stood there for a moment or two, casually looking around, then he unbuttoned his jacket and started moving across to the bar. I followed closely behind him. There wasn’t a lot of room at the bar, and the people standing there didn’t make
any effort to get out of our way, but Cole somehow managed to find his way through without having to push too hard. He even said “Excuse me” once. Behind the bar, a man in a white shirt was leaning against the till, drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette.

“We need a room,” Cole said to him.

“You what?” the man said.

“We need a room.”

Across the bar, someone laughed.

“Who’s
we
?” the barman asked Cole.

“Me and my brother.”

The barman glanced at me, then back at Cole. “Is that him?”

Cole nodded.

The barman shook his head. “We don’t take kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you
think
I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Cole said slowly. “That’s why I’m asking.”

The barman drained the whiskey from his glass, took a drag on his cigarette, then stabbed it out in an ashtray. Along the bar, someone called out to him. “When you’re ready, Will—couple of pints.”

Will nodded and started filling a glass. As Cole stared at him, I realized that the bar was beginning to fill up with noise again. People were talking. People were drinking. People were laughing.

I moved up behind Cole and whispered in his ear. “Come on,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

He didn’t move, just kept on staring at Will the barman. He watched him fill the beer glasses and pass them over. He watched him take the money and put it in the till. He watched him pass over the change.

Then he said, “Hey, mister—I’m talking to you.”

As Will stopped and stared at him, the room went quiet again. The only thing I could hear was the sound of my thumping heart.

Will said to Cole, “Listen, boy, I just told you—we don’t take kids. You want a room, that’s fine. But the squit over there ain’t staying here.”

He looked at me again, and for some strange reason I smiled at him. I don’t know why…maybe it was because I’d never been called a squit before. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I kind of liked it.

“How old are you, kid?” Will said to me.

“What?”

“How
old
are you?”

“Forty-six,” I heard myself say. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve got a very rare glandular condition that makes me look perpetually young. It’s a genetic disorder—been in the family for years.”

He looked at me for a moment, then shook his head and turned back to Cole. “Go on,” he said, jerking his head at the door. “Out—both of you.”

“I want a drink,” Cole said.

“Try somewhere else.”

“I kind of like it in here. There’s a nice atmosphere.” He pulled a £20 note from his pocket and dropped it on the counter. “I’ll have a pint of Stella.” He turned to me. “What do you want, Rube?”

“A pint of Malibu.”

Cole turned back to Will. “Pint of Stella and a pint of Malibu.” He pushed the £20 note across the bar. “And have one yourself.”

Will didn’t move. I saw his eyes flick to one side, and I looked over to see the uniformed policeman rolling along the bar toward us. He was bald and fat—fat head, fat mouth, fat belly. His face was glowing with sweat, and he had a cigarette clamped in his mouth. As he stopped in front of us, I could smell the beer and smoke on his breath.

“All right, son,” he said to Cole, “how about stepping outside for a minute?”

Cole turned around and looked him up and down. “Who the hell are you?”

The policeman put his hand on Cole’s shoulder. Cole looked at it. The policeman said, “You’re not much of a one for listening, are you?”

“Get your hand off—”

“Shut up. What were you told this afternoon?”

“What?”

“What did Pomeroy tell you?”

“He didn’t—”

“I’ll tell you what he
didn’t
tell you. He didn’t tell you to come down here and start kicking the shit out of people, did he? He didn’t tell you to come in here and start taking the piss, either. No, what he told you was to keep out of trouble and leave everything to us.
That’s
what he told you. Remember?”

Cole said nothing.

The policeman smiled at him. “Now, I know you’re under a lot of strain right now, what with your sister and everything, but you’ve already been warned against taking things into your own hands, haven’t you?” Still staring at Cole, he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth. “So, listen,” he said, “here’s what I want you to do. There’s a phone box at the end of the High Street. You take your little brother down there and you call yourself a taxi. You wait at the phone box, you get in the taxi, you tell the driver to take you to Plymouth. When you get to the station, you get on the train and go back to London. You do all that for me and I’ll forget about everything else—OK?”

Cole looked at him for a long time, weighing all the options. I knew what he wanted to do—he wanted to beat the shit out of him, crack his fat head open, smash his smiling face to a pulp—but Cole wasn’t stupid. He knew there was a time and a place for everything. And this wasn’t it.

He stared at the policeman for a little while longer, letting him see the truth, and then he just nodded.

“Good,” said the fat man, letting go of his shoulder. “Off you go, then.”

As we walked out of the bar, I could feel the man with the Quaker’s beard watching Cole closely. Everyone was watching him closely—but the man with the beard was different. He knew what Cole was. He knew what he was bringing. He could already feel the storm coming down.

Outside the hotel, I watched in silence as Cole checked his cell. From the way he stared at the display and snapped the phone shut, I guessed he didn’t have a signal. He looked at me. I got my phone out of my bag, looked at it, and shook my head.

“Shit,” he said.

We started walking toward the phone box at the end of the street. It wasn’t far. Nothing was far around here. You could walk the entire length of the village in about half a minute. The terraced cottages on either side of the street were gray and cold and lifeless, and I counted three more that were boarded up. The large stone house at the end of the street wasn’t boarded up, though. It wasn’t that big, but it seemed to tower over everything else, glowering down at the rest of the village like a stern gray sentinel in the dark.

I followed along behind Cole, gazing around at the
night. It had really come down now. I could almost feel it, draping itself over the world. It was a different kind of night from the nights I was used to—colder, darker, bigger. It invaded your senses. I could smell the drifting odors of the surrounding moorland. I could hear the secret sounds of the hills. And when I looked up, all I could see was an ocean of stars in a pure black sky, like a million gleaming eyes. I’d never seen so many stars. I wanted to show Cole. I wanted to stand together with him and look up in silence, wondering at the meaning of it all…

But I knew better than that. Cole doesn’t hold with that kind of thing. Stars are just stars to him—they’re there, and that’s it. What’s there to wonder about? And besides, even if he had wanted to look, he wasn’t in the mood for stars right now. He was boiling up inside. I could tell by the way he was walking—his jaw set tight, his eyes burning holes in the air. It was best not to disturb him. He’d controlled himself in the bar just now, but it wouldn’t take much for him to turn around and go storming back in and rip the place apart.

So I watched the stars on my own.

When we got to the phone box, Cole reached into his pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper that Vince had given him earlier. As he unfolded the paper and stared at the phone number, I could feel his anger simmering down and a sense of resentment stumbling up. He didn’t want to have to do this. He didn’t want to
ask
for anything. And I
guessed if I hadn’t been there, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. If he’d been on his own, he would have just stolen a car and driven off somewhere and spent the night asleep in the back.

“Do you want me to do it?” I asked him.

He looked at me.

“Here,” I said, taking the scrap of paper from his hand. “Have you got any change?”

He dug some coins from his pocket and passed them over. I went into the phone box and dialed the number. Vince answered the phone. He sounded really abrupt at first, but as soon as I’d told him who I was and what had happened at the hotel, his tone quickly changed and he suddenly became really friendly.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“In the phone box at the village.”

“All right—just wait there. I’ll come and pick you up. I’ll be about five minutes—OK?”

“Yeah, thanks…that’s really kind—”

He hung up the phone before I could finish.

I looked out at Cole. He was just standing there, smoking a cigarette, looking at nothing. I put some more money in the slot and called home. Mum answered almost immediately.

“How’s it going?” she asked. “Is everything OK?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. We’re staying at Abbie Gorman’s place tonight. We met her in Plymouth.”

“How’s Cole?”

“He’s all right.”

“Any trouble?”

“No—”

“Don’t lie to me, Ruben.”

“I’m not—honestly. Everything’s fine. He’s being really good.”

I heard her sigh. She knew him better than that.

“How are you?” I asked her.

“I’m OK.”

“Is Uncle Joe there?”

“Yeah, he’s staying over for a couple of days. When do you think you’ll get back?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think we’re going to have a look around tomorrow, see if we can find anything—”

“Do you think you will?”

“I don’t know, Mum. It’s not much of a place. If there’s anything here, it shouldn’t take long to find it. Couple of days, maybe.”

“Well, just you be careful—OK?”

We spent the next few minutes talking about nothing—the yard, the business, what was happening, what wasn’t—and then I heard a car pulling up outside the phone box. It was Vince in his Land Rover.

“I have to go, Mum,” I said. “I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.”

We said good-bye and I hung up the phone and went
outside. Cole was standing by the Land Rover talking to Vince. I went over and joined them.

“Who were you talking to?” Cole asked me.

“Mum.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yeah.”

I looked up at Vince. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, watching us intently. For a brief moment I saw him as a thick-headed spider, waiting in his web, waiting to paralyze us and wrap us in silk and drag us back to his lair…

“You can put your bags in the back,” he said.

I looked at Cole. He nodded. We threw our bags in the back of the Land Rover, then got inside and headed off into the darkness.

I
t didn’t take long to get from the village to Vince and Abbie’s place. A winding road led us up through a pine forest to a plateau of moorland, and then we were just racing along through an absolute darkness that could have been anything—sky, space, land, sea. It was impossible to tell. For all I knew it could have been nothing.

“Everything all right?” Vince asked me.

“Yeah,” I murmured, looking around. “It’s pretty empty, isn’t it?”

“You get used to it.”

After a minute or two he slowed down and changed gears and swung the Land Rover around a corner and down a steeply banked lane. The lane was barely any wider than the Land Rover, and as we swept along through the blurring darkness, the beam of the headlights lit up the banks on either side of us like the walls of a speeding tunnel.

I closed my eyes and held on tight.

After a while I felt the car slowing again, and when I opened my eyes we were turning off the lane into some kind of yard. Across the yard, pale lights were glowing in the windows of a small white farmhouse, and off to one side I could see the vague outlines of some larger buildings. Farm buildings, I guessed—barns, outhouses, cattle sheds. Beyond the yard, on the other side of the house, I could just make out a patchwork of granite-flecked fields in the dark.

Vince rolled the Land Rover across the yard and parked outside the house.

“Here we are,” he said, cutting the engine and looking at Cole. “You must be hungry.”

Cole shrugged.

Vince looked at me.

I smiled at him. “We don’t want to put you to any trouble—”

“No trouble,” he said. “I’ll get Abbie to fix you something.”

We got out of the Land Rover, grabbed our bags from the back, and followed Vince into the house.

I’d never been in a farmhouse before, so I didn’t know if it was a typical farmhouse or not, but I guessed it probably was. Wooden beams, wooden floors, logs crackling on an open fire. An Aga stove in the kitchen. A larder out the back.

Abbie took us upstairs and showed us into the smaller of two large bedrooms. It had a double bed and a folding sofa bed and lots of pine furniture.

“The bathroom’s just along the landing,” she explained. “There’s plenty of hot water if you want a shower or anything. The food’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

As she stood in the doorway, looking slightly uncomfortable, I could feel a sadness weighing her down. I could feel other stuff, too, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Some kind of longing, maybe…a desire to be somewhere else. I thought I could sense a hopelessness, too. Whatever it was she was longing for, she didn’t think she was going to get it.

“Is this the room where Rachel stayed?” I asked her.

She nodded. “She left a few things behind—a couple of T-shirts, some hair clips…I was going to send them down to you, but the police wouldn’t let me.”

I looked at the double bed. “Is that where she slept?”

Abbie nodded again. I looked at the bed for a while, trying to think of something to say—but there wasn’t anything. It wasn’t a moment for words. I looked over at Cole. He was just standing there, like he does—letting things be what they are.

I smiled at Abbie.

She smiled back. “Well,” she said, “I’ll see you downstairs, then…” And she turned around and walked out.

We listened to her footsteps clonking down the
wooden stairs, then Cole shut the door and dumped his bag on the sofa bed and went over to the window.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think we can do this?”

“What?”

“I don’t know…whatever it is we’re doing.”

He turned from the window and looked at me. “We’re already doing it. We’re here, aren’t we? We’re right in the middle of it. You probably know that better than I do.”

“Yeah, I suppose…”

“So why are you asking?”

“I’m insecure,” I said, smiling at him. “I need to know what you’re thinking sometimes.”

“You
know
what I’m thinking.”

“I need to hear it.”

He looked at me, his head perfectly still. His eyes were as dark as the night.

“You want to know what I’m thinking?” he said softly.

“Yeah.”

He paused for a moment, then moved off toward the door. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said. “
That’s
what I’m thinking.”

“I knew that,” I told him.

“I thought you might.”

“I knew that, too.”

He opened the door and went out without looking at me.

While he was gone I went over and lay facedown on the bed. It was freshly made—the sheets and duvet recently washed, the pillows firm and plump. There was no physical trace of Rachel left, but I could still feel her presence. As I closed my eyes and buried my face in the pillow, I could smell her sleeping skin. I could smell her dreams. I could see her face in the darkness. Her eyes were closed. Her breath was sweet. Her shining black hair lay soft on the white of the pillow.

Her lips fluttered.

Go home, Ruben
, she said.
Let the dead bury the dead. Go home.

When we went downstairs, the food was ready on the kitchen table. There was ham, chicken, salad, bread. Bottled water, beer, wine. Abbie opened the wine and started to pour some for Cole.

“Not for me, thanks,” he told her.

“You sure?”

He nodded.

“Ruben?” she said, offering the wine bottle to me.

I shook my head. “Could I have some water, please?”

As she poured me a glass of water, Vince cracked open a couple of beers and passed one to Cole before he could say no.

“Cheers,” said Vince, taking a long drink.

His speech was slightly slurred, so I guessed this wasn’t his first beer of the evening. Cole raised his can to him but didn’t drink from it. I clinked glasses with Abbie. She took a big slurp of wine, and then we all got stuck into the food.

“So,” said Vince, chewing on a chicken leg, “they wouldn’t let you stay at the Bridge, then?”

I looked at Cole. His face said—
You tell him.
I already
had
told him, on the phone earlier on, but I guessed this was just a way to get the conversation going, so I played along and told him what had happened all over again. I didn’t go into any details, and I didn’t mention anything about the policeman, but I got the feeling he already knew about that.

“Yeah, well,” he said when I’d finished, “you’re probably better off here, anyway. The Bridge is a bit of a shit-hole, to be honest.”

“Is it closing down?” Cole asked him.

Vince stopped chewing for a moment. His eyes blinked a couple of times. Then he started chewing again. “Who told you that?” he asked Cole.

“No one. It just looked like it was closing down. The dining room—”

“Oh right, yeah…it’s being refurbished.”

“What about the rest of the village?” said Cole. “The houses, the shops, the gas station—are they all being refurbished, too?”

A hint of annoyance darkened Vince’s face. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and reached for his can of beer.
“There’s a lot of redevelopment work going on,” he said, “a lot of reinvestment. It’s happening all over the moor. We were hit really hard by the foot-and-mouth thing a few years ago…the whole moor was closed off for months.” He looked at Abbie. “Things were pretty rough for a while, weren’t they?”

Abbie nodded. “I’d only been here a few months. Mum was ill, the farm was shut down…it was really tough. A lot of places went under—farms, pubs, restaurants—”

“How did you manage?”

Abbie glanced at Vince, then back at Cole. “Well, it was a struggle…”

“But you survived?”

She just looked at him for a moment, then started eating again. Cole opened a bottle of water and poured some into a glass.

“Not drinking your beer?” said Vince.

“Not right now.”

Vince shrugged and bit off a chunk of bread. “I hear there was a bit of trouble up at the gas station earlier?”

Cole shrugged. “It was nothing—just a scuffle.”

“Yeah? It must have been some scuffle. Big Davy’s still in the hospital.”

“Big Davy?”

“Yeah, the guy you hit—Big Davy Franks. I’d watch out for him if I were you. He’s not going to forget what you did to him.”

“He’s not supposed to. Who’s the slink in the red suit?”

“What?”

“The skinny little guy with the red hair—the one you were talking to at the gas station. What’s his name?”

“Redman,” Vince replied cautiously. “Sean Redman. Everyone calls him Red. Why do you—?”

“What does he do?”

“What?”

Cole had stopped eating now. He was just sitting there staring at Vince, burning questions into his eyes. I could tell that Vince was starting to get annoyed with it. Not that I cared—I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that Red Suit was actually called Red.

“This Redman,” Cole repeated. “What does he do?”

Vince frowned. “He doesn’t
do
anything. He just…I don’t know. He does a few odd jobs now and then. A bit of farmwork, a bit of building…whatever comes along. Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious,” said Cole. “I was wondering how he knew who we were, that’s all.”

Vince shrugged. “You know what it’s like in a place like this—nothing ever happens…everyone knows each other. News soon gets around.”

Cole’s eyes darkened. “I wouldn’t say that
nothing
ever happens.”

“Sorry,” Vince stuttered, suddenly realizing what he’d just said. “I didn’t mean…I just meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Cole turned away from him
as if he didn’t exist and started talking to Abbie. “You said that Rachel left some stuff behind—T-shirts or something?”

She nodded. “The police took it all away when they searched her room.”

“Local police?”

“We don’t have any local police.”

“What about the one in the Bridge?”

“Sorry?”

“There was a policeman in the bar at the Bridge—fat, bald, drunk.”

“Sounds like Ron Bowerman,” Abbie said cautiously. She glanced at Vince. “Ron drinks in the Bridge sometimes, doesn’t he?”

“You could say that,” muttered Vince.

Abbie turned back to Cole. “Ron’s the Rural Community Officer for this area. He’s based in Yelverton but he covers all the local villages.”

“Is he involved with Rachel’s case?”

“Well, not exactly…”

“What does that mean?”

She hesitated, looking over at Vince again, but his face was empty of help. She swallowed quietly and turned back to Cole. “Ron was the first one to arrive at the scene.”

“He
found
her?”

Abbie shook her head. “No, a forestry worker was the first one to find her. He called it in on his radio, and the
forestry people called Ron. Ron went out there and sealed off the area until the detectives arrived from Plymouth. They took over after that. I don’t think Ron had anything else to do with it.”

As she was telling us this, I was thinking of what Bowerman must have seen. He must have seen Rachel’s body, all naked and battered and ruined. He must have
seen
her. He was there. He was
with
her. And now, less than a week later, he was humiliating her brother and hounding him out of a bar…

I looked at Cole. The hate in his heart was killing him. He was keeping it under control for now, but I knew it couldn’t stay that way for long. When the time came—and I didn’t doubt that it would—Ron Bowerman was going to wish he’d never been born.

“Where was her body found?” Cole asked Abbie.

“About a mile from here,” she told him, turning to point through the window. “Up that way. There’s a wide track of moorland that runs through the forest up toward Lakern Tor—”

“Can we go there?” Cole asked her.

“When?”

“Now.”

Abbie quickly shook her head. “No…not now. You can’t see anything out there this time of night. We’d never find it.”

“Never find our way back, either,” Vince added.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Abbie said.

Cole nodded quietly and gazed out the window. The darkness was impenetrable. There was nothing to see—no lights, no movement, no life—but Cole kept on looking anyway.

Abbie muttered something to Vince, then she started clearing away the plates and things. Vince went over to the fridge and got himself another beer. He was beginning to look quite drunk now. His face was more flushed than usual, his eyes were loose, and when he sat back down at the table he had to put out a hand to steady himself.

“All right?” he said to me, popping open the beer.

I nodded and turned to Cole. He was still looking out the window, still staring into the darkness.

“Cole?” I said.

He blinked and looked at me.

“Are you OK?” I asked quietly.

He didn’t reply, he just blinked again and looked over at the sink where Abbie was drying her hands on a dish towel. “What time did you get back that night?” he asked her.

“Excuse me?”

“The night Rachel died…you said you were at your mother-in-law’s.”

“We’ve already been through all this—”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just want to get things straight.”

“All right.” She sighed. “Yes, I was at my mother-in-law’s.”

“What time did you get back here?”

Abbie glanced at Vince. He just stared at her. She turned back to Cole, still drying her hands on the dish towel. “I don’t remember exactly…it was late.” She looked at Vince again. “It was about one o’clock, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that.” He drank some beer. “I was going to pick her up,” he told Cole, “but I couldn’t get the car to start. She had to walk back.”

Cole looked at Abbie. “You walked back?”

She nodded. “I got soaked—”

“You walked back from the village to here?”

She nodded again, more slowly this time, staring at the twisted dish towel in her hands. Cole just stared at her. I did, too. We were both thinking the same thing: If she’d walked back home from the village that night, she would have gone the same way as Rachel. Same night, same journey.

Same night.

Same journey.

When Abbie finally looked up, her face was pale and her eyes were laden with sadness and guilt.