The Influence (22 page)
“I think she may have gone after that locket,” he said, trying to be vague.
Her silence made him yearn to be holding her, except then she would have sensed his panic. “You may be right,” she admitted. “Don’t be any longer than you have to be, will you? Next time I may take more notice of what you say about her.”
“So long as you don’t stop taking notice of yourself, love,” Derek said, and sent her a kiss. The plastic felt clammy against his lips. He was lingering by the phone when a milkman came to let Derek know his wife would be around as soon as she was dressed. Soon she arrived with her knitting, and Derek gave her Alison’s number in case there was news. “No need to rush, I’ll be here,” she said.
The wind had dropped. Mist shrank the fields beside the road and waited at the limit of the headlights. The idea that Rowan could be out on a night like this almost forced him back to Hermione’s, where at least his would be the voice she heard if she phoned for help—but if Hermione had really had a photograph of Vicky, might she have found out where the girl lived? While he struggled with his doubts his body went on driving, treading on the brake when he saw a small figure step back against the hedge ahead, but it was a gatepost leading to darkness. The road climbed toward Gronant, and as it rose out of the fog he saw lights fluttering under the trees against the sky at the top of the slope. People must be searching, he thought, and tried to be hopeful—and then he saw that the lights were on top of a police car and an ambulance.
As he drove up the slope he felt as if he were leaving his heart behind. He had to park before he reached the vehicles, because his hands no longer felt able to control the wheel: he’d seen two men carrying a stretcher through a gate. As he stumbled uphill, headstones wavered like failing neon as the pulse of light touched them. He was almost at the gate when a policeman with a flickering blue face blocked his way and said something in Welsh, and then “Can I help you, sir?”
The men had laid the stretcher down and stepped into a grave. They were going to lift out a body onto the stretcher, as if life were somehow running backwards. “What’s happening in there?” Derek stammered.
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir. Please move on.”
“I’ve got to see. I may know her.” Derek could hardly speak for praying that it wouldn’t be Rowan on the stretcher. “That’s my wife’s family’s grave.”
A second policeman came forward, and conferred with his colleague in Welsh. Eventually the one who’d stopped Derek said “You’d better see if you can identify her.”
Derek had already seen enough, and hated the surge of relief he experienced. The body that the men were heaving out of the grave was certainly not Rowan’s. He hurried across the graveyard, his bluish shadow leaping feebly ahead, and halted by the willow. Hermione looked as if she were screaming in a nightmare from which she was unable to waken. One of the attendants was trying to close her mouth, and Derek was afraid he would have to break her jaw, especially when the blue light made it seem to jerk. He might have fallen into the willow if a policeman hadn’t gripped his arm. “It’s my wife’s sister,” he muttered.
The attendant pulled a sheet over her face, and she was carried to the ambulance. As a policeman brought planks from near the gate to cover the trench, Derek lurched forward and glanced in, then recoiled from the sight of the bald blackened shape that lay crouched in the whitish lair of the box. The policemen closed the coffin and arranged the makeshift lid over the grave and then, grotesquely, placed No Parking cones at the corners farthest from the marble pillar. The sight made Derek nauseous, and he had closed his eyes when a policeman said “If you’d like to follow us when you’re ready, sir, you can make your statement at the police station.”
Derek forced his eyes open. “I’ve got to find my daughter.”
“You can tell us about that at the station, sir, and perhaps we’ll be able to help. Please don’t be long.”
How was it possible that they didn’t know about Rowan? Had someone called them to the graveyard before Derek had phoned the police? They waited by the gate, murmuring in Welsh. They must be giving him a chance to come to terms with what he’d seen, but he could tell they had their doubts about him. If he made them check that he’d called earlier, surely they would let him go for now. The pulse in his throat felt like a threat of sickness as he turned towards the gate and stepped into the shadow of the willow. The tree seemed to gulp the lights of the streetlamp and the vehicles. The shadow closed around him like black water, deep and chill, and a small pale hand took hold of his arm.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As soon as the station receded into the fog Rowan scrambled onto the nearest seat. Whoever had closed the door from outside wouldn’t see her now. She’d eluded Vicky and anything else that might have followed her from Gronant. She would be safe until Chester, where she would have to change trains.
Faded brownish seats swayed in the dingy light that clung like frost to the grimy windows. The train smelled old and stale and damp. As far as she could see, she was alone except for the driver. Cars reeled back and forth beyond the connecting doors as if they were striving to line themselves up, and made her feel unstable. She could trust the train, but she wished she could see where she was going—wished that the fog would give her even a hint of home.
She tried to rub the window clearer, but even when she tried to breathe on the glass she could make no mark. The grime was on the outside, and beyond that was the fog. Clumps of wet grass swelled out of the fog, sketching fields and a golf course, and then the bay came sweeping towards the railway and ran beside it for miles. Last time she had been able to see Waterloo, but now there was only the fringe of the sea, grey sluggish waves that looked weighed down by fog. She felt as if the familiar names, Waterloo and Crosby and Bootle and Seaforth and Litherland, had been wiped out by the weather. Soon fields pushed the sea away to be swallowed by the fog.
Her staring out had made the train appear flat, thin as cardboard, so shabby that it seemed on the point of wearing away to nothing. It made Rowan feel hardly there, hardly anywhere, in danger of being unable to fend off the memory of last night, the nightmare she needed to forget until she was safely home. Even when bushes flared out of the fog, green leaves turning yellow and orange and red, they seemed no more real than a film projected on the screen of the window. The prow of a ship loomed over the train, the keel beached in dank grass. It was a restaurant Hermione had promised to take her to when she was older. The next moment it had folded into the fog as if it had never been there at all.
Buildings broke through the fog on the side of the track away from the retreating sea, windowless brown buildings like cartons with too big an idea of themselves. Beyond them she glimpsed headlights drowning on the road along which her father had driven her to and from Hermione’s, and then the road was obscured by houses with long narrow gardens dark as moss, boxed in by brick walls. Lit windows displayed scenes misty as television commercials: a man dabbing at his just-shaved face, a woman rocking a baby in her arms beside a cot, an old man dodging from room to room of a house and switching on all the lights. It was too early for children to be up, she thought, and wouldn’t anyone who got onto her train at Flint want to know why she was? The train rushed into the station, and she was wondering whether to hide in the toilet when she realised that the train wasn’t slowing. It raced through the chalk sketch of a station and out into the fog.
So long as it stopped at Chester, she needn’t mind where else it did. A scrapyard ragged with fog sped by, a motorcycle glared at her out of the murk, dripping trees raw with autumn reared up, buildings that looked lost at sea sank into the fog. Houses crowded toward the railway as it approached Shotton, and the train blared its horn at the station. Only Chester mattered, Rowan told herself, but suppose the train wasn’t meant to carry passengers at all so early? Suppose it wouldn’t start to pick them up until it was past Chester? She pressed her face against the glass as the train sped into Shotton, and willed it to stop here as well, just to reassure her. The houses slid away, making room for a platform the colour of fog. The train wasn’t slowing; nobody was waiting. Rowan sat back, rubbing her face to try and rid it of the cold flat sensation of the window, and a figure rushed at her across the platform, trailing fog.
She had only a glimpse as the train swept by, of a figure in uniform with grey hair trailing over its shoulders. She was glad that the train hadn’t slowed after all. Then, as her car raced under a bridge at the end of the platform, she heard a door slam farther down the train.
Surely nobody could have boarded at this speed, but someone was back there. Rowan crouched on the seat and peered around it, through the connecting doors. Fog flooded by on both sides of her, sweeping away telegraph poles and greying tufts of grass. She could see no movement beyond the door except for the pitching of the carriages. She pushed herself away from the upholstery, which felt soft and damp, and was swaying to her feet in the aisle when she saw a figure coming towards her down the train.
It was wearing a dark uniform with a peaked cap. At first that was all she could see as her mind chased its tail in panic, telling her to run and hide, see first, run and hide… The two carriages between her and the figure seemed to shrink around her vision, twisting it as they jerked back and forth. He must be the guard, she thought, and he’d been on the train all the time. If he didn’t let her phone her parents he would surely call them himself, and they would promise to pay her fare. Why then was her panic growing as she watched the figure swing itself towards her down the carriage that looked starved of sunlight, dying of the lack? It was moving almost like a monkey, grabbing the backs of seats on either side and swinging itself between them up the aisle, its long grey hair streaming under the peaked cap. It reached the first set of connecting doors, and she saw it clawing at the glass before it managed to slide them back. It skipped forward into the carriage next to hers, and she saw the face beneath the cap. Despite the ragged hair that trailed over its shoulders, it had a baby’s chubby face.
Perhaps it was so old that it looked like a baby again; perhaps that was why the round face, pale as a snail’s belly, was slack and drooling. She knew only that it summed up everything she was terrified of. She watched helplessly as it swung closer, raising its legs so that she saw its thin bare ankles, white and blotchy as though with mould, above the shoes that seemed in danger of falling off every time it swung. She saw how delicately it had to take hold of the seats, because its blackened nails were half as long as its fingers. It was just a few seats away now, too close for her to escape even if she could move. Then it looked straight at her, and its small pinkish eyes lit up as a wicked smile puckered its toothless mouth.
Rowan choked on a scream and flung herself away from the end of the carriage, and almost sprawled full length. She fled along the lurching aisle, not so much supporting herself on the seats as fending them off. She almost fell again as she lunged at the door to the next carriage before it was within reach. The motion of the train helped slide the door open for her, and she glanced back in terror to see how much distance she’d gained. The uproar of the train must have blotted out the noise of the far doors, for the baby’s face was grinning at her from beneath the peaked cap perched on its matted hair and licking its lips with its swollen loamy tongue, close enough to touch.
This time she couldn’t even scream. She flinched across the roaring gap between the cars, swayed on the narrow walkway as the next carriage lolled out of alignment, squeezed past the door as it jerked open, clutched the inner handle with both hands as the train threw the door shut again. She leaned all her weight on the handle to keep the door shut, but it felt as if she might be dislodged at any moment. Praying that the door would stick, she raised her head unwillingly and looked through the glass.
The baby face was flattened against the window of the door across the gap. The blackened tongue stuck out of the slackly grinning mouth and squirmed against the glass. The peaked cap had slipped forward, almost hiding the gleeful eyes. It only wanted to terrify her, she told herself desperately, just as Vicky had wanted to. She thought of letting go somehow, of being able to sail away from the train like going through the binoculars, and clung to the handle as if it would hold her back from the temptation. Then she saw long cracked mottled fingernails creeping around the edge of the other door, in the moment before the car went dark.
A trench had closed around the train, high chiselled walls patched with sodden moss and weeds. The train was racing into Chester. If she could keep the door shut until it reached the station, surely she might be safe—but she had just remembered what lay between the trench and the station when the train rushed into it, into the tunnel.
Rowan squeezed her eyes shut and clutched the handle so hard that she couldn’t distinguish her hands from the metal. In the midst of the hollow roar of the train she heard a sliding sound, and then something pale pressed into her face. It was daylight, which meant that the train was out of the tunnel, but the tunnel was only the first of two. The second must be longer, because she was still in the dark when the door began to slide stealthily out of her grasp.
She tried to make herself strong as a stone, prayed that she could be until the train reached the platform, but the door was creeping open with a horrid gentleness, and she no longer seemed able to hold on. She strained to heave the door shut on the long-nailed fingers that she knew were spidering around the edge. They must be capable of reaching for her, seizing her while the pink-eyed baby face flattened itself against the glass until it was ready to drag her into its embrace. Suddenly she wanted to let go, either of the door or of her struggle not to do what Vicky had wanted: she would have given anything to be somewhere else, but now she realised she didn’t know how. Then the grey daylight flew into her closed eyes as the train lurched, and the door slid out of her grasp.