The Mystery of Mercy Close (27 page)

You could never tell with that woman. Sometimes she marauded, breathing fire, taking the moral high ground, but other times she liked to think of herself as down with the kids.

Either way, I could never go back to that house. Never.

‘Come on,’ I said to Jay Parker. ‘Get in the car.’

We kept on driving and eventually darkness fell and the Talking Map led us further and further into strange, wild country. This was taking a very long time, much longer than the couple of hours I’d anticipated.

We drove along tiny twisty roads, along sharp upsetting turns and into grassy boreens that petered away into lakeside sand.

Twice I had to turn the car round and retrace our path, peering into the bare lightless landscape, searching for some hidden turn that I must have missed. Darkness spread for miles around us in every direction and I began to feel like Jay Parker and I were the last people on earth.

Hopelessness was starting to get a grip on me, when all of a sudden the Talking Map said, ‘You have reached your destination.’

‘Have we?’ I said in surprise.

I hit the brakes, reversed a few speedy, squealy metres, then hit the brakes again. The car headlamps lit up a pair of gates, intimidatingly solid, at least three metres high. They were set into a high, unfriendly wall and although I couldn’t see much in the darkness, what I could see looked very professional, very private.

I jumped out of the car, Jay hot on my heels, and tried to push the gates open. But to my frustration they were sealed tight and smooth. There was no give in them at all; clearly they were locked electronically rather than manually.

Wildly, I twisted and turned, desperate to see something
to help me. To be this close to finding Wayne … I
had
to get in.

Right. There was an intercom set into the wall. I reached towards it and recoiled away from it simultaneously. I was so excited, but nervous too. I didn’t want to fuck this up.

I looked at Jay. In the orangey glow of the headlamps his face was showing the same mix of triumph and anxiety I was feeling.

He nodded at the intercom. ‘Should we … you know … press it?’

My head was racing. Did we need the element of surprise? If Wayne knew Jay was here would he do a legger and hide up to his neck in the lake until we’d gone?

Probably not, I decided. It wasn’t as if he was a criminal on the run.

‘Press it,’ I said. ‘See what happens.’

‘You do it,’ Jay said. ‘I don’t want to.’

Funnily enough, I didn’t want to either. I was exhilarated and anxious and finding this all very unsettling, but it wasn’t illegal to ring a bell, so I pressed the button and held my breath, listening hard, wondering whose voice would speak. Wayne’s? Gloria’s?

Above my head there was a whirring noise and quickly I looked up. A camera was moving and positioning itself to get a good look at me. ‘Christ!’ It was really creepy.

‘Is someone in there?’ Jay sounded panicked, or maybe excited. ‘Looking at us?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe it’s an automatic device, triggered by pressing the button.’

I stepped back out of the range of the camera and Jay and I waited in anticipatory silence, hoping the intercom would crackle into life.

Nothing happened. Not yet.

‘Try it again,’ Jay said.

So I stepped forward and pressed the button and once
again the camera whirred into life, twisting and turning above me. That made it more likely that it was just sensor-triggered, rather than operated by a human being. I didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing.

Still the gates didn’t open and no one spoke to us, and after a while I rang the bell again. I gave it four or five more good goes, proper long presses, but no response.

‘If someone’s in there,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they’re going to let us in.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Jay asked.

Well. I had a little electronic gadget. It might open the gates. But it might not. I didn’t understand electronics. All I knew is that sometimes my little device opened electronic gates and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it seized the gates completely, so that nothing, not codes, not buttons in the house, would open them, and a man had to come and completely reprogram the whole system.

If that happened here, we’d just have to go over the wall.

I got my little device out of my bag and held it against where I thought the lock might be, then pressed the button and – to my great relief – the gates began to smoothly and silently part.

We got back in the car and quickly drove in. A concentration-camp-style lamp was sensor-activated by our approach, nearly blinding us. And then, before us, was the house.

Not huge. Medium-sized. But very impressive. A wooden-framed Frank Lloyd Wright sort of place with double-height sheets of glass and a cantilevered deck overlooking the lake.

We parked close to the front porch and I got out, speedily cataloguing everything I could see. No sign of a car. In fact there were no signs of life at all. The house was in darkness but this was no reason to be discouraged. Wayne and Gloria might have switched the lights off and hidden behind the couch when they heard us at the gate.

More sensor switches clicked on automatically and we
were drowned in white light. I pressed myself up against a window, trying to see in, and found myself looking into a living room tricked out in brown, red and orange. The interiors person seemed to have gone with a Western theme. The broad floorboards were strewn with animal-skin rugs and the man-height fireplace was made of rough-hewn stones. Cow horns poked out of the wall and there was a lot of horse stuff. Rough-woven horse blankets were thrown on the leather sofas and I saw something that might have been a decorative bridle. Ornate metal things, again something to do with horses – reins, perhaps? – dangled from the ceiling. Most egregious of all was a three-legged stool fashioned from a saddle.

No sign of Wayne, though. No sign of anyone. But maybe in a room that disgusting you couldn’t expect to find a human being.

I wasn’t sure what we should do. We didn’t have a plan. We’d spent so long driving through the empty countryside that I’d become convinced we’d never find the house, never get to this point.

I had the solution. ‘Ring him,’ I said. ‘Ring him and let’s try to talk him out.’

‘Okay.’ But when Jay took out his phone, he said, ‘No signal.’

I grabbed my phone; no signal either. What a horrible feeling.

‘We need to get in there to talk to him,’ Jay said. ‘He’s probably upstairs in one of the bedrooms. Can I shout up to him?’

‘Let me think for a second. Okay, go for it.’

‘Wayne!’ Jay called. ‘WAYNE. It’s Jay.’ His voice sounded astonishingly loud in the still, pure air. ‘Listen, Wayne, everything’s okay, you’ve done nothing WRONG. We can sort this all OUT. Just come home to us.’

The silence – the lack of answer – reverberated in the
lakeside night. The air around a lake always seemed to me to be abnormally still and spooky and never more so than at that moment. I’d readily admit I wasn’t fond of lakes. I’d always found them a bit, well,
smug
. As if they knew everything about you and you knew nothing about them. Lakes tended to
withhold
, I found. Played their cards close to their chests. You never really knew what was going on with lakes, what secrets they were hiding in their closeted navy depths; they could be up to
all sorts
and you’d never know, like suburban swingers. Whereas with a sea you knew what you were getting. A sea was like a puppy (not that I liked them either). A sea was exuberant and open and couldn’t hide anything from you even if it wanted to.

‘We need to get into that house,’ Jay said.

I was starting to have unexpected misgivings. If Wayne really didn’t want to be found, maybe I should respect that. But then the adrenaline overtook me, the rush of being so close to him, and suddenly I didn’t care; all that mattered was getting into the house.

‘How do we get in?’ Jay asked.

‘We just open the door,’ I said with a flourish.

I went to the front door and tried the handle – because you never know. But it was locked.

Well. That was a little exercise in mortification.

‘What now?’ Jay asked.

‘We ring the doorbell.’

But there was no doorbell.

‘We knock politely,’ I said and I rapped my knuckles against the glass front door until they started to hurt.

‘What now?’ Jay asked again.

‘We break in. Obviously. You gom.’

It might sound like fun but it wasn’t very nice breaking into a house. The practicalities can be challenging – usually you have to find something heavy, then break a window, open it, slide yourself in without catching any of your arteries on a stray shard of glass, then run through the house, all
the time with the alarm screeching like the clappers and melting your head.

Handily enough, in this case the front door was made of glass so I didn’t have to engage with any windows. And I had a can of strawberries in my car boot.

‘What are you doing driving around with them?’ Jay asked.

‘Shush now.’

I was feeling a bit sick. This was agonizing, to be so close to Wayne and to have all these obstacles in our path. Or to consider that he wasn’t in there at all …

I smacked the can hard on the glass and it bounced back at me. I smacked it again, harder and more focused this time, and was rewarded by the sound of glass shattering – a small hole had opened up, with big cracks leading out from it in all directions. I hit it one more time and most of the door just fell out of its frame and on to the hall floor, sending lethal little shards flying everywhere.

I used the can of strawberries to knock away the jagged pieces that were still holding on around the lock, then I put my hand in and twisted open the lock on the inside.

‘As soon as I push this door,’ I said to Jay, ‘the alarm will go off and our ears will still be vibrating this time next week. But ignore the noise and move fast. You think he’s upstairs, so we’ll start there. Are you ready?’

I pushed the door open and we raced in, crunching over the shattered glass, but no alarm started screeching. All there was, was silence. Unexpected, disconcerting silence. Which meant one of two things. Someone was in the house, which was good (but also bad because they clearly didn’t want anything to do with myself and Jay). Or the alarm had been triggered remotely and was currently bringing the roof in at the local cop shop. Which meant that in short order a squad car full to bursting with rasher-fattened guards would come belting along the road, yelping like dogs and brandishing their truncheons.

Or maybe it meant a third thing, actually. Maybe it meant that because Docker had never even visited this house he’d never bothered to get an alarm. Maybe he’d thought the gates would be enough of a deterrent and then lost interest in the whole thing.

‘Move,’ I said to Jay.

We both belted up the stairs. Something strange was happening each time our feet hit the wooden steps. We’d arrived on the landing and were moving from room to room so quickly – there were three bedrooms, all very ranchy – that it took a few moments to realize what the strange thing that was happening was. It was dust – inch-thick dust that had lain undisturbed for a long time – rising into the air as our feet slapped the ground.

There was no one in any of the bedrooms, no one under the beds, nothing but dust. Losing more and more hope, I clattered back downstairs, my last bit of optimism pinned on the kitchen.

I promised myself there would be signs of life there. We’d find lots of fresh food: milk, eggs, cheese, chocolate Swiss roll. But there was nothing. And when I saw that the fridge wasn’t even plugged in, it was like I’d hit a wall.

There was no one here. No one had been here in a very long time.

Not Wayne. Not Gloria. Not anyone.

The anticlimax was so appalling that I couldn’t speak and neither could Jay.

All urgency left us and we walked, like people in shock, out to the deck. We stood looking down at the still black waters of the lake.

For a long time we stared in silence into its inky depths.

‘Funny that,’ I said. ‘It does actually look like ink. It’s got the same texture, almost viscous.’

‘You could drown in that,’ Jay said. ‘There’re always ads on telly saying how easy it is to drown.’

‘They’re wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s very hard to drown.’

I should know.

I’d thought of everything that time I’d tried and I still hadn’t been able to pull it off. I’d actually packed a bag for it. I’d loaded up a rucksack with little hand weights that I’d bought in another life when I’d cared about bicep definition. I’d filled my pockets with cans of strawberries and I’d worn my heaviest boots. I’d waited until it was late at night and dark and I walked right to the end of Dun Laoghaire pier, over a mile, as far away from land and people as it was possible for me to get, and climbed down the slimy, seaweedy stone steps into the black water.

The water was cold enough to make me reconsider – only for a moment – but the biggest shock was that it only came up to my waist. I had expected I’d be engulfed immediately and carried off to the land of no pain.

For the love of God! Was life going to humiliate me right until the very end?

Defiantly, I struck out towards the mouth of the bay, to
where the water was deeper –
had
to be deeper, how else did they get those massive ferries in? – but all the weights I was wearing were slowing me down.

‘Hey!’ a woman’s voice called from the pier. ‘You in the water, what are you doing? Are you okay?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just swimming.’

She must have been a dog-walker. What else would she have been doing there at that time of night?

I kept on going, moving sluggishly and slowly, hoping I’d fall off some underwater shelf and be dragged to the depths. But the water wasn’t getting any deeper. All that was happening was that I was getting colder. My jaw was chattering uncontrollably and my feet and legs were feeling thick and numb. Maybe this was how it would play out. Instead of drowning maybe I’d just get colder and colder and eventually get overtaken by hypothermia. I didn’t care how it happened, I just wanted it done.