Weirdo (38 page)

Sam tried again, putting the end of the cigarette a little further up his arm. She frowned, took another puff and repeated the gesture. Kept repeating it, over and over, until she broke the cigarette in half.

“For fuck’s sake,” she said. Corrine saw a string of saliva drool out of Sam’s mouth. “I’ll start again,” she said, in a tone half-pitched between boredom and rage.

This time, she put the end of the cigarette down on Darren’s forehead.

Corrine opened her mouth again, but it was useless. She could say nothing, hear nothing but her own blood pounding through her veins. But she could still smell all right, and the stench of scorched flesh that entered her nostrils sent another shaking fit coursing through her body.

Sam dotted the cigarette all over Darren’s face. “Not so pretty now, are you?” she said, throwing the butt down. “Not
that you ever were all that much.” She looked over at Corrine. “But still, I can do better than that.”

Corrine must have shut her eyes for a second without realising it. For the next thing she realised there was something silvery in Sam’s hands. A kitchen knife. She raised it up and plunged it down into the centre of Darren’s stomach. There was a sickening crunch as the blade went in, an even worse sound as she drew it out. “Oh yes,” Sam said, looking up at Corrine with a hideous smile of desire. “That’s better. This is for Debbie!” She raised the blade again.

Corrine stopped shaking as rapidly as she had begun. She felt the familiar sensation of numbness overtaking her, as Sam lifted the blade.

“Debbie Carver,” Sam said, her voice getting lower, more guttural. “Debbie Carver, Carver, Carver, carve her up!” She thrust the blade up and down, up and down, the tearing and sucking sounds of rendered flesh filling the old pillbox with a nightmare cacophony. Again and again and again she stabbed, rocking and gulping, her own body twitching now, her thighs bucking up and down. She didn’t stop until she was hoarse and breathless, foam flecking the sides of her mouth.

Then she lifted her hands one by one, clenching and unclenching her fingers, moving the knife from one hand to another, staring transfixed at the patterns of blood. Finally, she looked up.

Corrine, pushed up against the wall, stared back at her, mouth open and eyes wide, blood smeared all over her face. Staring between Samantha’s thighs, to where Darren now resembled the contents of a butcher’s board, although the expression on his face remained curiously unchanged.

Samantha stood up, weaving unsteadily from side to side.
She looked at the knife in her hand, frowned, and threw it over at Corrine. It hit the wall and clattered down beside her. Then Samantha took the cigarettes and the lighter back out of her pocket and dropped them where she stood. She walked backwards, stumbling as she went, until she was at the entrance of the pillbox.

Outside, she blinked in the sunlight, looked down at herself, at her hands, at her legs.

Then she began to run.

* * *

Edna was in her kitchen, working dough in a Pyrex bowl. She needed to have something to do with her hands, some familiar ritual to comfort and divert her from the terrible thoughts that were circling through her mind.

From the phone call from Wayne that had come early this morning, telling her of the granddaughter that she would now never get to see, never get to hold in her arms. Of the other that was roaming somewhere out in the streets, somewhere where even Eric’s best police contacts had not been able to find her. From the atonement with Amanda that she would now never get the chance to make. To all the pain and suffering her weakness, her stubborn refusal to see what was right in front of her, had caused her daughter, her granddaughters and herself.

And the empty dog basket in the corner of the room.

A middle-aged woman forcing herself to stand upright in her kitchen, the highlights in her rigidly styled hair catching the golden light of the slowly setting sun, her hands kneading and kneading away at the dough, worries working through her fingers, her fingers that already ached to the point where she wanted to scream.

The banging on the back door almost made her jump out of her skin.

Sammy’s face pressed against the glass, filthy with dirt and something else, something of a darker hue. Her eyes two enormous saucers filled with an absolute void of expression. For a second, Edna thought she was seeing a creature from a nightmare – a troll, a boggit or a witch, with a raggedy mane of upstanding hair. For a second, something deep within her told her not to let the thing over her threshold, to pick up a crucifix and send it far away. Then a more powerful emotion took hold of her, an emotion stronger than fear and stronger than reason. A grandmother’s love.

Edna ran towards Sammy, turned the key in the lock and pushed down on the handle, stepping backwards as the door opened and her granddaughter fell into her arms, sobbing and saying over and over: “
Nana, Nana, Nana
.”

* * *

Edna got Sammy bathed and into bed before she rang Eric. She sponged and scrubbed her granddaughter clean as new, washing away all the dirt and everything else down the plughole, wrapping her in her biggest, fluffiest pink towel, and singing to her the songs of her childhood as she dried her hair at her dressing table.

Sammy was meek and compliant, slipping into one of Edna’s nighties and snuggling down in her bed, in the room that Edna had kept in pristine order for her. Almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, Sammy’s eyelids drooped and her breathing slowed into a slumber.

Edna crept back down to the kitchen with Sammy’s clothes over her arm, loaded up the washing machine and set it to boil
wash. Stared through the glass for some time at the cycle spinning around.

When she eventually picked up the phone to call Eric, she found that she didn’t know quite what to say. “Sammy’s here,” she started with, “she’s safely asleep upstairs.”

“Thank God,” said Eric, drawing out a long breath. “Do you know where she’s been? What she’s been up to?”

“No,” said Edna. “But I think she’s had some kind of a shock. She’s acting very strangely.”

“Do she know,” said Eric, “about Mandy?”

“I don’t think so,” Edna’s fingers worried up and down the telephone cord. “I didn’t like to say, she seemed so …” But she couldn’t find the right word to express what she was thinking.

“No, you’re probably right,” Eric spared her the anguish of articulation. “Best to let her sleep. I’ll tell Len to call off the dogs. Maybe we can get it out of her in the morning.”

“Are you coming home?” Edna’s voice wobbled as she said it.

On the other end of the line, Eric put down the glass of Scotch that was halfway to his lips. On the other side of the windows, the tourists whirled and flew through the neon-lit wonderland, whooping with fear and delight as they traversed the wooden hills and the painted jets, the spinning, glittering wheels. On the desk in front of him, Amanda held the infant Samantha, a radiant smile on her face.

“I’ll see you in ten minutes,” he said.

Standing by the front doors of Ernemouth nick, Jason Blackburn watched the squad car come to a halt in front of the steps. His mouth was completely dry. Since Smollet had left him to deal with all this alone, he had tried calling Rivett several times. But the old sweat had left his mobile switched to voicemail and, without his guidance, Blackburn felt as if he had entered a parallel universe. A world where everything he was used to just got turned upside down and none of the usual rules applied.

Blackburn had experienced much in the way of strangeness during his long career in the force. But nothing to top the sight that met his eyes now. Arthur Bowles, the Deputy Chief Constable of Norwich Police, escorting his old comrade, DS Andrew Kidd up the steps towards him. Bowles looked straight ahead, his face a stern mask. Kidd, dressed entirely in black with a woolly hat pulled down over his eyes like some kind of terrorist, looked down at the ground, his wrists handcuffed in front of him, blood congealing around deep scratch marks on his cheeks.

* * *

Francesca felt a flicker of fear return as the lift doors closed behind them. There was barely room for the pair of them in there, and it was difficult to hide her discomfort. She tried to disguise it with humour. “He liked to live like a king did he, your mate Eric?” she said. “A red carpet, a private lift to his office?” The image of her parents flashed back to the forefront of her mind.

“As befitted his status,” said Rivett.

“And what were you to him?” she asked. “Some kind of courtier?”

The door opened on a circular room, windows all around it. Rivett stepped out first, turned on the lights.

“Every king need ’em,” he said. “You need brains to maintain power. The one thing that money can’t buy.”

As she followed Rivett into the room, it came back to Francesca what she had overheard her Dad saying about Eric Hoyle.
“With that for a grandfather,”
he had said,
“I s’pose it’s no wonder there’s something wrong with the girl.”
It was one of his pupils he was telling her mother about. But he had stopped when he realised she was standing by the door, listening to what he was saying.

“Take a seat, Miss Ryman,” said Rivett.

There was a big film producer’s desk in the middle of the room, with a leather chair behind it, facing in the direction of the sea. Another similar but smaller one opposite. As she trod across the white, shagpile carpet towards it, Francesca noted that the desk was bare of any ornament, save a big, round, smoked-glass ashtray, a matching table lighter and an old-fashioned black telephone with a ring-shaped dial. Rivett plonked himself down in the larger of the chairs, reached in his pocket for his cigars.

“They’ve kept it the way it was, then,” said Francesca, watching him light up. “Whoever owns it now.”

Rivett exhaled smoke. “That’s right,” he said. “They have. Not much longer to wait now,” he consulted his gold wristwatch. “I reckon he’ll call any minute. Sure I can’t get you a drink? They keep a well-stocked bar up here, so I’m told.”

“Whose courtier are you now, Mr Rivett?” asked Francesca.

Rivett looked down at the phone and back across at her. “The new boss,” he said, “has got a lot in common with the old boss. As you can see, appearances mattered to Eric. Mattered too much, in the end.”

Rivett put his cigar down in the ashtray, tendrils of smoke curling up Francesca’s nose as he took a small key from his trouser pocket and unlocked the drawer in front of him. Took from it a thick A4 envelope and dropped it down on the desk between them.

“I got to hand it to you, you are good, Miss Ryman. You in’t got none of the usual little twitches that give the weaker minded away.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively as he pushed the envelope towards her. “That’s what you’re after, in’t it?”

* * *

No sooner had he opened the back door to let the dogs out than Mr Pearson’s phone began to ring again. He turned on his heel, rushed back to the hallway to answer it, the dogs brushing past his legs as they ran in the other direction, out into the night.

“Frannie?” he said, lifting the receiver.

“Philip?” came a voice with a Midlands ring, familiar from somewhere in his past.

“Philip, it’s Sheila Alcott, are you all right, dear?”

“Sheila?” Mr Pearson put his hand up to his temples, closing his eyes. In a beat, a picture formed in his mind and he realised who he was talking to. “Oh, Sheila, I got you. Sorry about that, I must be having what they now call a senior moment.”

“Well, I did wonder,” said Sheila. “After what’s just happened to me, I thought I’d better check to see if you were OK.”

“Why?” Mr Pearson felt his knees weaken again. “What’s going on?”

* * *

“Where is DCI Smollet?” demanded the DCC. “I gave specific orders I would speak to him and no one else.”

Blackburn dragged his gaze away from Kidd, who was still staring at the floor.

“He got called away, sir,” Blackburn said. “Urgent business. Told me I had to hold the fort. Said he would be out of contact for the rest of the night. That’s all I know, sir.”

Bowles pushed Kidd forwards.

“Put this man in the cells,” he said. “He’s already under caution. No one is to speak to him until I return. And by no one,” the DCC’s flint-sharp eyes bored into Blackburn, “I most specifically mean you.”

* * *

“I caught a man trying to break into my property,” said Sheila. “But it’s all right, I was prepared for him, ever since your daughter came to see me yesterday and then that detective from London turned up, I thought something like this would happen.”

“My daughter?” Mr Pearson’s voice sounded faint, even to himself. “A detective? Sean Ward, d’you mean?”

“Yes, that’s right, dear, nice young man, I thought. Not like our local force at all. And that’s who it was, trying to come after me,” she said, her voice hardening. “One of them. The very same one that turned up on my doorstep all those years ago to tell me I wasn’t needed in court, would you believe? Did he get a shock when he found himself staring down the barrel of my son’s shotgun. And I’m afraid Minnie went for him too. I wasn’t able to stop her, not when I was holding a loaded weapon …”

From outside the back door, a ferocious cacophony of barking erupted.

“Oh my God, the dogs!” said Mr Pearson. “I’m sorry, Sheila, I’m going to have to call you back.”

* * *

Francesca stared at Rivett’s grinning visage.

“Go on,” he said. “Take a look.”

Her fingers felt too big and too clumsy as she slid them underneath the flap of the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of documents. The one on top had the name of a firm of Ernemouth solicitors on the letterhead. Her eyes ran down the typewritten page.

I, ERIC ARTHUR HOYLE being of sound mind and memory do undertake on this day 29.3.1989 to make the following
instruction. Upon my death, the business premises and trading interests of ERNEMOUTH LEISURE INDUSTRIES INC should be split equally between LEONARD HORATIO RIVETT and DALE ARMSTRONG SMOLLET, with the provision that neither party attempt to wind down, sell off or in any way discontinue the trading of the business.