Friends of the Dusk (4 page)

Just as she’d figured: nobody had ever said
trick
to them before. Probably not ever. They didn’t even have a trick. They
were
the trick.

Actually it might not have been the wisest thing to say. One of them had a hand moving inside a pocket of his hoodie. What if he had a knife down there? In
Ledwardine
? Oh yeah, after a gap of a century or so, people had been stabbed in Ledwardine again. And the vicarage was well screened from the village, with only the empty church on one side. People were always getting stabbed at vicarages.

The kids were swapping glances, ghoul-mask to ghoul-mask. If they did anything remotely funny or original, she’d hand over the Mars bars, get rid of them. If they didn’t… well, she couldn’t back down now.

Actually, under the light, they
all
looked too old for this. Maybe they were just accumulating stuff they could trade for pills down the Ox. According to Mum, Jude Wall’s older brother was on bail, having finally been found with a stash that merited more than the police cautions he’d been collecting since before his balls dropped.

‘I mean,
“
trick or treat”?’ Jane said reasonably. ‘What’s it mean? Why?’

She waited, watching the hand in the pocket. The air was sweet with applewood smoke from the chimneys of the Black
Swan across the square. The night was far too warm for the end of the old Celtic year. The storm had made sense, but it had faded. Which was so wrong. Like these kids, climate change had no respect for tradition.

‘I mean, any of you guys even know what Hallowe’en’s
about
?’

They looked at one another again, and then the reply came back, boxy from behind a mask.

‘
Horror.
’

‘Oh.
Right.
And what’s that mean?’

‘You really wanner find out?’ a thin kid said.

The boy next to him giggled. Jane said nothing. She became aware that they’d divided, two standing either side of Jane so she couldn’t keep them all in focus. Jude Wall had pulled his mask down over his face. It was a zombie mask, corpse-white with black radial lines through its thin lips. He drew a long, hissing breath and, one by one, the others joined in, and then the applewood scent was soured by beer-breath, which was…

… coming from behind. Jane saw, turning, that one of them was now between her and the door to the house.

‘All right,’ she said, maybe too sharply. ‘Back over there.’

The kid laughed.

‘Getting scared, now, is it?’

Jane stared at him, hands on her hips. He had a vampire mask, blood bubbles down its chin. He lifted his arms, raising long shadows under the porch light.

‘Yeah, I’m trembling,’ Jane said. ‘Now piss off over there, before I—’

She stopped. They were silent, all looking behind them towards the sound of footsteps on the drive. She saw a slender man, wearing a suit, the pool of porch light bringing up a sheen on his shoes.

‘I do hope these children aren’t bothering you, Mrs Watkins.’

His voice was quite low, a purr.

One of the kids hissed, ‘Children?
Children?
’

But they were still edging out of the porch.

The guy didn’t even look at them. He wore a long Edwardian kind of jacket, and his hair was swept back from his forehead, hanging behind to his shoulders. He wasn’t very tall but his back was straight, his head held high and, somehow, there was more of Hallowe’en about him than any of them.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re obviously not Mrs Watkins.’

Jane stepped out.

‘I’m her daughter. She’s—’

‘It’s OK, flower.’

A hand closed around her arm. Mum was behind her in the porch, all made up, aglow. Mum could still be quite something when she shed the vicar kit. She slid alongside Jane. Perfume. Wow.

‘Oh,’ Mum said quietly. ‘Mr Khan.’

She knew him?

‘My apologies.’ His voice was like satin. ‘I would’ve phoned first, but I’d been to visit my cousin, found I was passing and it occurred to me that I should call in.’

Mum said nothing. She let go of Jane’s arm. Jane scowled. One of the fundamentals of being a vicar: you thought you had to let every bastard in, like that was how God would want it.

‘You’re going out?’ He appraised her. ‘Or expecting a guest? If this is inconvenient, I can come back.’

Jane saw the kids had slunk away into shadows. Mum evidently hadn’t noticed them. She put an arm lightly around Jane’s shoulders.

‘Flower… could you just pop over to the Swan for me, and tell Lol I’ll be over as soon as I can? You stay and have a drink with him.’

‘You’ll be OK?’

Asking because it had just occurred to her who this guy might be.
Mr Khan.
Bloody hell. Flashback to a summer night out in Eirion’s car. A traditional-looking pub which, inside, had proved to be anything but. Actually a good night. Cool music.
And this guy in a white suit, periodically passing through the crowd like a spectre.

The next time she’d seen him had been in a picture in the
Hereford Times
, with a group of local dignitaries outside some derelict building down by the river that they were redeveloping as a bar and restaurant. Mr Hereford Nightlife.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Mum said.

Because, of course, she did know him. Raji Khan. Bloody hell.

‘Well… OK.’

Under the light of the street lamp outside the vicarage gates, Jane saw Jude Wall leaning over from the other side, was pretty sure he let go a gob of spit. Halfway down the drive, she turned and saw Mum following the guy into the house. The porch light went out and the vicarage faded back into the seventeenth century. Jane slipped between the trees and out through the gates where a single street lamp overhung the guy’s posh car. She wanted to kick it. Like what if Lol planned to talk to Mum about… well, about the future?

On the square, the council had reduced the street lighting to save money. The fake gaslamps were unlit and the black and white buildings were grey and greyer in the moonless early night. Only the Black Swan was a beacon, its sunken old windows like lanterns. She didn’t think Jude Wall and his mates would be too far away, but she only had to cross the street to the cobbles where cars were parked outside the Swan.

She didn’t run and she didn’t look behind her until she reached the front of the pub where she stood with her back to the wall, aware of breathing too hard.

Seemed ridiculous being scared of children, and yet it really wasn’t any more. In Pembrokeshire, a couple of the archaeologists had talked about having to work mob-handed these days because kids would nick anything, and if you got in their way… One of the guys had a mate who’d once been kicked into a trench and stoned with his own rubble.

Not that this neo-Biblical stuff had put her off archaeology, exactly, so much as how futile the job seemed to have become in other respects. Jane surveyed the shadowed centre of what was still called The Village in the Orchard, although most of the orchard was long gone. A lot of serious archaeology under here, possibly including the remains of a Neolithic henge that might only be discovered if some unsightly development got planning permission and the developers were forced to finance a dig to find out. And then they’d flatten it and build on top.

This was mostly what archaeology was about now – drawing a memory map of a Britain nobody was ever going to see again. Britain before it got turned into a shithole. As for rediscovering the magic in the land… She’d gone to Pembs, eyes open, with no mystical baggage. Determined that the phrases like
ancient energy
would never pass her lips in front of anyone with a degree in archaeology. And then one of them had said,
More things, Horatio, more things.
And something changed. Her face was burning now as she recalled waking up on that last morning not knowing who or what she was any more.

Jane took a couple of breaths, walked up the steps to the front door of the Swan. Most people these days went in through the alleyway, with its bracket lamps and disabled access, but Jane liked the old, worn steps. On the top one, an eruption of giggling sent her spinning round, and she glimpsed shady movement across the road, below the vicarage. Where the car was parked. Khan’s car, something smooth and bronze, maybe one of those compact Jags.

The little
bastards.
Were they using the car as cover for something or trying to break into it?

She heard rapid footsteps coming up from Church Lane, where Lol lived, so she knew she wasn’t alone. She slipped back down the steps, moved quietly onto the square, keeping close to the parked cars there. A man came out of Church Street, ran across the road. She heard a cry from behind Khan’s car, saw shadows rising, and then something was flung out like a rag.

She saw hands clawing at the air, recognized Jude Wall as the zombie mask came off. The big kid was sprawling in the wet road, the man standing over him as Jane took hesitant steps, pulling her phone from a hip pocket of her jeans. Stopping well short of the action, ready to run back.

When the man looked directly at her, even a scrappy beard couldn’t disguise Jude’s older brother, Dean Wall. Didn’t seem that long since they’d been at school together. First time she’d thought of him as a man as distinct from a bully and a slob.

Jude Wall tried to get up, and Dean glanced down and kicked him hard in the back. Jude yelped.

‘Shut the fuck up, boy,’ Dean said calmly, ‘else you’ll get one in the teeth.’ He looked up at Jane again. ‘Do my brother a favour he don’t deserve, Jane. Don’t tell
him.
’

‘Him?’

‘Don’t tell him who done it. Don’t want no trouble.’

Dean nodded at the car and then bent down.

Jane said, ‘Trouble?’

She saw he’d picked up a knife from the kerb. He shut the blade, zipped it into a pocket of his cargo trousers, Jude squirming crablike out of the road, tripping over his long coat.

‘All right, Jane?’ Dean said. ‘Not a word?’

This was like weird, dreamlike. Needing to keep a modicum of cool, Jane told him she’d think about it, and Dean Wall nodded. He’d lost weight, maybe donated it to his brother. He stood looking down at the boot of Khan’s car. Under the lone street lamp, you could see the number plate.

SUF 1

Personalized, obviously. What did it mean? She ought to know, but she didn’t ask Dean, having just seen what his brother’s knife had done to the Jag’s paintwork. One word scratched in. Almost.

childre

‘He called them children,’ Jane said. Her own voice sounded hollow. ‘And they were offended?’

Respect was all, especially if you were never going to deserve any. She felt sick, dislocated. Jude Wall was whimpering, gutter-dirt mingling with the syrupy blood on his face. Dean made a contemptuous, snorty noise.

‘Got no brains at all, this boy,’ he said.

6

Nightlife

M
ERRILY FED A
log into the kitchen wood-stove and the one below it collapsed into pink and orange flakes. She closed the cast-iron door, and the new log flared in the glass. Mr Khan wandered over.

‘Not as simple as it appears, wood-burning.’

His voice unrolling like an expensive carpet. Long black hair flopping over his forehead as he bowed. He did things like that, all these period-English flourishes. She recalled the one other time she’d met him, in his office at the Royal Oak near Wychehill in the Malvern Hills, all velvety Victorian, like Sherlock Holmes’s sitting room.

Rajab Ali Khan, owner of nightclubs. Elegant, educated and barely thirty.

‘Quite astonishing,’ he said, ‘the amount of wood needed to fuel one of these things over the winter months. One of the peculiarly
rural
problems my cousin is having to cope with. Not a rural person, my cousin.’

Not the first time tonight that he’d mentioned his cousin. Been to visit this cousin, he’d said, and decided to call in on his way home.

Except his cousin lived down in the Golden Valley and if Mr Khan was still based in Worcestershire this was not his way home.
Get him out
, Frannie Bliss would say, if he knew.
Get rid of the little shit.

Rajab Ali Khan, sometimes philanthropist and co-opted member of various diversity advisory committees. The young entrepreneur who’d converted a rambling country pub into a
venue for loud music. Unpopular with its neighbours, but you couldn’t be everybody’s friend. She’d once watched Frannie Bliss’s fingers actually curling with the need to feel Khan’s collar.

Due to him being a significant link in the West Midlands cocaine chain. Allegedly.

His smile was apologetic.

‘Actually we’re not so closely related. I just call him that.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Cousin.’ He turned away from the stove. ‘Mrs Watkins, I am
so
sorry. I had absolutely forgotten what night this was.’

‘Well, that’s…’

‘No, no. It’s unforgivably stupid of me. I arrive on All-Hallows’ Eve to consult you about a series of… anomalous occurrences.
So
embarrassing. Crass. Unsubtle. Not my style.’

‘Really, it’s… not a problem, Mr Khan,’ Merrily said, although of course it bloody was. ‘Good a night as any, and…’ Motioning him towards the refectory table. ‘I didn’t really imagine you’d come to book a wedding.’

Jane said, ‘I just… I can’t believe that
happened
. Any of it. One minute she’s getting all dolled up, singing in the bathroom, and then…’

It was like somebody had lit a slow fuse and there was no stopping it until there’d been an explosion.

Lol was half out of his seat.

‘So where is she?’

‘In the vicarage. With him. But…’ She reached out to his arm. ‘No… Honestly, she’s fine. Like, what’s he going to do? She
knows
him. She told me to come and have a drink with you and she’d be along later. There’s not going to be any more trouble. Not till he finds out what the little bastards did to his car, and even then… I don’t know.’

Her thoughts were swimming in the white noise of bar chat. Lol had been with Gomer and Barry, glasses on his nose, head turning as the door opened. Excusing himself quickly when
he’d seen her face, guiding her to the little niche behind an oak pillar.