Silent Children (15 page)

"You can do it," he cried through his clenched fangs, and saw the last thin beam of sunlight shrink as it retreated up the wall. The darkness that was filling his body with power was too much for the sun. In a moment he would be able to tear the nails out of his hands and thrust them deep into her eyes to put out the pity she'd dared to feel for him. He 'd almost let his love for her overcome him, but he was still a creature of the dark, and that was her destiny too. Then

"Ian, may I have a word with you?"

"Only got a paragraph, just a paragraph."

"Very well, if it's so important to you, I'll wait here till you've finished."

Then the weight of the hammer pulled Jonquil's arm down. The metal head struck the stake full on, splintering his ribs asunder. He felt it burst his heart. Agony shuddered through every inch of his body and out of him, and darkness rushed in to take its place, darkness that had the greatest power of all, the power of peace. In the moment before it took his sight and the rest of him away, he saw her fangs begin to turn back into the small neat teeth of his beautiful daughter, hardly more than a child's. The last thing he ever saw was her tearful smile.

"Is that a very long paragraph, Ian?"

"What? No."

"I ask because it's taking you such a long time to finish it. Is it hard to read?"

"No." Rather than dab at the moisture that had somehow escaped from the corner of his right eye, Ian scratched his cheek there. "I've read it now," he said, and turned to Charlotte's mother.

She was sitting on an elaborately curly garden chair beside the Wendy house, her thin ankle-length white muslin dress not quite obscuring what she called her body that Ian thought of, whenever he couldn't help noticing it, as a basque. Her upturned hands were folded loosely in the cleft of her skirt, an area he could have done with ignoring, and her head was slightly lowered as though to frame her patience with the glossy blonde hair that curved toward her chin. Her almost invisible eyebrows were raised, enlarging her big blue eyes—he suspected her brows had been raised ever since she'd sat down—and her pink lips were pressed together in a straight line, denying they were shaped like a sexy kiss. "May we speak, then?" she said.

She was doing her measured best to be reasonable, and he might have been receptive if the question hadn't included Charlotte, who'd perched on Hilene's knee and was regarding him with at least a show of nervousness. "Let's keep our heads and put them together," Hilene said "and sort out the squabble I hear you had. We don't like squabbles polluting the air in our house, do we?"

"No, mummy," Charlotte said, twisting around in her white-frilled yellow dress. "Mummy—"

"Let Ian have his turn now. What do you say happened, Ian?"

"She kept on at me to play when I was trying to read."

"Did you do that, Charlotte?"

"S'pose."

"It's a bigger word than that, now, isn't it? Words aren't insects, so we don't squash them."

"Suppose. But mummy—"

"Give Ian his chance. We don't want him to think he has to be polite to a rude little girl."

Charlotte sat resentfully straighter, looking not unlike a ventriloquist's doll. "I played with her all morning," Ian said.

"Nearly all, would that be closer to it? A couple of hours if we're going to be absolutely fair. That was kind of Ian when he was wanting to read, wasn't it, Charlotte? I hope you said thank you. We shouldn't stop people reading, unless of course what they're reading isn't good for them."

Charlotte glanced at her mother so as to copy the expression that went with the remark, and Ian felt outnumbered before Hilene said "All the same, Charlotte says you swore at her."

"That's crap. I never."

"Mummy, he did it again. Mummy—"

"All right, Charlotte, I heard perfectly well. Even if that isn't strictly swearing, Ian, it certainly isn't a welcome guest in our house or in the garden either. We don't want to be breathing blue air, do we, Charlotte?" When the little girl had finished shaking her head so vigorously it loosened her yellow bow, Hilene said "Is there that kind of language in your book, Ian?"

There was spectacularly worse, just one of the many things he was coming to think Americans did better than the English. "Some," he admitted.

"May I see it?"

He didn't know whether she meant the book or just the bits she was sure to object to, and he wasn't about to care. As he passed her
Blood Count
she lifted Charlotte off her knee. The eight-year-old shrank away from the cover with its reddened eyes using part of the topmost embossed silver word for sockets. "It's nasty," she complained.

"It's not just nasty," Ian said, caring after all.

"Go and play in your room now, Charlotte, or watch television if you must. I'll call you when we've finished discussing the book."

"But mummy—"

"Let's see those little feet tripping inside or they won't be going to dancing class."

Charlotte stamped once before flouncing in slow motion into the house. Her mother gazed hard at the door until it shut reluctantly, then she lowered her attention to the book. She flicked the pages and emitted sounds, not much more than short breaths and some hardly even that, on her way to taking a few seconds over the last page. She laid the book on the threshold of the Wendy house and found Ian with her frown. "What good are books like that meant to do?"

"What good is taking her down to the boats?"

"That's a question, not an answer."

"That's not a question," Ian said as Jonquil's brother in the book would have.

"It isn't clever to be clever, Ian. Can't you say how the book affected you?"

It had made him even happier that Jack was living in his house—even more admiring of how real a writer Jack was—but those weren't things you said. "I liked it. It was good."

"Did it excite you? Frighten you? Improve your vocabulary? Give you ideas?"

"Sure."

"That's what I'd be afraid of." She picked up the book, so urgently that the breeze of it caused the Wendy house to shrink away like Charlotte. "Aren't you old enough to see it doesn't make sense?"

"It did to Jack, and you only read the last bit."

"Which is all I had to read. A good book ties up all the loose ends, Ian. This has a brother who isn't even there, and the father wanting to be killed one moment and the next—I'd rather forget what it says he wants to do to his daughter."

"That's because being a vampire takes over when it gets dark. He tried not to turn her into one, but then he couldn't stop. She didn't die of it, that's why she can stand the sunlight, but she has to kill him or she'll always be a vampire. Her mother sent Jonquil's brother away to be adopted when he was little, that's why he isn't one. He came back and nailed their father down so he couldn't get away, then their father's slave, who wasn't a vampire, and the brother killed each other."

"Can't you hear how senseless all that is?" When Ian shrugged, meaning not that it didn't matter but that her opinion didn't, she shook the paperback at him. "Is this actually yours?"

"It's Jack's. Careful," he said, and grabbed the book.

"I must say if I were your mother you wouldn't have access to language or violence like that. Isn't there enough nastiness already in your life?"

He felt as though she were trying to replace on top of his mind the slab Jack's presence in his life had lifted. He repeated his shrug and met the eyes on the cover until Hilene called Charlotte, who came out of the house so promptly he would have expected her mother to be suspicious. "Correction over," Hilene said. "Now if he's kind Ian will take you down to the river."

"Don't want to go now. The boats have gone."

"They haven't, Charlotte. Look, you can see them," her mother said, pointing to the multicoloured sails on the glittering bend of the Thames half a mile away below the sunlit roofs of Richmond Hill.

"They're going. They'll be gone if we go."

"I'm sure Ian didn't mean them to be, did you, Ian?"

Ian almost let the slab on his mind keep his answer unspoken, but she raised her eyebrows a notch, and another. "Did you?" she said.

"No," he said.

"I really don't think you can compare reading, I suppose the gentleman who wrote it would call it schlock, compare reading an item like that with a grown-up remedying a situation."

It wasn't just her patronising him that made him stand up, it was how reasonable she expected him to think she was being. "Okay, I'm going home," he said.

"Charlotte won't look up to you if you go off in a sulk whenever you're criticised."

"She can do what she likes. I want to talk to Jack about his book."

"Your father said he'd take you and Charlotte to McDonald's when he gets back from golf. You don't want Ian to go yet, do you, Charlotte?"

Charlotte had flung herself on the recliner, both to claim it and to remind them she'd been disappointed. "If he gives me a hundred, if he gives me two hundred pushes on the swing."

"Half that, shall we say, Ian?"

Ian peered at Hilene to convince himself she wasn't joking. "Tell Roger I went home," he said.

"If you're really determined to go early I should phone first."

"Why?" He knew at once, which was all the more reason for saying "What for?"

"I just should." Having observed that Charlotte was listening, she pushed herself out of her chair. "I'll do it myself."

Intrigued by the prospect of her speaking to his mother or Jack, Ian followed her through the pale pine kitchen into the hall that seemed to smell of the flowers of the wallpaper. He watched her dial and then stroke her cheek with that fingertip, and gaze roofward as though there might be something she would need to ignore, and lean her head toward the wire in case that gave the answer less of a distance to travel, and very eventually replace the receiver. Before it touched its cradle he was on his way upstairs to throw his things into his overnight bag. As he expected, Hilene waylaid him in the hall. "I really think you should wait for your father," she said.

Ian might have retorted that his father shouldn't have gone off to play golf, though admittedly he'd invited Ian to join him in however many hours of tedium would have been involved. "I'll see him next time," Ian said, retreating down the cobbled path under several trellises of roses and out of the toothy white wooden gate.

He felt as if he were leaving the slab from his mind on the hill. He was sure he would like whatever he found at home, even if it was Jack and his mother hurriedly emerging from some part of the house together or pretending not to be. He didn't want to embarrass them. What he mostly wanted was to write a story Jack would like.

Church bells were competing across the width of the river as he caught the train to Willesden. North of the Thames the roofs of Acton swarmed by with churches sticking up among them. By the time he changed trains he'd thought up a little girl called Carlotta whose father wasn't really dead, he was a vampire that was hiding in the cellar. When her mother came home one day to their farmhouse near Los Angeles she scraped her hand on a point of the gate in the white picket fence, and when she went into the bedroom where Carlotta had been sleeping all day and her mother had gone to the chemist's, the pharmacy, the drugstore for medicine, the little girl smelled the blood and... He didn't know what happened then. Perhaps he could ask Jack's advice.

He didn't even consider turning toward Shaun's when he emerged from the station at Stonebridge Park. He was glad not to encounter anyone he knew as he walked home, his head feeling like a writer's, full of ideas that led in all directions to ends that wouldn't come clear. Gardens whirred with mowers, cars streamed with soapy water, but all that was irrelevant to the ideas he wanted to share in case Jack could tell him where they should lead—except that Jack's car wasn't outside the house.

Ian did his best not to feel disappointed as he let himself in. Jack might be somewhere researching his book or, since the house was empty, helping Ian's mother shop. Ian paced toward the kitchen as if he weren't certain what he would find there, and stood on the secretive concrete in case that might put him in more of a mood to write.

It didn't, but as he lingered, trying to bring some of his thoughts to a conclusion, he knew what would. Jack surely wouldn't mind if Ian borrowed his word processor to write a story for him to read, not when the machine helped Jack work. Of course Ian would have asked permission if Jack had been there to ask. He ran upstairs and into Jack's room.

Sunlight with a spicy tang of aftershave was reaching for the small desk Jack had bought and assembled, on which the word processor sat in the window. Ian left the door open and, having plugged in the machine, switched it on as he sat writer-like in Jack's secondhand swivel chair. The screen welcomed him and showed him its icons, from which he selected the writer's friend. The screen filled with tiny sketches of files bearing names, and he was trying to think of a title for his when the name of a file caught his eye. It was PROGRESS.

He'd heard Jack refer to his book in progress. The notion of reading a book that was still being written seemed irresistible, and he clicked on the file, which opened in front of him. It wasn't a book, it was only the notes for one. He read the first, and didn't know what shape his mouth had taken—felt as if he had forgotten how to blink.

HW's builder's yard on Blackbird Hill, edge of Wembley/Kingsbury. Sign says "Specialist in Property Renovation." HW uses empty buildings for burials.

David Baxter (7) disappears March 1974 in Kingsbury. HW's first victim. Remains found under floor of house 300 yards from home.

Julie Oakley (8), November 1976, Dollis Hill. Under new conservatory by Gladstone Park.

Stephen Mullins (6), December 1977, Hendon. Basement of house beside M1 motorway.

(Some victims not yet identified?)

Vincent Wearing (6), June 1980, Willesden. Extension, Kensal Rise...

At that moment Ian heard his mother's voice. Much of the rush of guilt he experienced was on Jack's behalf. The swivel chair rumbled away from him on its castors as he craned over the desk. His mother was in Janet's garden next door. Before he could move, she vanished into Janet's house.