Sinema: The Northumberland Massacre (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

Like Alice in Wonderland,

The Dream takes you by the hand,

Inside emotions that you might not feel,

If by some notion that the dream was not real
...

15
^th
June - Six months earlier.

The man lying on his back in bed blinked as the drowsiness from a disturbed night’s sleep gradually ebbed away.

The dream was still fresh in his mind, crystal clear down to every last detail. It had all seemed so real, so perfect. He was by no means new to this dream – he had experienced it time and time again over the last few years. Sometimes small details would alter, but the message was always the same. And yet, this time it had seemed so much more vibrant, so insistent. The urgency could no longer be ignored.

He sat up, exposing a broad bare chest with a diminutive portion of fair hair. The red hair on his head was thicker, but closely cropped and receding. His chin had a dusting of fine stubble, and lack of sleep had left its bruised mark under his auburn eyes. The fat Labrador splayed beside him on the blue duvet lifted his head, curious at the disruption, then flopped back down, letting out a deep contented sigh.

The man swung his powerful legs off the edge of the metal framed bed, and gazed absently at the curtained bedroom window, his mind a torrent of thoughts and emotions. A fine shaft of sunshine stole through a gap between the two heavy midnight blue panels to offer a hint of a warm early summer morning outside.

The master bedroom of his modest three bedroom semi was decorated similarly to the rest of the house – plain magnolia painted walls and white woodwork with a generous helping of simple, but functional
IKEA
furniture and furnishings. However, what filled the room was anything but plain. Posters, pictures and memorabilia were scattered in random patterns across every wall and surface. A framed original film cell from
Alien
, accompanied by a petrified looking Sigourney Weaver, playing Warrant Officer Ripley, adorned centre stage above the headboard …
last survivor of the Nostromo
. Either side of it were similar cells from
Enter the Dragon
and
Scarface
. Bruce Lee, sporting nunchucks …
Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory
… and Al Pacino in the iconic stance, complete with M-16 assault rifle …
Say hello to my little friend.

Either side of the window were rows of postcards collected over the years and carefully stuck with Blu Tack to frame the window on both sides. Michael Caine in
Zulu
, Martin Sheen in
Apocalypse Now
, Richard Burton in
Where Eagles Dare
, Woody Harleson in
Natural Born Killers
, Steve McQueen atop motorbike in
The Great Escape
, Anthony Hopkins in
Silence of the Lambs
, John Travolta and Samuel Jackson in
Pulp Fiction
and many more.

The door had another tribute stuck to it – a signed poster of Anthony Hopkins, again in his role as Hannibal Lecter, as seen by Clarice Starling through his glass prison ...
His therapy was going nowhere.

A Freddy Kruger blade-fingered glove lay on the top of one wardrobe and several carefully constructed sci-fi models lay on the top of a second, including a twelve inch model of a queen alien from Sigourney Weaver’s famous horror films.

All in all, the room, along with the rest of the house, was a not so subtle tribute to the silver screen.

He stood up, his muscular body, ordinarily pale, seeming more so – almost translucent – in the poor light. Preoccupied, he dressed slowly in faded jeans and a Steven Spielberg’s
War of the Worlds
t-shirt. As he slipped on a pair of weathered
Converse All Star
trainers, he said, “Ju, asshole and elbows, come on boy.” His accent was nondescript, lacking any local twang.

Jumanji snorted his displeasure, but complied, jumping down rather gracelessly from the bed.

The dog followed his master down the hall, past a huge poster of Michael Caine, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, from the film
Get Carter
...
You’re a big man, but you’re outta shape.

Still on automatic pilot, he went about his routine of making a cup of tea and two slices of toast with honey. His body was going through the motions as his mind played the dream over and over in his head. Slowly, it was solidifying; taking shape, evolving.

“I love the smell of tea in the morning. It smells like…breakfast,” he muttered to himself with a distant amused look.

Sitting at a small chrome breakfast table, he drank his tea out of a
Lord of the Rings
mug in silent contemplation, his gaze drifting out of the window to the postage stamp fenced lawn. His thoughts were only interrupted briefly to tear off a piece of toast and cast it into the eager, salivating jaws of Jumanji. The Labrador swallowed it with one short gulp and sat, tail wagging furiously, for more. With only a mild awareness, he continued to eat the toast while his mind worked through his dream … his plan. Could this be what some religious nutters call destiny? Only the writers of history could answer that.

As he swallowed the last dregs of tea, he seemed to snap out of his trance. At once, he stood up from the table and looked down to his faithful companion. “Come on, Ju, we’ve got some work to do.”

Happy to be included, the dog let out a short, high-pitched woof and continued to wag his tail.

The man sat at a modern birch computer desk in his small cluttered box bedroom-turned-study under the watchful eyes of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, making their famous Bolivian last stand …
For a moment there I thought we were in trouble
...
on the wall behind him and from a shotgun-brandishing Dustin Hoffman …
Jesus, I got em all
...
above his nineteen inch flat screen computer monitor.

The screen showed an installation bar nearing completion and the title,
Whitman’s Country Guide: UK Edition,
emblazoned above a silhouette of the British Isles. Beside the wireless keyboard and mouse, the
Lord of the Rings
mug stood empty and tea-stained, along with a discarded
PC World
carrier bag.

As he waited, he thumbed through a pocketbook of Zen meditations. Several of the short phrases held little interest, but he paused at one:
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
He stared at the words for some time.

The software pronounced the end of the installation process with a short sound-byte of Gerard Butler as King Leonidas, shouting, “This is Sparta!” After clicking through a couple of colourful welcome screens, he arrived at a menu screen with a number of filtration fields, allowing searches by place name, location, landmark or custom.

Sitting forward, he clicked on the
Custom
icon. This brought up a drop-down list of options to fill the first part of the equation with a greater/less than/equal to option followed by an empty field.

After taking a moment to study the different options, he chose POPULATION followed by < and then typed 500 in the empty field. The word
searching
flashed up briefly and was then replaced by an extensive list of place names.

Ticking the box entitled
Narrow Lookup
, he then opted for KILOMETRES FROM URBAN AREAS > 30. After a moment, the list began to shrink. After a couple of minutes of chin-scratching and adjusting his position in the swivel chair, he further narrowed the lookup; SNOWFALL/YEAR > average. Only a few left. Last, but not least, CAPITAL CRIMES (based on 2000-2004 Home Office statistics) = zero. One place name remained: Haydon.

His eyes widened as he studied the six innocuous letters. One? He glanced down at the book of Zen meditations and then back to the screen. Excitedly, he double-clicked the mouse over the name. An Ordnance Survey map of the village and surrounding area popped up in a new window with a few lines of text beneath it.

Haydon, Northumberland. Pop.392.

Set in the heart of England’s border county, amongst the picturesque
Cheviot Hills
and surrounded by unblemished woodland and moors. Local attractions include
Cragside House
,
Lady’s Well
,
Rothbury
,
Wallington Hall
,
Hadrian’s Wall
,
Northumberland National Park
.

The highlighted words offered further information on the individual attractions. Clicking on Northumberland National Park opened up a new window that sent him to the www.northumberland-national-park.org.uk website.

Welcome
…
Northumberland National Park, the land of the far horizon – a landscape of limitless beauty from Hadrian's Wall to the Cheviot Hills. 

He clicked back to the map of Haydon and stared at the screen for several long minutes. His face remained unchanging, his eyes seemingly piercing through the flat screen to the tangle of cables and the wall beyond. After a minute, he nodded slowly and whispered, “Three-ninety-two? That would beat Pedro by at least forty-two.” Questioning himself, he added, “What about Shipman though?” He scratched his chin in deep thought.

“Hmm, possibly as many as four hundred and fifty-nine, but only two-one-five confirmed, so officially not a problem.” Besides, Shipman’s cowardly injections were hardly Hollywood material.

A conversation with possibly the dullest Directory Enquires operator in history (priests lost in Ireland’s biggest Lingerie Department sprung to mind) had rewarded him with the telephone number of the nearest Tourist Information Centre. The phone rang for a couple of minutes before a bird-like voice answered, “Rothbury Tourist Information.”

“Hi, I wonder if you could help,” he replied, seemingly oblivious to her abrupt tone. “I would like to visit a village called Haydon; do you know it?”

“Yes, it’s not far from Blindburn. Business or pleasure?” Still a clipped tone, but a little more forthcoming. He couldn’t help but imagine a skinny old maid with a long beaked nose and narrow, squinting eyes.

“Both,” he replied with just a hint of a smile angling the corner of his mouth. “Is there somewhere nice to stay in the village itself or would I need to look further afield?”

“I’m pretty sure one of the pubs there is also a B&B; let me just check.” He heard the receiver clunk onto the desk (obviously not heard of mute or hold buttons out in the sticks yet) and then heard muffled rummaging through a filing cabinet. State of the art … whatever next, the wheel? Just as he laughed out loud, he heard the woman say, “Here it is. Are you okay?”

Clearing his throat to suppress the snigger, he quickly said, “Yes, fine, sorry got a bit of a cough.”

“Right,” she said, clearly unconvinced and unhappy at not being let in on the joke. “The Miller’s Arms. It’s a quaint little place right in the village itself.”

He made a mental note to check the dictionary for the latest definition of quaint, as a vision of dust, draughts and foist sprung to mind. But, what the hell, it would all be part of the experience. “That sounds fine. Do you have their number?”

Always a business doing pleasure with you.
As soon as he hung up, he dialled the number for the pub. A gruff, authoritative Scotsman answered on the third ring. “Miller’s,” was his succinct greeting.

“Hi,” the man said cheerily, “is that the Miller’s Arms in Haydon?”

“Aye, what can I do fae yae, laddie?”

Shifting back in his seat and leaning into the handset, he said, “Well, I’m planning a stay in the village for a while and I need a room. Do you have one free?”

“Nae problem, laddie. When do yae need it and fae how long?”

The man smiled; he liked this man’s friendly but no nonsense manner. “From the Second of July till probably December/January.”

There was a short pause, presumably while the landlord calculated the length of the stay. “Five or six months, yae say?” Surprise and just a hint of suppressed delight. “Yae know we danae tend tae give better rates fae longer stays, laddie,” he added tentatively.

“What’s your nightly rate?”

“Twenty quid; including a hearty Scottish brekkie cooked by my good lady wife.” A hint of pride in his voice.

“I’ll pay fifteen and I’ll pay monthly in advance. That’s my one and only offer.”

He could almost hear the man rubbing his hands together as he agreed. “And what’s the name fae the booking?”

His heart skipped a beat. Stupidly, he hadn’t been prepared for that. What was he thinking? Why hadn’t he taken the time to jot down a few notes before ringing to get his story straight? He sat forward and chewed his lip as his mind scrambled for options. A favourite film character sprung to mind, followed quickly by the logo still displayed on his monitor. The process took a mere three seconds. “Hannibal Whitman.”

“Hannibal? As in Anthony Hopkins?”

“Yes, I get that a lot,” he replied a little too quickly. His cheeks had flushed red. Grimacing, he added, “I’m researching a book, you see.”

“A genuine writer, yae say? That’ll get the gossip-hounds waggin’. Yae written anything I’ll know?”

“This is my first actually.” The old landlord hadn’t seemed to notice his discomfort, so his heart rate gradually slowed and he quickly regained his composure. “It’s a dark thriller.”

He wrapped up the conversation with the usual pleasantries, along with giving false address details and the happy acceptance that the first month would be paid in cash on checking in. The next step was to start planning and also to sort out his affairs for the time he would be away. There was Ju to consider, the shop and the house.