The Darkening (36 page)

‘For you.’

He took the phone. It was Laine Boye.

‘Sorry to disturb your evening, Mr Close.’ Her voice was so crackly it could have been cast from Mars.

Katharine slipped into the bathroom and started the shower. There would be no more talking about Donald Close and Tallong tonight.

‘That’s fine,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Is there . . . Can I help you?’

‘This might sound odd, Mr Close,’ said Laine. ‘But I need to ask you about a dead bird.’

21

T
he rain thundered down so heavily that Pritam could imagine that space itself was made of water, and was now pouring through rents in the sky’s tired fabric.

The three of them sat in the presbytery’s leather club chairs, finishing coffee. The mood was odd. Three very different people, each effectively a stranger to the other two. They had next to nothing in common. A neatly dressed Christian clergyman. A reserved, elegant woman recently widowed. And that long-limbed scarecrow of a man Nicholas Close. Would they ever have gathered were it not for these unusual circumstances? He didn’t think so. Yet they were surprisingly comfortable together. None had a loved one waiting at home for them. All had lost someone close to them recently. Sad, strange events had brought them together, yet there was something warming about each other’s company. Something easy and right, but very fragile - a fine rope across a wide chasm. Each felt it; the silence while they sipped was delicate and none wanted to break it.

After returning from the Gerlics’ house, Pritam had set himself busy to fill the time until Nicholas arrived. He’d mopped out John’s room, cleaned his ensuite, found a hundred small excuses not to go into the main church. When he heard a knock at the presbytery door, he had been surprised to find not Nicholas, but Laine Boye. She explained that Nicholas had invited her. Not long later, Nicholas himself arrived. Pritam made coffee, they exchanged small talk, and a silence settled that each recognised as a cue: it was time for serious talk.

‘Okay,’ Nicholas began. ‘I’ve told Pritam some of this, but not everything. Not by a long shot. Laine, you said Gavin mentioned a bird?’

Pritam felt the last word suddenly flutter in his gut like a real bird, nervous and ready to flee. He watched Nicholas walk over to the small bar fridge; he pulled out the plastic bag and untied it on the coffee table. Pritam’s heart beat faster as he saw again that violated little body, that disquieting woven ball for a head. He looked over to see Laine’s reaction to the mutilated bird, but her grey eyes were utterly inscrutable.

‘I first saw a bird like this four days before Gavin’s brother was murdered,’ Nicholas said, starting in 1982 with finding the dead bird and showing his best friend, Tristram. Then there was Winston Teale chasing them both into the woods, and watching Tris and his broken wrist disappear under the old water pipe through a tunnel full of spiders. How Tris’s drained body had been found miles away under tin and timber. Teale’s confession and suicide. Years later, Cate’s death. His fall on the stairs outside the flat in Ealing. The ghost of the screwdriver-wielding boy. Then more ghosts; sad, trapped ghosts. Cate’s ghost. Returning from London on a rainy night like this when Dylan Thomas disappeared. Elliot Guyatt’s confession and suicide, so eerily like Teale’s. Gavin’s dawn message punctuated by two sharp cracks of his rifle on which Thurisaz was scored: the rune that kept reappearing and seemed inextricable from death. Pursuing the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. The strawberries. The
Wynard
. The old woman and her dog Garnock that was no dog. The nauseating hand job. The archived flyers and news articles: so many missing children, so many dead men. Eleanor Bretherton, grim patron of this church, the spitting image of Mrs Quill the dressmaker. Her shop, now a health food store, with a rune marked into its door. Garnock attacking Suzette and wrenching out her hair, and Nicholas’s nephew falling ill the next morning. The odd power of the sardonyx and elder-wood necklace. And earlier today: a development sign erected, another bird talisman found, and a girl nearly snatched with Nicholas himself darkly urged to deliver her into the gloomy woods on Carmichael Road.

His story finished. The room fell silent under the cold gaze of Eleanor Bretherton, staring belligerently out from monochromatic 1888.

Pritam was exhausted, as if he’d just finished watching a disturbing horror feature that he knew couldn’t be real, but still made him want to avoid the shadows. He looked over to Laine Boye. She was watching him intently, as if gauging his reaction.

‘And, of course,’ said Nicholas, ‘a credible witness who could have confirmed that Quill and Bretherton were, forgive the pun, birds of a feather is dead. John Hird.’

‘True,’ said Pritam, and was surprised how quiet his voice was. ‘But there is this.’

He went to his desk drawer and returned with the photo of Mrs Quill at the church fête thirty-two years ago. Nicholas put out his hand, but Pritam stepped past him and handed it to Laine.

When Laine saw it, her lips tightened but her face betrayed no emotion. She stood and went to the hanging photograph of Eleanor Bretherton and compared the two for a full minute.

‘Could Quill be her grand-daughter?’ she finally asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas. ‘But there was no record of Eleanor Bretherton marrying or having children. She was a spinster.’

‘You tell me, Mrs Boye,’ said Pritam. ‘Are they the same person?’

Laine held the photographs side by side, comparing Quill’s and Bretherton’s scowls, their chins, their frosty alarm at being photographed. After a long minute, she returned the photograph to Pritam.

‘Similar,’ she said.

The rain outside roared.

‘So?’ asked Nicholas, looking from Pritam to Laine.

Laine looked at Pritam. He nodded - you speak first.

‘So,’ said Laine, ‘we have two photographs a hundred years apart with two women who look alike, but that means nothing of itself. A list of deaths and murders, but they were all explained away or confessed to. As for the bird, you could have mutilated it. We only have your word, Mr Close, that you found it. But . . .’

‘But?’

‘But you say you can see ghosts.’

Laine kept her cool gaze on Nicholas. For a long moment, he was silent. Then he spoke quietly.

‘True. The only thing it doesn’t explain is why your husband was talking in his sleep about a dead bird before he left your bed and shot himself.’

Pritam saw a shiver of something behind Laine’s eyes. Was it fear? Anger? It was gone so quickly, he wondered if he’d seen it at all.

Nicholas turned and looked at him. ‘Well, Reverend, what do you think? A coincidence with Bretherton and Quill? Secret relatives?’ He smiled grimly. ‘And what about me? Crazy guy who thinks he sees ghosts?’

Pritam could see that Nicholas was fighting to seem contained, but was ready to snap.

‘My religion,’ he answered slowly, ‘says that one of the three aspects of my God is a ghost.’

Nicholas smiled grimly. ‘However?’

‘However, I need to ask . . . Are you afraid of spiders?’

Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard. ‘Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.’

‘Were you always?’

‘What are you, a psychiatrist?’

Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning.

‘Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child, and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult, and the trauma of seeing Laine’s husband take his life in front of you just recently . . .’ Pritam shrugged and raised his palms. ‘You see where I’m going?’

Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her grey eyes missed nothing.

‘Sure,’ agreed Nicholas, standing. ‘And my sister’s nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.’

‘Your father died?’ asked Laine. ‘When?’

‘Who cares?’

Pritam sighed. ‘You must see this from our point of—’

‘I’d love to!’ snapped Nicholas. ‘I’d love to see it from your point of view, because mine’s not that much fun! It’s insane! It’s insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It’s insane that this,’ he flicked out the sardonyx necklace, ‘stopped me kidnapping a little girl!’

‘That’s what you believe,’ said Pritam carefully.

‘
That’s
what I fucking believe!’ Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.

Pritam’s jaw tightened. ‘Please don’t swear in my church.’

‘IT’S
HER
CHURCH!!’ Nicholas snatched up the photo of Mrs Quill and threw it at the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton. ‘She paid for it! She owns this place! Do you know why? I don’t, but I think it’s pretty fucking fishy! And why do you think, despite all those people that
died
, all we have is this crappy pile of
speculation
!’ He was spitting out the words. ‘Because she’s
smart
! She watches and she waits and she takes and she gets away with it because it’s insane to think otherwise!’

The air in the presbytery was as sharp and fragile as crystal. Pritam felt as incensed as the first time Nicholas Close was in here. What was it about the man that infuriated him so?

It’s because he has no respect for God.

Pritam licked his lips and said softly, ‘I think perhaps we should continue this another night when you’re a little calmer.’

Nicholas glared at him, then jerked his gaze to Laine.

She looked back evenly, her hands in her lap, expression indecipherable.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.

‘And don’t blaspheme, please,’ Pritam said curtly.

Nicholas stood and opened the front door. The roar of rain filled the room.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to put aside the real world for this stuff. I’d give my right arm to not believe it.’ He looked at Pritam. ‘But if you’re going to be offended by a couple of words, I don’t think you’re up for what this is all about. This is murder and black magic. You don’t believe in magic? That’s fine. I didn’t until a few days ago. But if you two have any sense, don’t take the risk. Get out of here.’

He closed the door behind him, and the room again fell almost silent.

Anyone outside the church would have seen a tall man striding to his car, not caring that his unruly hair was slicked down by the heavy rain, throwing open his car door and angrily wrenching the engine alive. As the car drove away, its tinny burble faded, leaving only the hot skittle spatter of rain on the road. And a small, careful slide of footsteps from the pitch black eaves of the cold stone church.

Were there anyone to see, they’d have watched a small, hunched form step into the rain and look behind itself. Were they close enough, they’d have heard a dry whisper that defied the downpour.

‘Go.’

A small white thing the size of a cat stepped from the same shadows with movement too fluid, too wily, for its squat form, before hurrying silently away through the rain.

Anyone watching would have seen the dark, stooped figure stare at the presbytery for a long, long moment, before she turned and hurried away in the direction of Carmichael Road.

Only no one was there to see, and she knew that well.

Pritam could hear the ticking of the mantel clock. He settled in his chair with a sigh. ‘I shouldn’t have let him go.’

Apart from rising to inspect the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton, Laine Boye had hardly moved since she first arrived. Her back was straight, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She watched Pritam.

‘Do you believe in magic, Reverend?’

Pritam nodded over at his desk. It was, of course, very tidy: his laptop folded away, his pens capped and sitting in a Daylesford Singers Festival ’04 mug. Beside his diary were his Bibles. ‘In Act Eight, Philip goes to the city of Samaria,’ he said, ‘where a man named Simon was supposedly using sorcery and bewitching the city folk. So, my faith acknowledges magic.’

Laine shrugged. ‘No offence, Reverend—’

‘Pritam, please.’

‘No offence, Pritam, but reading something in the Bible isn’t the same as seeing it with your own eyes.’