The Love of the Dead (11 page)

“Alright. Work it. Tell him to get his finger out of his ass, would you? Call me back, anything changes.”

“You want to be there?”

“No. I need to get to Beth’s house.”

Coleridge could almost hear the old bastard’s wrinkled face rustling into a smile.

“Shut up,” said Coleridge.

“Didn’t say a thing. You want to talk to the boss?”

Coleridge shook his head. “No. You talk to him. Call me back you get anywhere.”

“Will do.”

Mooney hung up. Coleridge opened the door to his car and squeezed himself in.

He’d just got somewhere, and he should have felt good about it. But he didn’t. Because it didn’t work. Gregory Sawyer? Maybe. But it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like all of it.

Beth was the key. She knew something. He hadn’t wanted to push her before, not after what she’d seen. He’d felt guilty, too, so he’d taken it easy on her. Gone soft. But he could feel time ticking down.

He couldn’t afford to baby her anymore. He was sure she was holding something back, and whatever it was, he needed to know. What he didn’t know might kill her.

Coleridge started to think about how to get it out of her. Working it over in his head, he started the car, drove with that kind of absent concentration people have when their mind was on other things.

To finish the case, he had to have what Beth knew, whatever it took. Even if he had to be a bastard to get it.

He wasn’t the kind to leave things undone. If you start a thing, you should damn well finish it.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The ride back to Beth’s house was slow and quiet. The policemen asked if she found anything. They asked if she was all right. She told them no. Short, simple, but in a hard voice that left the “leave me the alone” off the end.

They drove the rest of the way, silence in the car apart from the occasional burble from the radio.

When they got back, she didn’t ask them in or offer them a cup of tea to warm up. They didn’t seem disappointed.

“Night, then, ma’am,” said the older one, the one with the ghost dog. Dean, she remembered. She didn’t care though.

“Night,” she said.

“We’re right out front if you...” he said, but she was already closing the door.

She showered in her cold bathroom. Her house was tiled throughout and in the winter it was freezing. She didn’t mind. Sometimes in the morning she splashed cold water on her face first thing, just to get her blood flowing ’round her pounding head. Walking barefoot around the house in winter had the same effect.

November, now, and winter was coming on. It wasn’t quite here, but soon. Another couple of weeks, maybe even before the start of December, she’d be freezing. She didn’t have central heating, just a wood stove and her oven. She didn’t have gas, but she did have an electric heater stored in the shed for the coldest months.

When she finished her shower, Beth headed into the kitchen and took out a pint of milk. She sniffed it, figured it was a little past the sell-by date, but it didn’t reek or anything. She filled a mug and put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes.

When it was done, she spooned in hot chocolate and instant coffee and three sugars. She checked the clock. Waited for a minute, the drink cooling. The minute hand hit twelve and that was it. The day was done. Now it was just a long slow slide until bedtime.

She poured in the whiskey and sat at the table with the mug in both her hands, trying to warm herself through. She was colder than she had any right to be. Some part of her reasoned that it was just shock, but it didn’t feel like shock. It felt like a death, a small death, maybe, but something quite definitely final.

She tried to figure it out while she had her dinner and her medicine all rolled into one.

She’d experienced death today.

That had to change you. Knowing what it felt like to be decapitated. She didn’t remember how it felt, physically, but emotionally, she felt it right down into her soul. The shock, the jarring impact sensed as her head hit the floor. Warm blood, but no pain. Sadness. The blade had been so sharp there hadn’t been any accompanying sensation. Just a kind of confusion, looking up at her headless body from the floor. The sense of her body slumping, the life leaving it, while her vision clouded, then ended as the blood washed over her unblinking eyes.

A head in a box seemed almost inconsequential after that.

No. That wasn’t right. It had been shocking and terrifying. But it wasn’t the head, or seeing death through Mary Westmoor’s eyes.

It was Mary, alone.

No. That wasn’t quite right, either.

She took a gulp of her drink, not really tasting it. Thinking hard while she cradled the cup in her shaking hands.

What was it? There had been something there. Something she’d noticed at the time, but that hadn’t quite registered.

Mary. Alone. Waiting.

Waiting for what?

For her, of course.

“Oh.” She sat back, leaning against the back of the chair. Realized what it meant.

Mary had known she would come. Spirits had known she would go looking.

Spirits knew things that the living could never know. Spirits, even those that didn’t move over to the other side, those that waited, angry or sad or just plain lonely, those spirits still touched the other side. There was knowledge there. Secrets.

That was what she’d been told, but that was a matter of faith.

She’d lost her faith a long time ago. Maybe it was on the day her son died. Maybe it was when she started drinking. Not the tipple at Christmas, and the one over the eight at a friend’s wedding. The real business of drinking, which when you got right down to it wasn’t about being drunk but working toward something bigger. Working toward solace, peace, or whatever came at the end of it.

Death?

She shrugged with no one to see her.

Is that what she wanted?

She’d tried it out tonight. She didn’t want that. She wasn’t a coward, but this was bigger than her. Spirits were involved somehow. Not the personal spirits she saw on a daily basis. The big one. The one she didn’t believe in anymore.

But maybe the big one believed in her.

Was there reason to hope?

Someone at some seminar once had told her that time was different for spirits. Was it in Thetford? With Mary and Stan? Might have been. It didn’t matter.

What was spirit? A form of consciousness that lived in the past, present, and future, all at the same time? What a body left behind when it died? Memory, thought, personality, love...did all these remain?

Sure they did, she thought. She’d seen enough to believe that. It wasn’t a matter of faith. She’d observed it. Maybe not good enough for a scientist. Maybe not good enough for a Christian, but good enough for her.

But could the dead see the shape of things to come? If they did, she’d never known them to intervene. They gave comfort where they could. They confirmed things, sometimes, but life was about learning. They didn’t teach. That wasn’t their job.

But Mary had waited for her. She took an active hand in showing Beth the way. She
pushed
, damn it.

What did that even mean? Had the dead stepped down, stepped in? Was this killer so unnatural that the spirit world felt it had to take a hand?

She’d never known spirits to be so active outside of stories she’d read before her life became a kind of story.

She finished her drink, stood, then sat down again with a thump. She remembered Miles taking her hand when she found the head.

He’d put her hand on the head. He’d led her where she didn’t want to go.

“Fuck,” she said, more afraid than ever, because the things she thought she understood didn’t make sense any more.

She wasn’t just stuck in the middle of a nightmare. She was being led through it by the dead.

A tap came from the window and she jumped. It was full dark, so she couldn’t see what it was for a second. Then she picked out the shape from the darkness.

A raven, beak tapping on the glass, hard and insistent then harder and so loud she put her hands over her ears and shouted for it to go away.

But it didn’t. The glass cracked. It shattered across the floor, flashing like diamonds in the light. The raven cawed, an awful sound, and flew into her kitchen.

It was his, she knew, and it had come for her.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The raven flew through the window while the glass was still falling, wings batting aside glittering fragments as it dove for her head. Beth threw her arms up, and the raven sank its beak into the fleshy underside of her forearm, then pulled back and tore a chunk loose. It flicked it into the air and flapped its wings, holding itself beneath the falling morsel. Beth screamed with fury and terror and smashed the bird as hard as she could with her arm. She didn’t catch it with much force, but it was enough to stop it from eating her.

She didn’t get a chance to take a good swing at it again. It clawed at her face and got its foot tangled in her hair. She flailed at it, crying out all the time. She couldn’t shift it. She could feel blood running down her face, now, running down her neck. Hands clutching at the bird, her head hanging down, she saw her blood dripping onto her table.

She stood and even tried to head-butt the table, anything, just to get it out of her hair. It wouldn’t budge, but it shifted its weight ’round—God, it was heavy. It took a stab with its beak at her eye. It even managed to grasp her eyelid, pulling it back. She wrenched her head back, her neck cracking, desperate to get it off, kill it, to save her eye.

She heard a bird cry and thought maybe she’d hurt it. It let go of her eyelid and blood poured across her vision, so for a second she didn’t see where it went. There were wild cries filling the room. She panicked, blind now in both eyes, blood pouring. There were more of them. The room was full of birds. She felt them flapping around her head, their wings batting her, the wind buffeting her. The screams of the birds were terrible, and somewhere in all that noise she was crying out herself.

She threw herself on the floor and tried to get under the table. She wiped the blood from her eyes. They stayed clear just long enough for her to see something she couldn’t understand at first. The kitchen was filled with seagulls. Maybe twenty or thirty, flapping, squawking, and fighting. She saw a seagull by her side, dead, one flat eye staring up at her. The raven was in among them, lost somewhere in their number. They were attacking it, but it was fighting back, fighting back hard. Another seagull dropped with a heavy bang onto her kitchen table. Then the raven dropped, too, wings broken and covered with blood.

A leg twitched weakly and shit ran out of it.

The seagulls fell on it and tore it to pieces. She could hear bones shattering under their rage.

Finally they finished, and only bloody feathers and fragile, hollow bones remained.

The last of the seagulls flapped its wings and flew out of her shattered window. Beth pulled herself from under the table. Blind in one eye, in agony from a hundred small cuts in her scalp and pouring blood from the big wound in her arm, she stumbled across the shit and blood on the tiles, trying to take it in. Trying to understand. Crying.

She slipped down in the muck and sprained her ankle. She didn’t even notice it, just righted herself and turned around, eyes wide, blinking through dripping blood.

Her kitchen was ruined. Everything was covered with feathers and blood. Four seagulls were dead, one still fluttering its wings weakly. There was hardly anything left of the raven.

She took the seagull up in her arms. She stroked it softly and, holding it, slid back to the floor among the mess.

When the policemen finally broke in her door and found her, she was still sitting there, holding a dead bird, stroking it, thanking it over and over again.

“Thank you,” she sobbed. And again, stroking, holding, looking down into its flat, blank eye. Wishing it back to life. But it was dead and there wasn’t any coming back, not for saints, not for sinners, not for brave seagulls or bitter lonely women.

She could feel it on the freezing air, feel it in her blood. Feel his hand in this, feel it cold on her skin, too, but it was a comfort, somehow, because she couldn’t take anymore.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Ma’am? Mrs. Willis?”

A different policeman. The nightshift, maybe. He spoke softly to her while his colleague spoke into the radio clipped just below his shoulder.

“Ma’am? Can I have the bird?”

She looked up from the bird and into his face. He was sincere. Concerned. But she laughed, just the same.

Something in her face made him recoil.

“I need to get you to a hospital,” he said, watching her carefully, like she might try to ram the bird up his ass. She thought about it. “Can you walk?”

“Of course I can fucking walk,” she snapped. “But I’m not going to the hospital.”

He pointed at her arm, pouring blood down her skirt.

“You need stitches. There’s a chunk missing from your arm.”

She shook her head, turned her attention back to the bird. She could hear the other policeman on his radio. Telling them she was attacked by a flock of birds. She thought about telling him he was wrong, but one bird, a flock of birds, what did it matter? It was all so ridiculous. Totally. It wouldn’t make sense to them, to their dispatcher. It didn’t make sense to her.

The raven had tried to kill her. Tried to
eat
her, for God’s sake.

The seagulls had killed it.

A fairly simple set of events, but so beyond the pale it could only be make-believe.

But then she imagined what Peter would have said. Clear as anything, she could hear his voice, his certainty. Rock solid, unwavering.

“It happened, honey. It’s true. Just got to believe.”

She did believe, because the evidence was strewn all around her kitchen.

“I really need to get you to a hospital.”

“No.” She stared at him flatly. No arguments, her stare said. He backed off, maybe a little frightened of this petite woman staring him down through matted, blood-soaked hair that used to be blonde.