The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (5 page)

‘You can’t go upstairs,’ the commander said. ‘I’m not being pissy. You literally can’t; the stairs are gone. But straight
through the remains of that front door yonder – that’s your lounge in there.’

‘That’s where the resident is?’ Sean said.

‘Unless he’s moved, yeah. Which I doubt. Coroner’s on his way.’

Groves looked at the house again.

‘Hell of a blaze,’ he said. ‘What are your thoughts?’

The commander shrugged. ‘That’s for the team to say, and then maybe you guys. There are no suspect containers aside from all the bottles. My guess? Well, you’ll see the remains of the ashtray by the settee.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘Yeah, I’d imagine so. Guy’s drunk and sleepy, and he drifts off with a dangler. You know what these builds are like.’

Groves nodded. Most of the houses on the estate were old council homes, sold off cheap to people who then rented them out to people who then rented them out again. Old, threadbare furniture; dodgy electrics; and God only knew what stuffed in the wall cavities. Most of them wouldn’t have passed a safety check twenty years ago, never mind today. If that was what this fire came down to, it might still be a criminal investigation, but not one for them. They were only here for the resident.

‘Okay.’ He turned to Sean. ‘Shall we?’

‘Let’s.’

They stepped through the open doorway into the remains of the front room. The smell hit Groves first: a foul waft of old meat and rust, like opening the oven in an abandoned house. The back window was completely gone, allowing an angle of sunlight in. Everything it touched looked either scorched black or shattered. In the far corner, water was still drizzling down from the remains of the ceiling, pattering on the broken eggshell of a television. What was left of the carpet squelched beneath Groves’ feet. Looking down, he saw dirty grey foam bubbling up around his shoes.

The dead man was on the remains of the settee – or inside it, to be more precise. The fabric had burned away, leaving a
rusted skeletal frame with a spread of thick black ash congealing underneath. The man himself was bent double, with his backside on the floor and both legs poking over the front of the settee, the rest of him contorted awkwardly within the frame. If he had been alive, it would have looked for all the world like a moment of slapstick, as though he’d sat on a collapsing deckchair.

He was very obviously not alive, though. You could still tell the body had once been a real, living person, but only just. A patch of skin and scorched hair remained on the scalp, and a single shoe was recognisable on one foot, the melted plastic hanging down in stalactites. Beneath the body, mixed with the ash, the melted flesh had hardened in greasy pools. The man himself might as well have been carved from black wood. The mouth was little more than a gaping hole.

Groves stared down at the remains for a moment, struck as always by the distance between the living and the dead. The spark that just went: a beat of time in which everything changed. What had once been a man now resembled a snuffed-out candle.

‘Sir?’ Sean clicked his fingers above the figure in the settee. ‘Can you hear me, sir?’

‘There’s the ashtray.’ Groves gestured with his foot to a chunky glass bowl near the corner of the settee, then looked around. There were shards of glass and broken cups by the walls, some of the shapes still recognisable. ‘Bottles everywhere too. I’m guessing he passed out rather than fell asleep.’

‘No wonder it’s so hard to wake him up.’ Sean stepped back and sniffed. ‘Am I imagining that stink of booze in the air?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even so, I’m thinking the commander called it right.’

‘Me too.’

Groves took another look round, puzzled by the lack of furnishings. Aside from the broken television, the settee and the bottles, the room was bare. It must have been a sparse existence. He imagined the man, drunk enough to pass out with
the television flickering in the corner, the cigarette falling from his hand. A sad image.

‘Been and seen,’ Sean said. ‘Happy?’

Groves leaned closer, peering at what was left of the dead man’s face. The blackened cheekbones looked strange.

‘Have a look,’ he said.

Sean did so, inclining his head.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘I don’t know.’ Groves gestured at a thin ridge across the man’s cheek. ‘Something cut into the bone?’

‘Old scar, maybe. Like Action Man.’

‘There’s more than one.’

‘Eh. Leave it to the coroner for now.’

They walked back to the doorway, Groves still wondering about the cuts in the bone – but Sean was right. He took a last glance behind him, at what was left of the man’s legs pointing out from the settee. Utterly still.

‘Not how I’d like to go,’ he said.

‘It’s not like we get to choose, David. Besides, look at the guy. Seems pretty comfortable to me. Chances are the lucky bastard didn’t even wake up.’

That was true: when the fire caught, the smoke probably killed the man before he even surfaced. So yes, it could have been worse. At one fire scene, early on in his career, he’d found the remains of an old lady curled up at the base of a walk-in wardrobe. He couldn’t imagine the fear and confusion and pain she must have gone through.

Even so, part of him thought that when it came to it, he personally would want the chance to at least fight to stay alive. That he’d want to feel
something
for as long as possible, even if it was only pain. To cling on and not go gently – all the way to the bitter end.

But then Groves thought about Jamie. And he figured that if he didn’t feel that way, he’d have given up on the world a long time ago.

Mark

Charlie Matheson

As I walked into the room, the woman claiming to be Charlotte Matheson was lying on her side, facing away from me. The bed took up most of the space, with just enough room for small anonymous cabinets on either side of the headboard, and a plastic chair near the door.

She had the covers pulled up to her shoulders, so that all I could really see of her at first was a mass of brown curly hair – and that only barely. On the other side of the bed, the blinds had been drawn on the window, and the overhead light had been dimmed right down. In the gloom, and without being able to see her face, I couldn’t even be sure if she was awake.

‘Excuse me.’ I closed the door. ‘I’m with the police. I’m Detective Mark Nelson.’

For a moment, the woman didn’t respond. Then she nodded slowly, rolled on to her back and hitched herself up into a sitting position. The covers bunched around her waist, revealing the hospital gown she was wearing. I presumed the doctors would have kept the clothes she’d been found in. It was possible we’d need to examine them. Unlikely, but possible.

Her hair was hanging forward over her face, but she pulled it back, tucking it behind her shoulders, revealing her face in the process.

The sight of the cuts there stopped whatever I was about to say next.

Her face was almost entirely covered in them. There were whorls around her eyes, and lines and patterns of scarring across her forehead and nose. A complex web of cuts swirled down her cheeks, all the way to her jawline, before joining together in a single passage across the cleft of her chin. As far as I could tell, staring at her, the injuries were perfectly symmetrical.

Amidst all that, her eyes seemed unusually bright in the dimness of the room, as though they were catching a light source unavailable to the fixtures and fittings. But they also looked bleary and confused. Scared. I supposed that was fairly understandable.

I sat down on the chair, and her gaze stayed on me, the way a cat might watch a nearby stranger, ready to bolt for safety. Then I switched on the camera that was attached to my lapel. It had been departmental policy for years now that all field interviews were recorded, the footage beaming straight to a secure cloud and then logged into the relevant file, immediately accessible to any other officers working on the case. Not that there were any on this one, nor were there likely to be.

‘How are you feeling?’ I said.

‘Better than yesterday, thank you.’ Her voice was soft, but there was a surprising amount of resolve there. While still wary of me, she was also quiet and to the point. ‘It was a difficult transition, but I think I’m getting there slowly.’

A difficult transition
. If she was referring to her supposed return from the dead, it seemed a strangely formal way of describing it.

‘What are you looking at?’ she said.

There didn’t seem to be any point in denying the obvious.

‘Your face. Your scars.’

‘Yes. I am marked.’

Again she sounded matter-of-fact about it.

‘You are marked,’ I said. ‘Yes. What happened to you?’

‘Do you like them?’

‘I don’t know.’ I wondered what the right answer was. ‘They’re a little too elaborate for my taste, if I’m honest. They’re very detailed, though, aren’t they? I imagine they must have hurt.’

‘Yes, they did.’ The memory seemed to make her sad, then her expression brightened slightly. ‘But it was like childbirth. It hurts, but very quickly afterwards you forget how much. And you end up with something that makes it all worthwhile.’

I nodded sympathetically, even though I didn’t think the two things were remotely similar. After childbirth, you ended up with a baby, a child you loved, whereas this woman was scarred for life. Whenever people saw her, they would always draw breath and look twice. She would forever be asking
What are you looking at?
while already knowing the answer.

And yet, as extensive as it was, I realised that there was something oddly beautiful about the scarification. Perhaps it was the sheer intricacy of it. There was clearly a careful design to the damage that had been done.

I said, ‘I wouldn’t want them myself.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you want. One day you’ll have them too. That’s how it works.’

‘How what works, Charlotte?’

‘Charlie. Not Charlotte.’

‘Okay.’ A small detail, perhaps, but it was obviously important to her, and since the question of identity was underpinning all this, I was happy to go along with it. ‘How what works, Charlie?’

She shook her head, as though I couldn’t possibly understand. I thought about her choice of words.
It doesn’t matter what you want
.

‘Did you do them yourself?’

‘No, of course not.’ She pressed her palm to her forehead and the scarring wrinkled as she contorted her face. ‘I can’t remember it all properly. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about them any more. Not right now.’

I very much wanted to talk about them, but there was a hint of distress there, and I needed her to stay with me.

‘All right, then. Let’s start at the beginning instead. You told the doctor your name was Charlie Matheson. Is that right?’

‘Yes. Nobody believes me, but I’m really not sure what else I’m supposed to say, or what everyone wants to hear. I’m Charlie Matheson. I’m twenty-eight years old and I live at 68 Petrie Crescent. My husband’s name is Paul. Paul Carlisle.’

The mention of her supposed husband’s name caused a look of upset to cross her face, as though she had just remembered something painful to her. But then she blinked it away and shook her head.

‘I’ve been through all this a hundred times already.’

‘I know. And you say you were in an accident.’

‘Yes. Everything else is a blur right now, but I remember the accident like it was yesterday. I was driving on the ring road. It was late, and I was going too fast. There was a corner, and the wheels locked. I lost control. The car went over the embankment.’

This was good. These were all details I could check – see what she was right about and work out how she might have known about it.

‘And then?’

‘I didn’t have my seat belt on.
So stupid
. I remember thinking that – and then that the airbag would save me, but it didn’t. I went through the windscreen.’

‘You remember that?’

‘Yes. I didn’t die right away. Not long. But I was on the grass for a while. Flickering in and out. There were voices, angels, I think, but they kept fading and coming back. And then ... I died.’

‘Two years ago.’

‘Yes. According to the doctors.’

‘And you’ve been dead ever since.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

I leaned back.

The thing was, she sounded so reasonable, and yet it was obviously a crazy thing for a person to believe. I found myself looking at the scars again. Hard as it was to imagine, it wasn’t impossible that she had done them to herself – and if something’s possible, you can work backwards from that. The kind of person who would do that to themselves, what kind of story would they tell you, and how would they present themselves? This kind of story, I decided, and probably very much like this. Confused. Vulnerable. On the verge of being angry.

Thanks again, Pete
.

At the same time, the cuts bothered me. Someone else had done them to her, she claimed, and I could hardly ignore that. While the whole thing seemed an utter waste of time, and almost certainly would be, I had a duty to pursue it at least a little further.

So I suppressed the sigh I wanted to give.

‘I believe
something
happened to you. And I want to understand what.’

‘Everything’s hazy right now.’

‘Well ... let’s see about that.’ I thought about it. ‘Do you remember what happened yesterday, before you were found?’

‘I was in an ambulance.’

‘No, before that.’

‘I mean I was in
another
ambulance, before the one that brought me here. A kind of ambulance, anyway. It was white – really white – and there was a man with me.’

‘Can you describe him?’

‘Not really. He’s old. He’s some kind of doctor.’

‘You’ve seen him before?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘I think so.’

‘And what was he doing in the ambulance? Did he speak to you?’

‘Yes, but I can’t remember what he said.’ She frowned at that. ‘And I need to, because it’s important. I was awake for a bit, and he was trying to tell me things. But I must have gone back to sleep again.’