The Darkening (30 page)

He berated himself. Nicholas Close had undergone trauma.
I should have been more sympathetic
, he thought
.
Tomorrow, clear of this awful headache, he’d call the man and apologise. But as for child murders . . . there was no way he would upset the Right Reverend with talk of cult killings.

He switched off the outside light.

16

S
uzette sat in a silent simmer the entire drive back from the church to Lambeth Street. Nicholas pulled up the hire car. Rain pattered on the roof.

‘You are your own worst enemy, you do know that,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Cate used to say that.’

Suzette blinked. He hadn’t said it for sympathy; it was true. Cate had often chastised him for acting before he thought things through. But the mention of Cate turned down Suzette’s thermostat just a little.

‘She was right. What did she ever see in a twit like you?’

He shrugged. It was a mystery he’d never be able to clarify.

Suzette opened her door. ‘Coming in to see Mum?’ she asked.

He begged off; his mother’s forced pleasantness so soon after the defensive hostility of Pritam Anand would give him the bends. He agreed to meet Suzette the next morning for a decent breakfast at the café near the railway station, and make a plan for visiting Plough & Vine Health Foods. He waved, watched her hurry across the front yard and through the form of Gavin Boye. The sight made his stomach tighten. He looked quickly away and drove off.

By the time he’d parked outside his flat on Bymar Street, the rain had dropped to a steady drizzle. He was halfway up the concrete stairs when he stopped. What was inside? Frozen pizza and television channels overladen with half-baked reality or over-cooked comedy, all broadcast with mephitic monotony. A sane and solid bedrock where north was north and home was safe and marriages lasted . . . the frippery of evening television made a mockery of the unpleasant things he’d learned today.

What was out here? Night. Shadows. Questions.

Garnock?

Nicholas shuddered. But he’d been bitten twice by the spider and he was still fine.

Fine? My dear boy, this is hardly fine.

He thought the best thing he could do was go inside, find as much alcohol as he could and get roaringly, disgustingly, forgetfully drunk.

Yet he didn’t want to go inside. His feet were anxious to move. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and walked back down the stairs and onto the street.

The rain finally petered out and a wind had invited itself to shift the air, turning it cold and nudging the black tops of trees. Nicholas was angry with himself. It could have gone so much better with Pritam. Suzette was right. And now he’d alienated a person who felt like a man who could be trusted. Nicholas couldn’t blame the reverend. Spoken aloud, his theory on the murders was a fabulist’s: the stuff of nineteenth-century fairy tales where endings weren’t happy and evil was as powerful as good. A woman a hundred and fifty years old killing little boys and girls to stave off her own death and, for some reason, to keep her dark woods whole.

Woods. Floods. Spiders. Church.

How had everything gone so wrong so fast? Four months ago, he and Cate had had a life to be envied. Was that the problem? That they’d had the gall to be truly happy? Had they offended the gods by flaunting their pleasure with their simple plans and simple love? One motorcycle trip. One ladder. One phone call. Halloween child. Samhain child.

Church. Green Man. Walpole Park. A face wreathed in leaves.

One fall down cement stairs and a day world becomes a night world. The dead walk unmollified, doomed to mark time while some cosmic starter gun fires, reloads, and fires again and again . . . Cruel. Cruel.

They saw him, the dead. And they knew he could see them; they watched him. As some respite from their own morbid television re-run performances, perhaps they looked to Nicholas for help. But he couldn’t help them. Nor could they teach him.
This isn’t like some TV show where the gold-hearted clairvoyant heals the departeds’ suffering and sends them on their way. No; this is excruciating impotence. This is jumping all the way to the end of the book and finding the last chapter has been torn out and lost. Cruel.

Why hadn’t he died in the bike crash?

Why had Cate died instead?

Why hadn’t Gavin shot him?

Nicholas stopped. He was at the corner of Lambeth Street. If he turned up it, in two minutes he’d be with his mother and Suzette. But he could feel no answers waiting there.

He walked on.

Another block and he reached the corner of Airlie Crescent.

Without thinking, he let his feet change direction - just as he used to let his hands turn the wheel of his van when he trundled through narrow-laned English villages hunting for knick-knacks. He strode up a shadowy footpath he hadn’t walked in two decades, in and out of tiny pools of streetlight, to stop outside number seven.

The Boyes’ house.

It lay watching from within a nest of tall laurel trees, which hissed disapproval at his arrival. Though the house was, to his adult eyes, smaller than he remembered, it was still huge - a looming colonial with deep verandas draped with filigreed ironwork that had greyed with neglect and hung between posts like cobwebs. The hedges had rambled and shrubs were creeping out to reclaim the yard. Dim lights shone within; a brooding Halloween pumpkin.

Nicholas entered the yard and mounted the wide wooden steps to stand outside the lattice doors. He rang the doorbell.

Here was the landing that he and Tristram had dared each other to jump off, commandoes from a C-47. And Nicholas, to his credit, had jumped, albeit pale and terrified. Tristram had jumped whooping. Tristram had been the brave one.

Across the shadowed veranda, the dark, glossy front door opened a crack and Mrs Boye squinted at him through the gap. Her white hair spilled like a judge’s wig around her dressing-gowned shoulders - she could have stepped from a scene of Shakespearean mania. Her eyes narrowed.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Nicholas, Mrs Boye. Nicholas Close.’

Mrs Boye set her lips. ‘Oh, Nicholas. I’ll tell Tristram you’re here. But I don’t want you two yelling about the yard! Mr Boye has had a very full week.’

Nicholas thought the better of arguing with her.

‘Thanks, Mrs Boye.’

‘Tristram!’ she called. ‘Tristram Hamilton Boye? Gavin, where is that brother of yours?’

The old woman walked back into the house, shutting the door behind her. Again, Nicholas was alone on the steps.
Why am I here?
Avoiding my own mother. Avoiding my sister. Avoiding sleep. A minute passed, and no one returned to the door. Nicholas gave up, and was halfway down the stairs when he heard the front door open again.

‘Hello?’ A younger woman’s voice. He turned.

Laine Boye’s hair was dripping wet and she held a bathrobe closed with one hand.

‘It’s Nicholas Close, Mrs Boye.’

‘I can see that,’ said Laine. Her face was in shadow. ‘Can I help you?’

He walked slowly back up the stairs. ‘Yes. Well . . . I just was walking, and happened to be . . .’

He watched her watching him. She was barefoot, drenched, even thinner than when he saw her last. She held her chin up and out, her head cocked.

‘I’m sorry to come unannounced, Mrs Boye, but . . .’

He felt his hand close around something in his pocket. He pulled it out. Something silver and small rested on his palm.

‘I found Gavin’s cigarette lighter. At home. I thought . . .’

He held out the Zippo.

Laine took a half-step back, as if the sight of the lighter offended her. Again, Nicholas noticed the colour of her eyes. A seashell grey; an equivocal colour that could be contented or angry, serene or melancholy.

‘I thought maybe we could talk a little,’ he said. ‘About Gavin.’

She watched him a moment, frowning at some argument in her head. Then she nodded and unlatched the lattice door.

‘Come inside.’

Nicholas followed her in.

The sensation of being drawn back through time made him wish he’d walked instead up Lambeth Street. Some rooms had been refurbished, and a few of the furnishings had changed. But the tall panelled walls, the polished cherrywood dining suite, the fireplace over which were mounted two painted portraits of Tristram and Gavin as boys, were all exactly as when he’d seen them last, twenty-five years ago.

Laine stopped in the dining room. She seemed shorter in bare feet. Square-shouldered. In the softer light, her features were finer, less angular. Her skin had an olive hue.

‘Give me a minute. I have to dry my hair.’

She frowned at Nicholas, then stepped into the room that had been Gavin’s and shut the door. On the floor outside it, Nicholas saw a small collection of packing boxes. Some were taped shut, and over the tape the boxes’ contents had been neatly printed in permanent marker: ‘Shoes’, ‘Shirts & Trousers’, ‘T-shirts’. Their ordinariness - as if Gavin were simply moving house, not dead and being filed away for good - was prosaic and mournful. One box remained open, only half-filled. He stepped closer to peer inside.

Some VHS tapes with documentary titles handwritten on the spines. A pair of worn hiking boots. A curled bunch of shooting magazines . . . and something else. Nicholas bent closer to see -

‘Who are you?!’

He whirled at the shout, startled.

Mrs Boye stood behind him, brandishing a fireplace poker.

‘Nicholas. Nicholas Close,’ he replied, hiding the tremor in his voice. A woman who could spit on Christ from twenty paces would be a wildcat with a poker. ‘How are you, Mrs Boye?’

‘Ah, Nicholas,’ said Mrs Boye, lowering the weapon. ‘You want to see Trissy. Tristram!’ She wagged a bony finger at Nicholas. ‘I don’t want you two making a racket.’ She gestured for him to follow.

She led him through the house to Tristram’s bedroom door. The sight of it made Nicholas feel suddenly cold. She rapped sharply.

‘Tristram? Your friend is here.’

She looked at Nicholas with an expression that said: boys, how intolerable. ‘Go in, but I need you going home by five. We’re dining early.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Boye.’

She walked away, stiffly whistling a tune that should have been tripping and joyful, but from her sounded broken and lost.

The large house became eerily quiet.

Nicholas twisted the low-set knob and opened the door.

He flicked on the light.

The room had not been touched since Tristram’s death. A
Battle Beyond the Stars
poster was stuck to one wall with yellowing tape, one corner detached and weeping down. The alarm clock had burnt out, its panelled numbers frozen at 11.13. The air was husky and dry, and smelled like sick soil. A thick film of dust coated the wooden floorboards. In the middle of the floor sat a board game; at its centre was a hard plastic bubble in which was a die on spring steel that would have click-clacked loudly when it was last pressed by small hands. Now, the steel was rusted and dust had painted the dome a cadaverous brown. Cobwebs hunched in the ceiling corners and around the depending light shade. A large spider had spun a web above the bed; the creature seemed to creep a sly step towards him. Watching. The small single bed was still unmade, a gritty patina of insect husks on the
Empire Strikes Back
sheets. The room was unutterably sad.

‘Nicholas?’

He turned.

Laine stood behind him, dressed in jeans and a woollen jumper. Her anxious fingers twined amongst themselves.

He stepped out of Tristram’s bedroom and closed the door.

Laine looked at the floor a moment, then up at him again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Getting changed, I thought about it. I don’t think I really want to talk with you much about anything.’

Nicholas felt a guilty stab of relief. He nodded. ‘I don’t think I have anything to ask.’

She gestured towards the hall. He could see her fingers vibrating. She was holding herself together with sheer willpower. Husband suicided. Yoked instantly with the care for a senile mother-in-law. No one to help. She led him to the hall.

‘I do have a question,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘Did you shoot him?’

She lifted her chin and watched him with those inscrutable grey eyes.

‘No,’ he answered.

She pursed her lips and stepped away.

They walked past Gavin’s bedroom. As they passed the boxes, Nicholas peeked down again into the half-filled one. And he saw what had caught his eye earlier: the rifle magazines were roughly rolled together and shoved in a plastic bag. On the side of the bag was printed Plough & Vine Health Foods. Rowena’s store. Mrs Quill’s old shop.

‘Do you shop there?’ he asked, nodding at the bag.

Laine stopped to see what Nicholas was looking at.

‘No. Gavin took a liking to dried pumpkin seeds. For the zinc, he said.’

And rifles for the lead
, thought Nicholas.

She opened the front door for him.

‘Good night, Mr Close.’

Before he could reply, she shut the door, closing him out in the cold.