Darke Read online

  ‘Ha!’ Kerry crowed at the filthy water dripping from Sally’s coat. ‘Now you’ll get in trouble and the Fell Man will get you instead.’

  ‘No he won’t. He only comes for horrible little girls.’

  Kerry stomped again, and was forced to flee when Sally launched after her with a howl of indignity. Kerry’s laughter was manic as her older sister chased her between stunted trees that had grown bent at an angle by the incessant wind. Running in ill-fitting wellington boots wasn’t easy, and it was inevitable an exposed root would take her down. Kerry tumbled in the couch grass, adding more green stains to the knees of her jeans. She rolled onto her back, drawing up her legs protectively. Sally could have launched on her then, but unlike her little sister, she wasn’t into all that rough and tumble boys’ stuff. She bent over Kerry, both hands fixed to her hips. ‘Serves you right, you little monster.’

  Kerry made claws of her fingers and screwed up her nose. She growled. ‘I’m not afraid of monsters.’

  ‘Aye you are.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘You’re scared of the Fell Man. It’s why you have a night light left on in your bedroom. Just like a little baby.’ Sally suddenly pivoted away, and she skipped off between the trees, chanting in a singsong voice: ‘Kerry Darke’s afraid of the dark, Kerry Darke’s afraid of the dark…’

  Kerry was up and after her in seconds, the hunted now the hunter. Sally shrieked in mock terror and ran faster. She was six inches taller than her sibling, sapling thin and long legged; it was no competition.

  ‘Sally! Wait for me,’ Kerry called when it was apparent that her floppy wellington boots weren’t designed for running in.

  Sally paused thirty feet ahead. She pointed back to where the slate roof of an old building could barely be discerned from similar coloured shale that had cascaded down the hillside beyond. The decrepit ruin stood alongside a stagnant pond, and was surrounded by gnarly trees: the ancestral, but now abandoned home of landed gentry, the Brandreth family, whose descendants had fallen into financial troubles back in the eighties, and allowed the mansion and grounds to go to seed. A smelly tramp supposedly lived there; to the girls, though, it was the home of a wicked witch or ogre from a dark fairy tale. ‘You’d better hurry up, Kerry! He’s coming. The Fell Man’s right behind you!’

  Now Kerry’s shrieks of not-so-mock terror filled the air, and she galloped, cumbersome and ungainly after her sister who bounded over the tussocks of coarse grass with the ease of a yearling deer.

  ‘Girls! What did I tell you?’ Their mother met them as they burst out of the trees onto a gentler slope overlooking a chuckling stream – a tributary that added its water to the tarn in the valley below. Mam had one hand propped on her hip, and her mouth pinched briefly before she went on. ‘I told you not to wander off, didn’t I? And what was the last thing I said? Don’t get dirty. Sally…look at the bloody state of your jacket.’

  ‘It’s not my fault!’ Sally’s face crumpled, on the verge of tears. She could be quick to cry, but her emotion was only for effect, to elicit sympathy. ‘I warned her not to, Mam, but Kerry kicked mud all over me.’

  Mam’s accusatory gaze swept to Kerry. Guilty as charged, Kerry stood breathing heavily, her knees nipped together.

  ‘Well, madam?’ Mam demanded.

  ‘I need a wee,’ said Kerry.

  Her mam shook her head at the deft way she’d changed the subject. ‘Well you should’ve thought about that sooner. Come on, we have to go and pick your dad up at the train station.’

  ‘I’ll wet myself,’ Kerry groaned.

  ‘Serves you right for wetting me.’ Sally smirked at her.

  ‘Shut up, Stupid Sally!’

  ‘Both of you shut up.’ Their mam tapped her wristwatch in emphasis. ‘And get a move on. Into the car and put your seatbelts on. Your dad’s train gets into Penrith in an hour.’

  ‘Ma-a-am,’ Kerry whined, and her knees almost entwined.

  Looking frazzled, her mam shoved her fingers through her copper hair. She cast a disapproving glare over the numerous grass and mud stains on her youngest daughter’s clothing, but she wasn’t genuinely annoyed: she’d grown used to Kerry’s tomboyish ways, and had dressed her appropriately for a picnic on the fells, and for a girl who couldn’t resist a muddy puddle or clump of dirt. At least she’d managed to avoid rolling in the proliferation of sheep droppings that dotted the hill. ‘Hurry up then, you can go behind the car.’

  ‘Somebody might see me,’ Kerry moaned.

  ‘Who wants to look at your skinny little bum?’ Sally teased.

  ‘No spying.’ Kerry’s nose scrunched in warning.

  Sotto voce, Sally leaned in. ‘It’s not me watching that you have to worry about. Don’t forget who the Fell Man’s after.’

  ‘Ma-a-am,’ Kerry whined, this time with a nasal tone, ‘Sally said the Fell Man’s going to get me.’

  ‘Sally, that’s enough. Stop trying to scare your sister. You know the Fell Man’s not real. Kerry, get a pee now or you’ll have to wait till we reach the station.’

  While Kerry protected her modesty alongside the car, she kept an ear cocked towards the conversation as Sally slipped in and buckled up her seat belt. She didn’t really need to pee — that had been a ploy to distract her mam — so she only pretended.

  ‘Mam, if the Fell Man isn’t real, why do they keep talking about him on the telly?’ Sally asked.

  Carrying the leftovers from their picnic in a carrier bag, and loading the dirty plastic plates and empty flasks away in the boot, their mam said, ‘You don’t have to worry about what they’re saying on the telly, Sally. That’s another fell man altogether. He’s not the same bogeyman that you’re frightened of.’

  ‘Isn’t he?’ Sally challenged. ‘Because I heard he takes girls away too.’

  ‘Well there you go then,’ said their mam as she slammed the boot. ‘You should both listen to me when I tell you not to wander off. You better hadn’t’ve been up around those ruins like I warned, not with that horrible tramp supposed to be back living there.’

  ‘We weren’t. Kerry wanted to go and look, but I wouldn’t let her.’

  ‘Good girl, Sally. At least one of you is sensible. Kerry! Hurry up!’

  Zipping her jeans, Kerry darted around and jumped in the backseat beside Sally. The sisters exchanged worried frowns. Sally whispered, ‘The Fell Man sometimes looks like a horrible tramp. Told you he was real.’

  This time Kerry didn’t argue.

  As their mam drove off the hillside and onto a track that followed a parallel course to the winding stream, Kerry peered back up the hill, searching the stunted trees for movement. Earlier, she thought, for the briefest moment, there was a small girl standing in the shadows beneath the trees, sadly watching her potential playmates leaving, before she was dragged backwards into the gloom. But then it could have just been the movement of a bush swaying in the breeze. When she was confident that no bogeyman lurked in any of the other shadows she leaned over and tapped Sally’s wrist. Her sister looked at her open mouthed.

  ‘Does that mean Santa Claus is real too?’ Kerry asked facetiously. ‘Because you told me parents just made him up to make sure little girl and boys behaved themselves.’

  Their mother’s eyes glared back in the rearview mirror. ‘Sally! You didn’t?’

  ‘No, Mam, I didn’t tell her. Honest!’ To add validity to the outright lie, Sally yelped, ‘I still believe in Santa!’

  ‘Well that’s OK then, otherwise who’d bring you the Tamagotchi pet you’ve been begging for?’

  Sally huffed. She lived in hope that she wouldn’t have to wait months until Christmas, not when all her friends at school already owned Tamagotchis and were busy raising their electronic pets to her envy. She’d hoped their dad would bring her one back as a gift from his business trip to Manchester.

  ‘I want a Tinky-Winky for Christmas,’ Kerry announced.

  ‘The Teletubbies are for babies,’ Sally reminded her.

/>   ‘I don’t care. I still want a Tinky-Winky.’

  ‘Didn’t you just have one before you got in the car?’ their mam joked.

  While the girls giggled and debated the must-have toys of the year, their mam pulled onto the track down off the fells towards the A66, where they could strike eastward for Penrith. When they reached the main road, they were oblivious to the battered old Land Rover that crept out in their wake and then followed all the way to the train station.

  Sally never received the Tamagotchi her dad brought back from his trip, and come Christmas, eight-year-old Kerry didn’t believe that Santa Claus existed, although she’d learned that the Fell Man was genuinely to be feared.

  7

  When Kerry arrived home in Fulham the bare-footed girl was waiting for her on the pavement. She was as nebulous as the last couple of times Kerry had spotted her that day, vague, ill defined, but unhurt by her jump from the tower. The rain spattering the windscreen, streaked by the wipers, didn’t help to form a definite shape to her, but that wasn’t it. Since the first time Kerry spotted ‘Girl’, she’d always presented as something insubstantial. She had never altered in form, always her straggly hair hung over her features and down her narrow shoulders; her grubby dress was barely more than a translucent shift that skimmed her knees, so thin and worn it outlined the bones of her hips and thighs as shadows through the material. She was best observed from the corner of the eye, because when viewed straight on she tended to melt or streak away. There was something important she needed to convey to Kerry, but throughout the two decades and more since she’d first been around, the apparition had proved mute.

  Kerry didn’t stop the car; she held her gaze resolutely ahead. Girl observed the car’s progress from the flooded pavement. In Kerry’s periphery she grew more solid, her face tilting up, but if there were any features then she couldn’t make them out and the reaction to glance at her forced her to fade. Only raindrops slanted across the pavement where Girl had just stood.

  ‘Shit, Kerry, you’re in enough trouble as it is. Don’t start with this ghost stuff again,’ she admonished herself.

  Although the reinsertion of Girl into her life was worrying, she wasn’t fearful of the wraith as such. She’d driven past her because there was no available parking spot outside her house. Arriving home from work earlier than Kerry, her fiancé Adam Gill’s Ford Focus had taken the last spot. In their neighbourhood, on-street parking was at a premium, and only the richer residents could afford private parking bays. Kerry found a space at the end of a row of vehicles on Favart Road, at an entrance to Eel Brook Common, and had to walk the couple of blocks back home, her collar up and head tilted down. She welcomed the rain, and the early hour, because it meant there was nobody else abroad. The last she wished was to meet a neighbour and have to dart past them to avoid their questions, be they well meaning or critical. She’d endured enough of both since Erick Swain’s fall from the roof of the tower block.

  With two decent incomes, Kerry and Adam could afford to rent an entire house, two storeys and a dormer attic. It was at the end of a terrace of similar quaint houses, all painted in pastel shades, next to a modern red brick apartment block that lacked all charm. They even had a front garden, though it was barely large enough to contain a couple of planter boxes and a path to the front door that could be traversed with a single stride.

  Before she got her key in the door Adam pulled it open. It was almost 2 a.m. and because he was on a fast rotation his next shift was due to begin at HMP Belmarsh in only five hours. He should have been asleep long ago. His lack of rest had aged him; his brown eyes enfolded in dark smudges and wrinkles, and under the overhead light the fine growth of stubble on his head twinkled silver. He was a big man, fit and strong, but his shoulders slumped as he greeted her. He was only thirty-four, two years Kerry’s senior, but right then he could have been her father’s age. She had never been happier to see him.

  ‘You’re back,’ he stated the obvious. ‘I’m glad. Are you OK, Kerry?’

  ‘It hasn’t been the best of days,’ she said.

  ‘C’mon, let’s get you inside. You’re bloody soaked through.’

  He took her right hand, helped her step over the threshold, then reached past to close and lock the door. His closeness, his warmth, and even the scent of him were comforting. She leaned against his chest, and he cupped her head and kissed her scuffed forehead. She allowed him to walk her to their living room and collapsed in an easy chair.

  ‘Here, I thought you’d appreciate one of these.’ Adam pushed a glass tumbler into her hands.

  She looked down at it, and the amber liquid sloshing inside. The smell was distinctive. Whisky. She wasn’t a big drinker, and preferred gin, but any port in a storm. And he was right; she did need a stiff drink. She downed it in one gulp, without savouring any of its nuances, and held out the glass for another shot.

  Adam fetched the bottle and poured. She met his gaze until the glass was almost full to the rim, and then blinked.

  ‘Should help you sleep,’ Adam said as he placed down the bottle on their coffee table.

  ‘You should be asleep.’

  ‘What? You didn’t think I’d wait up for you after you called me?’

  ‘I only wanted you to know I’d be late home. So you didn’t worry.’

  He exhaled, then dropped into the settee opposite her, reaching for his spectacles from the coffee table. He was dressed in a frayed Game Of Thrones T-shirt and oatmeal jogging bottoms. Feet bare. Hairy toes, like a hobbit. There was a rumpled blanket under him, so maybe he’d been snoozing while he’d waited for her, the reason why he’d set aside his specs. He sloshed whisky into a glass, only a finger because he didn’t want to smell of it at work. He nodded at the muted TV. ‘I saw you on telly earlier…after you telephoned me.’

  ‘I dread to ask what they were saying about me.’

  ‘They were talking bollocks.’

  ‘Could you be more specific?’

  ‘They implied you might have helped him to jump.’

  Swain had caused quite a mess when he’d hit the concrete paving, but there was little damage to his left arm, except for the deep, bloody gouges in his flesh where somebody had “used excessive force” on the rigid cuffs. Anyone would think she’d forced him off the parapet by the overzealous application of his restraints.

  ‘Your boss didn’t help matters,’ Adam went on. ‘What’s Porter’s problem with you anyway? Why didn’t he stick up for you instead of announcing you were on administrative leave while he conducts a review of your actions? The arsehole. He as much as said you were being suspended on suspicion of murder.’

  DCI Charles Porter had a job to do. Protecting the Met’s reputation came first, and if that meant pushing one of his detectives under a bus then he was the one willing to give them a shove.

  ‘Do you think I forced Swain off that roof?’

  ‘If you did, then the bastard must’ve deserved it.’

  Light-headed, Kerry set her untouched second whisky by her feet. ‘That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, Adam.’

  His mouth bunched up at one side. ‘Yeah, well I didn’t mean it the way it came out. All I’m saying is if Swain was pushed, then it was just desserts.’

  ‘I didn’t push him, though. We were struggling and he fell. He was trying to throw me over the edge, not the other way around.’

  Adam also set his drink aside, so that he could cross the room and go down on his knees before her. He grabbed both her hands in his, squeezing them with each word. ‘I know you didn’t, Kerry. But if you did, then I for one wouldn’t blame you.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Heat built in her throat, expanded into her skull like a mushroom cloud. She extricated her hands from his. ‘A little support wouldn’t go amiss, Adam.’

  He reared back on his knees, hands spread. ‘I’m on your side.’

  ‘But even you think I’d something to do with Swain’s death. Where does that leave me when I’ve a chief inspector loo
king for a scapegoat?’

  ‘He’ll have to prove you pushed him, won’t he? But there were no other witnesses?’

  ‘There was a uniform there, too, but he was knocked out and didn’t see a thing.’

  ‘There you go then!’ Adam grinned conspiratorially. ‘If it’s your word against Swain’s, dead men tell no tales.’

  She pushed up abruptly from the chair. ‘For God’s sake, Adam!’

  He grasped for her, but she swiped his hands aside and lunged for the door. Her glass went spinning, sloshing whisky over the carpet. ‘Oh, bloody hell! Look at—’

  She bent to retrieve the glass, touched instead the sopping mess.

  ‘Leave it, Kerry. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘I’ve got it myself. I don’t need you—’

  ‘Kerry. Come on. You’re tired, you’re—’

  ‘I’m bloody disappointed! I thought of all people you’d be on my side.’

  ‘I am on your side.’ He knelt, reaching for the glass. Before he could pick it up, Kerry snatched it. He looked up at her. She glared down at him, her usually mismatched eyes uniform in their sadness. ‘Jesus, Kerry, I’m sorry, OK? I don’t think for one second you deliberately killed him…’

  ‘You’re not bloody helping! Not when everybody else thinks I did!’ She stormed into the kitchen. The empty glass clattered in the sink. Kerry was back instantly with a tea towel in one hand, a roll of absorbent kitchen paper in the other. ‘Get out the way. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Just give me the cloths. I’m already down here.’ It was true; he hadn’t made an effort to stand. As if by hemming it in he could stop the spread of the liquid through the carpet pile.

  ‘I said, I’ll do it!’ Kerry pushed into him, and he only gave a little. She lowered to one knee, throwing down the towel. ‘Shift, Adam, I’m in no mood for this.’

  He didn’t go away, he embraced her. She resisted, but he persisted, and strength flooded out of her. She almost collapsed over his knee, and he flopped back, drawing her with him away from the spillage. He ended up with his back against the settee and Kerry in his lap. He cupped her head to his shoulder, held her while she sobbed. She formed fists against his wide chest. Before making them she’d dug her nails into his flesh. Adam didn’t flinch, or complain. He’d been an insensitive prick and deserved the discomfort.