Monday 6th April 2009 – 9.15 a.m.
Now what?
Although Helen had managed to kick and bite her way out of that grungy B&B they’d all holed up in for the night, it was kneeing her betrayer in the balls that had finally seen him off. He’d then chased her with surprising speed along Nantwich Grove as its orange street lights had faded.
No point dwelling on how they’d all shared that so-called ‘family’ room on the first floor; how she’d forced herself to stay awake until she could flee both men, clearly operating under instruction. The younger thug had accused her and Flynn of knowing about the will, so he must have followed them to Hurst Crescent. Her instincts about him had been right. Wrong about the other. She must call the police and Jason, then hotfoot back to Heron House to collect her stuff.
Once and for all.
She wished she could have spoken to him directly while her captors had used what had passed for a bathroom. But perhaps he’d call her. Soon.
Her purse’s innermost fold held £5.35 pence exactly. All in coins, their worth incompatible with their weight. At least she still had her Visa. But where was DCI Jobiah’s card that she’d kept there, too?
Damn.
Her body was too full of bad blood, rising, falling, into her head, into her unchanged pad. She’d shelled out enough money to be by her boss’ side and for what? The man from Crosskelly had betrayed her. The empty pork scratchings packet suddenly blown against her ankles, said it all. No wonder he’d been so eager to check out the will on a Sunday, then the flat. He had to outwit the cut-up roughneck.
Feeling invisible to the purposeful throng around her, she glanced up and down the busy street. Where were they both now?
She should never, ever have stepped into that tempting white van on Saturday night. Heffy would have said ‘stupid cow’ and been spot on.
Now look.
***
Despite the morning rush hour’s exhaust fumes, Helen could smell herself as old, dead meat. Her manky hair stuck to her head. Her imagination now working faster than her legs, letting in a deadly thread of paranoia that made her quicken. What if the grey Volvo should pass by? What if Flynn and his co-pilot had guns? London was full of them. And knives. What difference would one small ‘pop’ make in this crazy hubbub?
She must get away from this place while that little boy’s photograph and his diary were still safe in her pants. While she still had a pulse. Jason’s advice before he’d put the phone down. But first things first. She needed simply to stop and investigate properly what she’d discovered at the dead man’s flat. Her toilet visits in the B&B had been listened in to. How sick was that? No way could she have studied the little book there or risked being heard turning its battered pages.
Soon the crowds and shops thinned out until she reached railings and a large open gate leading into a children’s play area where the second bench along was thankfully unoccupied. She opened up her rucksack and withdrew a slender, dark green book which bore the embossed word DIARY along its leather spine. Although the tiny brass clasp yielded to her fingers, the even more minute key attached by sellotape, wouldn’t budge in the lock.
At last.
The lock finally clicked open and, with no-one else within snooping distance, she turned back the worn leather cover and its mottled end paper and on the first thin page began to read:
This diary belongs to Charles Edmund Pitt-Rose
aged 8 years, 5 months, 10 days, 6 hours.
Dormitory 9. Weyborne School. Bridport. Dorset.
Great Britain. Europe. The World. Hemisphere. Stratosphere.
Hades.
PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL
Any other eyes that look,
Will be severely brought to book.
Hades was an odd addition from one so young. Or was it? Then she remembered what the Philippina had said. He’d also allegedly used it to describe Heron House.
Her breakfast Diet Coke began to churn around inside her as she began to read the first entry, dated Monday 12th September 1945, where, immediately, she spotted Betsan’s name. But in what context was impossible to see as without warning, the breeze had suddenly become a dusty wind trying to turn the well-used pages for her.
“Stop!” she snapped, facing the other way so she could concentrate. However, the wind only strengthened, bringing a voice she now dreaded. That could, if she let it, drive her insane.
“I can’t, I can’t. Surely that photograph you stole shows how frightened he was? My darling little brother who was forbidden to see me, his loving sister. His only sister. Never to come home, even for Christmas...”
Margiad Pitt-Rose.
“Yes, that’s me and it’s taken you long enough to find out. But then, why should you care? You’re like all the living. Selfish, blinkered. What a waste of a life.”
Helen secured her hood even tighter around her mess of hair to blot out the cruel monologue. To keep her head free for her own thoughts. Hadn’t Jason experienced the same phenomenon with his Evil Eyes book? Yes. Except this time, the agenda was different.
“And when it mattered, nobody listened,” Margiad persisted. “To him or me. And don’t think he was the only one to suffer. There were two other young boys who’d strayed too far. Learnt too much about things that were private, so they were…”
“What?” Helen shivered, glimpsing ordinary people passing the open gates.
“Violated then thrown in the swimming pool. Where they almost drowned my Jason…”
My Jason?
I tried to save them, but was punished for it. You see, their cries had torn at my heart, my soul.”
That once refreshing Coke was now acid in Helen’s throat. Her pulse jumping and that wind still tossing the branches and scattering litter.
“When did this happen? And who’s ‘they?’”
“Hasn’t my Jason told you?”
“No.”
“He’s had every opportunity.”
Just then, a Chinese guy with his toddler son walked by hand in hand, heads bowed against the wind. This picture of normality made her vision blur. They stared briefly in her direction, probably suspecting a multi-personality disorder, before moving on.
“ It was yesterday, in your present time,” the voice went on. “Ask him.”
“You’re lying. You want to suck every last ounce out of me like you’re doing with him. Or rather, you did to him. I’m supposed to forget about that? Am I?”
“He enjoyed it. Begged me for more, if you must know. I can still hear every word… Now,” the tone hardened, “give me my dead brother’s things.”
“You’re disgusting! Leave us alone!”
“Never.”
An angry crack of breaking glass suddenly filled Helen’s ears, followed by that same eerie scream she’d heard outside the art gallery. Not only was the diary being pulled from her grasp by a relentless force she’d never experienced before, but the horrible feeling of something moving beneath her clothes towards her pants.
She shrieked for help, unable to get up and run away, but at last managed to push the memoir between the bench and her thighs. Sealed tight, as the voice grew even more threatening. “Give me the diary. He’s my baby brother, not yours.”
“So what are you trying to hide? Who hanged him? Someone we know?”
A pause in which that sickly smell of roses met her nose.
“My Jason will have the answers. You’re not worth it. I had a child, remember? Unborn, but still something you’ll never, ever have…”
Helen shivered and couldn’t stop. “Your father’s, was it? Like Llyr?”
That breaking glass din returned. She covered her ears. Saw the play area’s trees and shrubs swaying back and forth as if in a deadly dance.
“I’ve been protecting you and your hard heart, but no more. From now on, you’re on your own, and if you think my Jason will be putting your interests before mine, you’re wrong. You’ve had your chance, Helen Myfanwy Jenkins. So let’s see how you get on.”
***
With that wretched diary safely reburied in her now dirty pink rucksack, and a growing sense of foreboding enveloping her, Helen didn’t hang about. Instead, dizzily turned left into Radlett Road, thinking about that baby. Had it been a lie for her benefit, or part of a terrible reality?
Whatever. She was now in competition for Jason with a ghost. A ghost, for God’s sake. Time to make a call. Two calls in fact. She burrowed in her rucksack’s usual places.
No mobile.
She’d still had it in Sandhurst Mansion and when she’d crept into the damp, mean bed next to the bathroom in Nantwich Grove.
That was it.
Those two thieves must have struck when she’d gone in there.
Running now, into the wind, the swollen pad between her legs shifting out of place with each stride, but she didn’t care. Too much else was at stake.
“Where’s the nearest phone,” she panted at a passing suit. His directions a blur as she ran on, dodging the multitude of shoppers and drifters, all the while sensing that other force holding her back.
At the welcome sight of a silver threesome outside Islington Post Office she let out a cry of relief, only to have the breath punched from her lungs from behind, between her shoulder blades. With no chance to fight back, she fell on to her outstretched hands. Her rucksack adrift, just beyond reach and soon snapped up by a figure she half-recognised. When she got to her feet, the man had gone. Her rucksack emptied of the diary lay a few paces on. No-one she asked had seen anything. No-one helped. And it wasn’t until she’d flagged down the first taxi to come along, did she realise who her cowardly assailant had been.