‘I’m the only one who can stop the hopping,’ Nathan Charles told the police.
‘And why’s that?’ asked the taller of the two ginger constables, not bothering to suppress his disgust.
‘Because I’m the only one who saw it happen. I put all this in my statement last night.’
The tall ginger constable leaned close. He’d recently eaten a curry. ‘What your statement tells us, mate, is that you’re a nutter. Worse than a nutter. You know what they do to people like you in prison? The warders won’t protect you.’
Nathan tried to stay calm. He thought carefully, imagining another way to explain. ‘Do you believe in the soul?’ he asked. The copper looked blankly at his short pal. ‘I’m not a religious man, but I’ve come to believe that a wronged soul might seek redress. Haven’t you ever tried to put things right? What if you were dead? Wouldn’t your soul be in danger? Hop is an ancient name for the devil, did you know that?’
‘Right, that’s enough of this bollocks,’ said the short one, spitting his chewing gum into its foil for later. He signalled to his partner. ‘Let’s get him locked away again.’
Nathan Charles decided he was wasting his time trying to appeal to their spirituality. Before his arrest for murder, no one ever noticed him. He was a quiet, unhealthy man with a bad back that caused him to move cautiously, in perpetual expectation of pain. He was the last person you’d imagine hurting anyone, let alone committing such shocking acts of violence. But in the last two years, he had tried to kill seven children.
He didn’t do it to satisfy an aberrant desire, or for financial gain. He was attempting to save the lives of others. Nathan constantly had to remind himself that he was not mad. I’m a good man who has been forced to take an unthinkable path, he thought. I am trapped on the horns of a terrible moral dilemma from which there is no simple solution. But I must fight to find one.
The police, as they say, were baffled. How could someone have attacked children with such frequency and avoided detection until now, when he finally struck in a crowded street? They didn’t know that Nathan had been keeping to a pattern that no one else could discern, that he was careful to leave no trace. He was always watching for an opportunity to commit murder, and his victims were defenceless. Of course, parents were much more mindful these days, so he still had to be careful, but with a little planning and forethought he felt he could achieve his aim.
What exactly was his aim? The two ginger constables watched him and waited for instructions, but never asked themselves what had led their prisoner down this path, from a comfortable married home life to a haunted existence in a squalid bedsit. To discover that, they would have had to turn back the clock.
Two years earlier, Nathan Charles had been a happily married man with a three-year-old daughter. He had married Chloe, the girl he had dated since his days at Warwick University. His wife had given birth to Mia, a precocious black-eyed child whose atavistic behaviour amazed and amused them both. Nathan saw a lot of his daughter, because Chloe worked while he stayed home and tried to finish enough paintings to furnish his second exhibition. The first had met with modest success, encouraging him to strike out in a new direction, but all too often he found it easy to drift away from his sketchbook and watch Mia at play. He was entirely happy in this role. It allowed him to view his daughter’s development at close range.
It was around this time that he began to make drawings of her. He had in his mind a series of sketches that would chart the mysterious behaviour of her expanding intelligence. He drew without thinking, marking in the folds of her arms, the back of her head, not really studying his efforts until he had several sketches complete. He filed the sketches in folders, with the idea of waiting until several sets were completed before creating a large-scale composite painting.
This was a new area for Nathan. His first exhibition was very different, and had come about because of the location of their apartment. The Charles family lived in a wide grey street, in a house set diagonally opposite the entrance to Holloway Prison. The place had come cheap because it was difficult to get tenants to live within sight of jails and graveyards. The view didn’t bother either of them, and the light was good because it was a top-floor flat. They never saw the people inside the vans that came and went; Nathan had no way of telling who were guards and who were prisoners, and didn’t give it much thought until the day of the escape.
Holloway is a women’s prison with a controversial history, from the imprisonment of suffragettes, the dubious conviction and execution of Edith Thompson in 1923, the hanging of Ruth Ellis in 1955, and accusations of racism that culminated in the suicides of black prisoners and former inmates in more recent times. Yet the prison also had connections with art. One of the most striking was the silver pin presented to all members of the National Women’s Party who served time for picketting the White House for women’s suffrage. The pin was modelled after Sylvia Pankhurst’s Holloway brooch, which represented the portcullis gate of Holloway Prison, chained shut with a heart-shaped lock.
The prisoner who escaped was a girl called Jackie Langford. She had been incarcerated for the murder of her father, and while there was no question of her guilt it was generally felt that she should have been placed in C1, the psychiatric wing of the prison, rather than the offenders’ unit, because medical reports pointed to her poor mental condition. There were those who said she had suffered terribly as a child, and did not deserve to be in prison at all.
On that day, Nathan was returning from the shops with Mia, and had almost reached the front door when he saw a slender, pale girl running across the road. A car screeched, there was a slam of flesh and bone against metal, and her body fell at their feet. As she landed, she threw up her arms and caught Mia in the mouth with her wrist, splitting the child’s lip.
Mia screamed, more in surprise than fright, and suddenly they were surrounded by officers in dayglo yellow jackets. Nathan and Mia were hustled to one side as the police twisted the girl onto her stomach and locked her hands behind her back. It seemed inhuman to Nathan; she had not meant to hit his daughter, and he felt the police should check her first for broken bones before slamming their weight on top of her. He began to say something, but was warned into silence by an armed officer. Later, when the event was covered on the news, he was shocked to discover that the girl, Jackie Langford, was only twenty-three. She looked much older, but her ethereal appearance was due to the hunger-strike she had embarked upon several days earlier. She had fought her imprisonment from the outset, and just half an hour earlier that morning had put out a warder’s eye with a plastic fork after agreeing to eat a meal.
Mia seemed none the worse for her fright. The cut looked worse than it was, and she soon forgot the incident. Nathan read about the Langford case because it was in the papers for days afterwards; she had died on the way to hospital, but there was some confusion as to the cause of death. Doctors’ opinions conflicted: one said she had been fatally injured in the road accident, another said that her wounds had been caused by the guards on their journey to hospital. The journalist implied that she had been assaulted in revenge for the injury she had inflicted on their fellow officer.
THE GIRL WHO WISHED SHE HADN’T BEEN BORN was the headline of one melancholy article about Jackie Langford. Beneath it were two photographs, one of Jackie aged three, already damaged by neglect, clutching a pathetic bunch of small white flowers; the other showed her grim little grave, where no such flowers would ever be left to take root, where attention would be denied in death as it had been in life.
Certain facts had not been made available at the time of her trial: Jackie’s history of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, her often-expressed desire to die, her attempts on her own life. Born to an alcoholic and a drug-addicted mother, she had first been abandoned, then placed in care and finally reclaimed by her father. The scandal was that social services had allowed her to be returned to her abusive parent, whom she had eventually killed. Public sympathy for Jackie was mitigated by the fact that at the time of his death, her father was crippled and all but helpless, and she had tortured him before he had finally slipped away. The whole affair was sordid and sad, but Jackie’s death had not quite brought the cycle of violence to an end; a few days later, newspapers reported that her mother had murdered the baby she’d recently conceived with another drug addict, before taking her own life.
Nathan studied Jackie’s downcast face in the blurred newspaper photograph. He had never seen such an image of misery and damage – could nobody have done anything? Such things happen, Chloe told him, and there was little that anyone could really do. She was upset that Mia had come into such close contact with a convicted murderess. She wanted them to leave the area, but a move was out of the question until Nathan had sold some paintings at the next exhibition, which was still seven months away.
The paintings were not coming easily. None of them satisfied him. Nathan felt as if he was failing to grasp the point of his life. Was this really the best he could do?
And he had a problem with his drawings of Mia. It was hard to keep her sitting still, but when he gave her some coloured crayons and a sheet of paper, he found that she would hold the same position for several minutes at a time. He had hoped for early signs of artistic talent, but was too optimistic, because she only ever managed looping scribbles, their colours decided by whatever crayons were at hand. For some reason (probably because the sheets he gave her were the same size as the ones he was using) he kept Mia’s drawings sandwiched with his own, and it struck him that he might use the random elements from her doodles in with his own sketches. It might even provide the breakthrough he was looking for.
Then an odd thing happened.
At the end of an overheated, tiring day (the stormy August afternoon had drawn Mia into a state of fractious boredom) Nathan emptied out the drawings and began to assemble them in order. Although it still seemed a good idea to mix both sets of sketches, what upset the compositional balance was his daughter’s profligate use of colour, so he tried to damp them down by overlaying coloured gels. The first few didn’t work; they rendered the sketches invisible. Nathan threw the sheets onto the polished pine boards of the studio and dug out a crimson panel of acetate, laying it over the scrawls.
What the crimson did was knock out all of the reds, yellows, oranges and lighter tones, leaving blues, deep greens and blacks. To his surprise, he found himself looking at a legible sentence.
It read: I AM THE AVENGER OF ALL UNWANTED CHILDREN.
It wasn’t possible, but the words were quite clear and spelled out in block capitals. They had simply been buried under many layers of crayon. As the weather broke and rain began to patter against the windows, Nathan dropped to his knees and pulled out all of the other sheets she had drawn on. Then he applied the same sheet of acetate. The following sentences were slowly revealed like coded patterns in DNA:
FOR ALL MEN THAT DO NOT LOVE.
WHO MUST TAKE THE BLAME.
FOR NO ONE WILL AVENGE ME.
I JACKELINE (sic) LANGFORD.
THEY WILL DIE AT MY HAND.
THROUGH THE HANDS OF OTHERS.
THEIR OWN OFFSPRING.
AM NOT THE ONE.
Rearranging these and adding the first drawing, he came up with:
I JACKELINE (sic) LANGFORD AM NOT THE ONE. WHO MUST TAKE THE BLAME. FOR ALL MEN THAT DO NOT LOVE. THEIR OWN OFFSPRING. THEY WILL DIE AT MY HAND. THROUGH THE HANDS OF OTHERS. I AM THE AVENGER OF ALL UNWANTED CHILDREN. FOR NO ONE WILL AVENGE ME.
It seemed as though someone was playing a grotesque trick, but try as he might, Nathan could not come up with a rational explanation. The drawings were his daughter’s, and the block letters all matched. He could see that in every case they were carefully buried under layers of scribble. He had watched the child make every one of the pictures herself, beginning with a blank piece of paper. She had pieced the lettering together stroke by stroke, entirely out of order, as a medium might.
With trembling hands, he laid a fresh sheet before her. Delighted, Mia grabbed a handful of crayons and began to loop and scratch at the paper. Nathan watched for an hour, and could still not see the letters being formed. If they were there at all, they had been made up from hundreds of tiny disconnected lines. When he removed the sheet from her and placed it beneath the crimson gel, he could read:
THEY CANNOT CATCH ME FOR I WILL HOP.
This seemed to make even less sense than the previous statements camouflaged in the drawings. Worse, it was the last sentence Mia produced. When he tried to get her to do the same thing again later that evening in front of his wife, Mia produced a little-girl daub with nothing hidden within. Nathan searched the sketch in every imaginable way. It was as though his daughter knew he was onto her, and had decided to call his bluff. When Nathan attempted to show the drawings to Chloe, she took Mia’s side against him.
On those long afternoons while his wife was at work, he watched the little girl constantly. He knew that she was someone else. Her body language had completely changed. He watched her, and she knew when he was watching. A slyness crept into the corners of her eyes. She became preternaturally calm and intent upon her tasks, studiously ignoring him as if to say, ‘I know what you’re about, but you won’t catch me out.’ She was no longer his daughter, a small distaff form aligned to his emotions, but a Midwich Cuckoo of a child, something to be feared when they were left alone.
Curled against the far side of his bed at night he thought: I love her. My daughter was never unwanted. She hates me. How can she hate me for not loving her? He knew the hatred must come from the woman who possessed her, but it seemed impossible, insane to believe.
In the months that followed, the marriage began to break apart. Nathan was unable to provide enough paintings for the gallery, and lost his exhibition. All his energy was spent on studying his alien daughter. A strange pattern to Mia’s behaviour had emerged. This sentient being, this guarded spirit, only appeared in the light of day. After dark when Mia was sleepy, she was quite herself. It was as though the thing – that part of Jacqueline Langford which had been denied sunlight for so long – could only thrive and take hold in brightness, even the grey-tinged sunlight of North London. He imagined her spirit operating like the phototropic cells of a plant, a purely chemical transformation, as impersonal and determined as a poisonous orchid, unfolding to release its spoor like a spreading cancer.
Chloe became mistrustful of leaving her daughter alone with her strangely behaved husband, but one winter afternoon, while she was visiting her gynaecologist, Nathan reached a decision and took the child to a lonely part of Clissold Park.
‘I know you’re in there,’ he whispered to Mia as the insipid November sun flecked her face. She ground the toe of her Wellington into wet grass and gave him a new look she had lately developed, the one that said ‘Daddy can’t stop being silly’. She held his eyes for so long that he jumped when she suddenly ran off.
He caught her in a few easy strides as she tried to dive inside a straggly bush of gorse. She did not scream or fight to escape his embrace. He tugged but the thorns refused to yield her, snagging her clothes and striating her pale limbs with spidery crimson trails. Her body went limp in his hands, and for a moment he thought he had killed her.
He only realised what she was doing when he saw the boy, a self-consciously tough kid of nine or ten, his grey cotton hood up, a Silk Cut smouldering in a pinched mouth. He’d been mooching behind the bushes, and now stood frozen to the spot as the sentient spirit gathered strength in Mia’s inert form, preparing to hop.
This time he almost saw it leap, as some filmy, fiery substance, the passing of raw energy, displaced the air between girl and boy. Now Mia was awake and screaming at him in shocked bewilderment, and the boy was staring at him with her crafty eyes, preparing to bolt. Nathan made a grab for the child, but found himself holding the grey hooded top.
The good news was that Mia, his daughter, had returned. She retained no knowledge of what had happened to her, and seemed none the worse for her distant interlude.
Chloe’s coldness was harder to dismiss. She would not forget her husband’s disturbing manner so easily. Nathan’s last sight of the little boy running away across the sodden park returned to him each night, preventing sleep. He began to retrace his steps across the grass, searching for the boy. He had taken the first steps in a hunt that would last for eighteen months. Soon his wife and child were gone, but losing them was the price he paid for vigilance.
He came to feel that he had been chosen to protect the children of the city. He had no money, no friends. He followed the tormented spirit of Jacqueline Langford from the body of one child to the next as it hopped, tracing families from Balham to Tooting to Finsbury Park to Leytonstone to West Hampstead, and always the creature defeated him at the last moment. It only chose young children; perhaps teenagers were too closed, too knowing. He had no way of understanding the process. He only knew that such things existed.
He watched the children as they changed, and sometimes he managed to stop them before they hurt their fathers. But he was never sure what to do with any child she had hopped into. Should he kill it? Would that stop her from causing an eternity of harm to others?
On that final rainy Thursday in the Edgware Road, he trapped the little boy Amir, into which Jackie’s much-travelled soul had hopped only a few minutes before. He strangled Amir with his tie, coming up behind the boy outside a shop. Amir had been choosing oranges, and held several in his hands. As the tie tightened around his neck, the oranges fell from his hands to the gutter.
When she saw that her child was missing, Amir’s mother screamed in a way that only a middle-Eastern woman could.
Later, Nathan told the police everything, right from the start, but of course they didn’t believe a word. They only wanted to know what he had done with the boy. When Amir was found alive in a nearby cemetery, tearful and confused, a doctor examined him and found no sign of abuse. What’s more, the boy plainly had no recollection of the strange man whom witnesses had placed in the street just before his disappearance. The spirit had hopped once again.
The police released Nathan. What else, they told Amir’s screaming mother, could they do? Just a few days earlier they had captured a man who had run amok in Oxford Street with an axe, yelling to his victims that he was the Devil’s emissary on earth. These days there was a tendency to lump all the lunatics together; there seemed to be so many of them about. Nathan’s case was unproven.
But Nathan Charles was no longer the man he had once been. His wife sued for divorce. She wanted to know what he had done with the child while they were in the cemetery. She had been in touch with Amir’s mother. Eventually a case was assembled, spearheaded by the parents of children all across London who recognised his photograph in the News of the World and logged onto a website with testimonials. Chloe gave evidence against him. Although little hard fact emerged, Nathan did his case no favours by insisting that his story was true. He was placed under the supervision of a North London psychiatric ward.
After a further two years had passed, he was allowed to make local trips in the custody of his doctor. On one chilly Sunday morning in June, Nathan visited the cemetery where he had taken the boy Amir. After this trip he became quite calm, and never again tried to convince the examining board of his case. For he had seen the tiny flowers that now blossomed across Jacqueline Blandford’s grim little grave, on the spot where he had shaken her spirit free from the terrified boy. The fresh white petals had transformed the site into a place of lasting peace, a small sign of thanks given to a man who had sacrificed everything to restore a single tortured human soul.