CHAPTER NINE: CONTACT

 

 

IT HAD BEEN a good five years since Will had set foot on Dartmouth Park Road. He hoped Elisabeth still lived here and hadn’t moved on. He pushed through the gate – which still wailed in the same high-low fashion – and rapped on the door. When it opened, there was a hand that flew to a mouth, a dreadful crash as the plate Elisabeth had been drying fell to the floor.

Will said, “Pleased to see me then?”

 

 

WHAT HAD BEEN their living room contained the same curtains they had picked together from IKEA. Mango, the cat they had chosen from a litter belonging to a Maine Coon breeder in West Croydon, regarded him from the windowsill with the same mix of disdain and suspicion. Elisabeth was sitting with her slim legs winding around each other, elbow resting on her knee, cigarette burning between well-manicured fingers. Her hair had been cut short; her high cheekbones formed the inverted base of a triangle completed by the thick, ruby bow of her mouth.

“You look fantastic,” he said.

“You look like a stunt, Will,” she said. “You look like shit in a jacket.”

“I aim to please.”

“That’d be a first.”

Will held his hands up. “Look, Elisabeth. I’m not here to fight you.”

“What the fuck are you here for? Money? You still living in that shit pit with vinegar tits? My fucking patient, she was. I should have pulled the fucking plug on her before you got wind of her.” Elisabeth took a huge, violent drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray that might as well have been Will’s face.

“Elisabeth, I–” And then he couldn’t go on. The grief that had been rattling around inside like a loose coin in a machine spat out of him with such force that Elisabeth moved back in her seat, her hand covering her mouth, her eyes large in their sockets. As she blurred before him, Will slid onto the floor and let it happen. By the end, his chin and chest were a thin gravy of snot and tears and saliva. His chest hurt from all the sobbing. He was exhausted.

Elisabeth said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you,” he said. “Cat. She’s been kidnapped. I think she might be dead.”

Elisabeth closed her eyes and for a while the two of them were silent. Then, very slowly, Elisabeth moved over to him, sat by him, and slipped an arm around his shoulders.

She said, “You’ve lost weight.”

“There was a baby. Our baby... I mean, one that me and Cat were going to have. We lost it.”

Elisabeth tensed but did not remove her arm. Her voice was cold when she spoke again. “I don’t know what you think I can do for you, Will. I mean, it’s not as if we parted in a way that would ever be described in the maturity textbook, is it? I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you, but why have you come here?”

“You’re all I know,” he said. His voice had dwindled to breath and little else. “Men came to our house. They were going to kill me.”

“Will? What are you talking about?”

The urgency in her voice couldn’t rouse him from the exhausted sleep that he suddenly fell into. Elisabeth was able to grab a cushion from the sofa before his head hit the floor. One of his hands retreated to his eyes, covering them as though to prevent him from seeing something awful. It was hours before she could get him up, in any sense of the word.

 

 

ELISABETH SAID, “THERE’S nobody called Slowheath on the net.”

“Fuck it,” Will spat. He was sitting at her shoulder, watching as her fingers flew over the keyboard of her laptop. The computer’s hard drive softly chirruped and chuckled as it processed Elisabeth’s request and vomited the results up on screen. The window in the basement study showed a mass of foliage, topped by a portion of pavement. Occasional legs would stride by, casting stop-start patterns of shadow across the room.

Will said, “Are you sure?”

“You can see for yourself. Hang on. What about Sloe Heath?”

“Who he?”

“It’s not a he. It’s an it. It’s a hospital in the Northwest. Just outside Warrington.” She jotted an address on a piece of paper.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well.” Elisabeth swivelled to face him. The whiteness of the screen behind her made it difficult to see the cast of her features. She pressed the scrap into his hand. “There’s nothing else. You’ll have to try. Tell the police. They’ll look into it for you.”

“I can’t get the police involved. I’m already on their shit list.”

“What do you mean?”

“Receiving stolen goods. And there was an affray in the town centre.”

“An affray? What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t talk copspeak with me. What did you do?”

“I was in a fight. A knife was pulled–”

“Oh, Will...”

“Not me. I didn’t have the knife. I headbutted this guy. Broke his nose.”

They were quiet for a while. Then Elisabeth said, “That’s why we aren’t together any more.”

“You don’t have to explain, Eli. That was five years ago. I can work it out for myself. But I can’t go to them. They’ll think I did it.”

“What will you do now?”

“I have to go up there. Catriona might still be alive.”

Elisabeth was becoming, in these moments, much as she used to be when she grew agitated by their arguments. She drew breath as though to say something and then fell silent. It was like watching a shy person struggling to express herself.

“The police,” she blurted finally, persistently. “You must go to them.”

“I can’t,” he said, simply. “There’s no time. They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“I’ll back you up.”

“No. I have to go now. Do you still have the car?”

It was as if, in a second, Elisabeth’s rigidity towards him had returned. She gave him a better view of her chin. “Fuck off, Will. My help desk has just closed.”

“Eli–”

“Don’t Eli me. You’re on your own.”

The burbling computer and a slow foot on broken glass in the street filled the silence. Will was grateful that Elisabeth wasn’t pushing for him to leave, but he knew that it wouldn’t be long in coming.

He said, “Can you smell anything burning?”

Elisabeth regarded him blankly. “Do I look like I’m cooking?”

“Well something’s caught. Are you sure you haven’t got anything on the stove?”

A finger of smoke curled around the door.

Elisabeth said, “Shit.”

She flew upstairs to the kitchen, but there was nothing on the cooker. Will checked her when she hurried back into the hallway. Something in his poise stopped her dead.

He put his finger to his lips; his reddened eyes shifted their focus to a point behind her. She turned to find the back door smouldering, a black handprint gaining definition in the grain of its wood.

“What–” she managed, before Will gripped her hand.

“We have to leave,” he said. “Now.”

She nodded.

“Where’s the car?”

They left by the front door. The sun was a fat, orange, cold thing wrapped in mist, low in the too-blue sky. Frost marbled the roads. A heavy woman in a nurse’s uniform laboured over the handles of an ageing bicycle.

“Show me,” said Will.

They hurried to the corner of Dartmouth Park Road as a series of muffled crashes peppered the stillness they’d vacated.

“I was followed,” Will said.

“Who?” Elisabeth glanced back at him as he propelled her along the pavement. She caught his strangled answer I don’t know, and then her attention was dragged over his shoulder by frenetic movement in their wake. Elisabeth could see, over the top of Mr. Royle’s neatly clipped hedges, a head, jerky with intent. Whoever it was moved fast. Faster than them.

“Where’s this fucking car?”

Elisabeth was about to answer when their pursuer stepped out from behind the hedge, sucking the breath from her.

“How can she run?” she managed at last, before Will pulled her off the road. He had spotted Elisabeth’s car – a cherry-red Volkswagen Golf – parked in a familiarly skewed fashion in a side street. It still bore a scratch from a visit they had made to Abersoch years before.

“Keys,” he demanded. He was wondering how the woman could walk, let alone run. Her legs had been molten, running into each other in shapeless flesh loops before rediscovering normality.

One hand had hovered beneath her chin, like a soup-eater aware of his lack of skill with the spoon, to scoop back great drifts of skin that oozed off the boss of her skull.

Elisabeth was laughing, her eyes as big as eggs. “The keys are on the fridge. Next to a bag of plums.”

They moved on, past Elisabeth’s car, aiming for the top of the road. Will could see there was no way they would make it before the woman caught them. What was wrong with her? Was it leprosy?

“Maybe you should talk to her?” Elisabeth gasped. She was clutching the side of her stomach, fighting a stitch. “Maybe she needs help.”

“Fuck that. She’s not after a cup of sugar, I assure you.”

The woman – if she could be called that – continued to gather pace and form. Now Will saw that she was only able to observe them since coins of flesh had peeled away from her face, allowing vague smears of colour to resolve themselves as eyes. Her targets locked, she arrowed towards them.

God, Will thought. She sniffed us out.

She was almost upon them when Will jinked left, hauling Elisabeth down a narrow alleyway. Up ahead, Hampstead Heath rolled away from them, raked by mist.

Will glanced back; her cornering wasn’t too clever. The effort to right herself meant she lost control of her substance. When she hove into view once more, her extremities were knitting themselves back into true.

In this fashion, he was able to put some distance between them. On the main road, he chanced upon a taxi pulling away from its rank.

“Anywhere. Drive,” he ordered, as they spilled into the back seat. She came for them out of the lane like a greyhound from a trap. Will watched her receding through the back window as she gamely attempted to pursue. As soon as it was evident she could not catch them, she switched off and set a new course instantly, never once reciprocating Will’s interest in her.

“So,” Elisabeth said. “Who’s she?” Her hands were covering her face and he could see her lower lip trembling. Nevertheless, some of the sass was creeping back into her voice now they were safe. “Jealous girlfriend?”