Читать книгу Dark Winter Tales: a collection of horror short stories - Paul Finch - Страница 12

Geoff slows his Chrysler to a halt on the road called Woodcock Close.

It is a cul-de-sac, as its name suggests, with a turning circle at the end and detached middle-class houses at regular intervals along its western side. Opposite these, on the east, the ground flows away downhill, a rough uncultivated pasture of brambles, ragwort and rich, thick meadow-grass. At the bottom, perhaps two hundred yards down from Woodcock Close, a dense stand of trees encloses a woodland pond. Beyond this there is a fenced-off paddock, which is periodically used for exercising dressage horses, though the stately residence to which it belongs lies half a mile to the north, only accessible from the paddock by a winding, unmade lane, and when you reach it, well concealed within a manicured spinney of sculpted evergreens; out of sight, out of mind – and thus unattached to the green and pleasant area which lies below Woodcock Close, tucked away like a secret garden.

While dreary enough in the winter – unless there is snow, in which case it becomes an exceptional sled and toboggan run – this small but hidden valley is a magical place at every other time of the year. It is no more than ten or twelve acres in total size, yet, in appearance at least, it is deep, secluded, mysterious – even though in reality it sits in the heart of the town’s sprawling suburbs, and is perhaps only five minutes’ walk from the ever-rumbling M6 motorway. Locals like us have always known it as ‘the Dell’, and probably every generation of our boys, going back to the pre-war years, waged their own battles down in its leafy heart, explored their own jungles, fought their own dinosaurs, built their own treehouses and swung on their own makeshift rope swings.

But that was then and this is now. And children don’t play in the Dell anymore.

“You know, Dad,” Geoff says as he parks, “… you don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” I reply.

“It’s not as if you’ve got anything to prove.”

I consider his words, which I hear every time we come here, and then take my stick from the footwell.

“You really expect to find something?” he asks. “After so long?”

I throw him a look – one of those short, shrewish looks I increasingly throw at people these days, and which I’ve recently made a mental note to try and clamp down on. “It … it isn’t that. You know it isn’t that.”

“I know.” His voice softens. He smiles sympathetically. “It’s become an annual pilgrimage, this, hasn’t it?”

“Something like that.” I button up my overcoat and climb from the car.

It is a cool day in early September. It would probably be warm if not for the gentle easterly breeze, which rustles like paper in the grass atop the Dell. The sun is mellow and misted in a pebble-blue sky, against which the foliage of the woodland below is bright emerald in colour, deep, succulent in texture.

“I wish you wouldn’t do it, though.” Geoff climbs out of the car on the other side. He nods at my stick and at my slight grimace of pain as I straighten my ever-creaking back. “I mean … you’re not going to be able to get up and down that hill much longer. Not at your age.”

I’m not sure whether this is an intended wind-up.

“I’m only sixty-seven, you know,” I remind him.

He doesn’t smile (which means that it isn’t a wind-up at all). “You’re a sixty-seven-year-old with chronic sciatica.”

“Well you’ll be around to help me, won’t you? If things get tough.” I use that terse, fatherly tone, which always suggests that you’re telling your son something rather than asking him.

He shakes his head as he slips his rolled-up newspaper from his jacket pocket. “Oh no … nooo, no. I’m not helping you punish yourself. No way.” He leans back against the car and starts to read. “I’ll happily give you a lift here … so long as you want to come, but that’s as far as it goes.”

I look at him for a long moment, before setting off down the slope.

He is a handsome enough man, my son; thirty-nine now and with a growing-up family of his own. He still looks youngish, though. His hair is jet-black and thickly layered on his scalp. He plays football at weekends and looks after himself, as his tall, spare physique suggests. People have always said he reminds them of me, but I don’t see that in him at all. If anything, his smooth, almost refined features resemble his mother’s, though the same certainly can’t be said for his attitude. Geoff has always been a man’s man, and I suppose by that I mean energetic, self-assured, cocky, confident and, generally speaking, a good provider for his wife and children. But at the same time he can be domineering, insensitive, occasionally boorish (when the drink is on him), and mildly selfish where the non-material needs of his loved ones are concerned. I can’t fault him for any of that, I suppose – the modern male isn’t nearly so progressive an animal as people like to imagine; the main difference between him and the old-fashioned model is that he makes a pretence of putting others first, but it only goes as far as that. Maybe, in that respect, Geoff is like me, however. When my family were growing up, I never saw a great deal of them, and even though that was because of work, I wasn’t half as astute at my job as Geoff currently is in the computer business he runs. At least, I didn’t make it pay as well, so at the end of the day, you may ask, what was it all for?

He senses me watching him and glances up. “Okay?”

I nod and half-smile. “Fine. Just running over a few things.”

“Once a copper, eh?”

I nod again. “Back in five, okay?”

“No problem,” he says, getting back to his reading.

*

All over Britain, I guess, and probably in other countries too, parents these days seem to be more mindful of where their children are and what they’re getting up to. The tabloids and daily newsreels are too filled with lurid, ghoulish stories to render them anything else. In the UK, the murders of children by strangers are said to be lower in number now than they were in the mid-1970s, but that must be because grown-ups are simply more vigilant, less prepared to let their very young go out and play unsupervised, and especially wary of scenic but isolated spots like the Dell. In that respect, the Andrew Conroy case won’t be the only reason why kids don’t hang out around here anymore, but it certainly can’t have helped.

As I perambulate downhill, it strikes me as immensely sad how modern children are denied the youth of wild adventure that Geoff and others like him enjoyed. A wood like the one at the bottom of the Dell should not be silent and filled with undisturbed shadows; courting couples sneaking off into its undergrowth should not go unspied upon; tadpole-filled ponds like the one deep in the middle here should not remain unplundered.

But that is the way of it these days. And with good reason.

The murder of Andrew Conroy was really quite horrible. More so from my point of view, perhaps, because I knew the kid personally. He was a contemporary of Geoff’s … went to the same school and scout troop, was a member of the same swimming club. Don’t ever believe it if someone tells you that police detectives get hardened to the slaughter of the innocents. Especially don’t believe it if those police detectives happen to work in their home town.

It was his eleventh birthday, and young Andrew had gone down to the Dell to see if any of his pals were around. That was all anyone really knew about it. His body was discovered seven hours later, under a bush and covered with leaves. He’d been bludgeoned to death with a brick, then sexually interfered with. We made fingertip searches through those woods for the next three weeks, ran door-to-doors throughout the district, questioned every ‘possible’ in the town, and their families – over and over again. But to no avail. This happened in 1975, still nine years before the first DNA breakthroughs would be made, but even if we’d had that level of crime-busting technology available, it’s unlikely we’d have made progress. The killer was either too clever or too lucky. There was minimal evidence to go on. The murder weapon, which we recovered, had been thrown into the pond and thus was washed clean of fingerprints; it had been a dry summer day – the ground firm, the turf lush and springy, which meant there were no footprints; nobody living in the nearest houses had seen or heard anything untoward; public appeals for information drew a blank. No-one, it seemed, knew a damn thing.

I headed up the investigation, being already a seasoned detective. And if I couldn’t make ground on the murderer, nobody could, people said. They usually said that while giving me a conciliatory slap on the shoulder. I still remember those slaps, though I remember them more these days like the blows of a whip.

I reach the bottom of the slope – not without some huffing and puffing, because meadow-grass grows deep and tussocky at this time of year, and tends to be liberally laced with cocksfoot and creeping thistle, and as I’ve already hinted, I’m not the sprightliest sixty-seven-year-old. Anyway, I reach the bottom and the wood stands before me. Not that there is anything dark or sinister about it. Sunlight slants through its open spaces; its leaf canopy whispers in the breeze; somewhere in the higher boughs, a woodpecker jackhammers away. Rural idyll – it bespeaks pure rural idyll. Mind you, it probably did the same on that fateful day in 1975.

I press on in, having to tread carefully. Various pathways once wound back and forth through the miniature coppice; clear, well-trodden routes that served as ably for bicycle tyres as they did for sneakered feet. The fact that they are now largely invisible, submerged under dense profusions of thorns and bracken, tells its own story. There are sections of them I have to beat my way through, using my stick like a machete. Here and there my trousers snag, strands of briar conspire to tangle my ankles and try to trip me. But I am resolute; I will keep going – because all the way through there are melancholy reminders of what this place once meant. In a high elm quite close to the centre of the wood, a few mildewed planks lie balanced between the branches, one hanging loose from a rusted nail. These are all that remain of a carefully constructed treehouse. It hailed from an era long prior to my son’s, but consecutive generations adopted it as their own, each one making its own renovations and improvements. I remember Geoff telling me how he and his cronies put a carpet up there and cushions, and hung a polythene roof over the top of it. There was even a rumour that someone provided a stash of girlie magazines for it, snaffled from the barber’s shop by an understanding older brother.

Further along, I come to the pond itself. It occupies a low, shady hollow in the very centre of the wood, and at this time of year is only just filling up again, recovering from the annual dry season that is August. Already though, it has scummed over; it looks soup-like, stagnant – clearly no-one has been fishing here, or even poking about in it. One particularly wet year, when the surface of this pond had risen a foot or so higher than usual, Geoff and other kids like him – Andrew Conroy amongst them, I expect – built themselves a raft and spent the entire summer poling their way barefoot from one end of it to the other. High above it and now out of reach, a ravel of rotted strings are all that is left of the once infamous rope swing; more than a few youngsters came splashing down from that in their time, thankfully none injuring themselves seriously. These days, I imagine the weight of a squirrel would suffice to break it.

I carry on, hacking my way through swathes of vegetation, and sense the trees close in behind me, blotting out all visible traces of the grassy slope and the neat row of houses at the top. Just ahead, what was once the path will soon split into two, the left-hand route bending back on itself to loop around the other side of the pond, the right-hand route meandering deeper and deeper between the ranks of ash and juniper, finally terminating at the fence on the edge of the horses’ paddock. As I understand it, this was once the place for youngsters to come to if they’d wanted to watch the prize-winning animals get put through their paces, or to feed them lush tufts of elephant grass. Unfortunately, it has different connotations now.

I never cease to feel a cold breath on my neck as I approach this spot. You’ll understand if I explain that the first time I personally came here was to view a wide, taped off area with a police tarpaulin erected over it as a rainproof tent.

No evidence of that remains now, but the atmosphere is the same. In fact, in some respects it is worse, because the spiky hawthorn bush under which Andrew Conroy’s battered, violated body had been stuffed, has now grown up and out, turning into a young tree. This in itself is enough to create a menacing shadow in the once sunny glade, but to make matters worse, the small embankment along which the barbed wire fence was erected proved an insufficient anchorage for the growing tree’s spreading root system. As such, it tore loose from the ground some time ago and now leans backward across what was left of the open space, its upper branches intermingling with those of the adjoining hazel and alder, creating a partial roof through which scarcely a lick of sunlight can penetrate. Other items of underbrush have grown up along the fence beside it, thus blocking off any sight of the dressage field, and enclosing the forgotten murder scene in a den or hide entirely of its own.

I stand there, as I always do, gazing down onto the bare earth, and thinking about Andrew Conroy. He was a pleasing enough youth – red-haired, happy-faced. I didn’t know him so well. I don’t think he ever once came to our house. As I recall, he was a little bit backward in some respects; what they called a ‘remedial’ in those days, but now probably referred to as ‘special needs’. I’ll never forget watching him collected from school while I was waiting there for Geoff. Either his mother or his older sister would come, and they’d be all smiles as they walked side-by-side with him out of the yard, nodding and listening as he told them excitedly about his day.

That memory alone is enough to bring a tear to my eye. As a murder detective, you only need to fail one victim and you’ve failed them all. From a distance, particularly when it is portrayed in the slick, overly dramatised way that it is on television, it must seem like a glamorous, heroic world, the Criminal Investigation Department. In reality, it isn’t like that at all. It is dark, brooding, intense and it can be utterly soul-destroying; it is also exhausting, physically, emotionally and spiritually – and the higher up the ladder you progress, the more serious the crimes you’re landed with and the more onerous the weight of responsibility, until finally you reach that ultimate zenith (and nadir): the Murder Squad.

Back in those days, we rarely used specialised homicide units. We tended to deal with unlawful killings as and when they occurred, forming separate investigation teams for each one, drawing our staff from the surrounding divisions’ most dedicated and experienced detectives. Of course, it doesn’t matter how experienced you are; the pressure of just one murder enquiry can be crushing, paralysing. Even when you’d done as many as I had … but no. This story isn’t about me. It’s about a little boy called Andrew Conroy, and how he spent the last moments of his life stranded on the edge of this wretched, desolate wood, probably knowing all the fear that every child everywhere has ever suffered, not to mention all the pain and humiliation. With nobody there to help. Nobody even to call out to. It’s also about the person responsible for that. And how he’s still walking around somewhere. And all because I failed in my police officer’s duty.

I stand there, dabbing at my eyes with my handkerchief. “Pathetic … hopeless, a futile gesture,” I hear you say. And you’re right.

I don’t need to glance down at the floor of the shrunken clearing and see the tiny, curved twig-like object. Or rather, not see it. As I have and haven’t on every occasion I’ve been here since 1975, including that very first day when the darkening woods were filled with radio static and the yipping of dogs and the hushed mumble of voices. I don’t need to look because it will still be there. And it won’t. As it always is. And isn’t. A tiny, curved fragment of twig. Easy to overlook in the heat and emotion of the moment and the general mass of forest rubble that litters our English woodlands.

As I amble back out of the trees, I feel the burden of guilt lift a little. Not because I’ve achieved anything by coming here – aside from my serving another day of penance – more because the proximity of events is that little bit further away. Because one more year has elapsed. Because the faces and the facts are twelve months more distant.

On the way out I pass more sad evidence of our modern, sophisticated age. As the wood thins out at the foot of the slope, I see the remnants of yet another den – this one at ground-level; in fact below it. Apparently someone’s dog once burrowed between the roots of an old sycamore tree in pursuit of a rabbit, and the rest of the gang quickly seized on the idea, going racing home for spades and trowels. All that remains of it now is a rank, caved-in recess, its innards cluttered with wads of dead leaves, its entrance deep in stinging nettles. When it was first finished they were able to conceal two or three of them in there at a time, I was told. They took in their own props and roof-supports, another roll of that ubiquitous carpet, not to mention candles, matches, boxes of apples and crisps and – yes, more well-thumbed girlie mags. I give a wry smile as I make my torturous way back up the hill. Girlie mags again … easy to see it now, but the kids back then weren’t quite as innocent as we like to think.

At the top of the slope, Geoff is still leaning on his car, reading. He glances up as I reappear. “Back in retirement then, are we?”

I nod, too breathless and my back too sore to think of a suitably witty rejoinder.

“You won’t do yourself any good with this, you know,” he says, shoving his newspaper into his pocket. “Better just to let the past go.”

I nod, as I always do, but say nothing as I climb into the car alongside him. I am in the usual conundrum; thinking about my possibly having overlooked a vital clue. But even if I were to suddenly throw caution to the wind, pick up the phone and tell someone about it – and even if they were to react positively, which is highly unlikely given that I’ve now been out of the job for eleven years, it would be very much a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. That might be a forced rationalisation on my part, and an excuse, but it’s also true. And that, in the absence of anything else, makes me feel a little better.

Geoff was right in what he said earlier. I don’t have anything to prove. This was the only murder case I failed to solve. There were at least twenty others when I got the right result. When I retired from the job, I did so after thirty-five years of exemplary service, after making detective superintendent, which was probably the highest rank someone of my working-class background had any conceivable hope of achieving.

But then, my mind goes back to that little boy, who, through personal circumstances, I knew so well. And my heart bleeds for him. Then I think, isn’t it true that we’re really only as successful as our least successful moment? Aren’t we only ever as good as our worst failure? And couldn’t it also be said that if your failure owes to more than simple negligence, then that doubles, trebles, maybe quadruples your culpability? As Geoff drives me away again, I can’t help brooding on that tiny, curved twig, which I saw so clearly in the flesh on that first occasion and have seen again in my mind’s eye ever afterwards, but have always denied and rejected and disbelieved as meaningless and insignificant. That innocent-looking twist of organic matter, which instead of being a twig, might actually have been an apple-stalk – and if that was the case, which might indicate that whoever dropped it there alongside the body had the very odd and unusual habit of eating the whole apple rather than leaving the core.

Believe it or not, I feel relief as I depart this place.

Children don’t play here anymore.

And as my son still lives in the area, I find that a very great relief.