Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (15 page)

My first emotion was bewilderment. As I opened the blade out and saw how it had been recently honed to an exceptionally keen edge, my thoughts took on a darker frame. I instinctively ran my thumb along the blade, aware that the slightest pressure would draw blood, and wondering why on earth this old thing was here. I had never seen Max with anything like this before. And yet I felt they went perfectly together, for both had that inert potential for violence once removed from their respective cases.

Because the razor was so close to my eyes, I saw the tiny stain at the point where the blade joined the black handle in a hinge. It was dark, dried and flaked away as I ran my thumbnail over it. My first thought was that it was blood. My second was that I was letting my imagination run the race, and so I slid the razor back into its sheath, and placed it where I’d found it, rearranging the contents of the drawer so that my visit was, I hoped, suitably disguised.

Rising from the bedside cabinet I approached the wardrobe doors, taking a handle in each hand and yanking them open, which they did with an alarmingly strident squeak that caused me to pause and cock an ear for company. There were a few clothes hung up on the hangers; they were huddled together at one end as if quivering in fear at the vast space that lay beyond. On the base of the wardrobe were two pairs of shoes, both pairs having seen better days, and beside them a tattered shoebox. On my knees again, I slid out the box and placed it on the carpet in front of me, lifting the cardboard lid with both hands. Inside was a white plastic bag, a small lump of something encased within. The bag had been sealed with a deliberately tight knot.

I prodded and squeezed the contents, curious to know what it was, and in the end I started to tease away at the compressed ball that was the knot, frustration fuelling my desire to get inside and hindering the dexterity of touch needed. I laboured at it for perhaps five minutes or so before it finally gave, and eagerly opened the bag to see what the elusive contents were. I gasped aloud and dropped it in repulsion.

Even now my stomach turns a little at the thought of the sight of the rat’s rigid body, dead for a long time judging by its condition, its eyeless head removed and lying beside its torso, its belly gashed with the desiccated contents of its insides strewn about the bag to mingle with grey matted fur.

It took me all my strength to tie it back up in its plastic shroud and return it to its cardboard coffin.

*  *  *  *

Carl closed the door softly behind him and locked it, turning the key slowly so as to make as little noise as possible. He swung round, avoiding for the moment the figure sitting in the corner of the room. His nose wrinkled, but the odour didn’t hold his smile in check, and his lips spread out to form a thin, hard line across his pallid face, emphasising the layers of soft skin under his eyes and the lines that struck out from them like miniature explosions.

He walked leisurely into the centre of the room, his shoes making hardly a sound on the thick carpet, his hand reaching inside his jacket pocket and drawing out a packet of cigarettes. Standing in a puddle of sunlight that forced its way between a gap in the chintz curtains, he flicked a cigarette proud of the packet, picked it out with a delicate finger and thumb, stuffed it casually into his mouth and popped the packet back.

He remained motionless, his lips sucking at the cigarette, tongue tasting, eyes glancing round the fixtures and fittings of the room. The sunlight was warm and welcome and he closed his eyes briefly, imagining himself to be a cat. A large cat. A leopard. His muscles stretched, limbs flexed, fingers stiff and fanned out, then curling into a claw. He might easily have purred. Like the cat that’s got the cream, he thought, and gave a single snort in appreciation of his own little joke.

“Like the cat that’s got the cream,” he called to the figure in the corner. “Meow!” he said. But the figure didn’t answer. He didn’t expect it to. “Dumb bastard,” he said under his breath.

Carl’s fingers found the box of matches in his pocket and he struck one, touching the end of the cigarette with the struggling flame – almost as if it wanted to be free of the wood, he thought, fighting to tear itself away. He fanned out the flame with the image in his head that he’d killed it before it could escape. The wisp of smoke spewing from the match end rose in languorous swirls, as if somehow this was the flame’s dejected spirit.  He blew it away into nothing.

Smoking was not allowed inside Overton Hall. Which made the cigarette taste all the sweeter, the deep inhalations all the more satisfying. He attempted a smoke ring but failed. Again. Nearly. He grew tired of this and went over to a leather chesterfield, sitting down heavily in it, gazing thoughtfully at the figure in the corner. Crossing his legs, he took the cigarette from his lips, balanced it lightly between the fork of two fingers, his elbow on the arm of the chesterfield. His fingers drummed on the leather. It was the only sound except for the radiator pipes clicking as they cooled down.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked the figure. There was no reply. “I’d like to believe in them. Means there’s something else after this crap.” He sucked at the cigarette, the words that followed wrapped around blue smoke. “But what’s a ghost, eh? I mean, you’ve got to have something inside you when you die to become one. Follow me? Take me, for instance. Up here –” tapping his head, “– I’m fine, just dandy, I’m all there. When I die, what’s up here becomes – Well, whatever it becomes. Now take you. What’s up there in that skull of yours? Nothing. So what happens when you finally shuffle off your mortal coil, uh? Nothing. What is there up there to become anything? You ain’t nothing now, you ain’t gonna become anything afterwards. You’ll always be a nothing. You might as well be dead already.”

The figure gave a sigh, almost inaudible, and heavy lids blinked laboriously over the eyes, like metal shutters coming down over a pair of shop windows.

Carl rose as if ejected by a spring. “Look at all this. What the hell do you need any of this for? What are you seeing of this painting on the wall, huh? It’s original. You know that? Know what I mean by original? Henry Thomas Dawson. Worth at least one and a half grand. Do you know that?” He shook his head. “And those two by Douglas Falconer, worth another thousand. What I can’t understand is how you get to have all this luxury surrounding you and I get jack shit. That isn’t fair, wouldn’t you agree?”

The figure remained motionless, blank, watery eyes fixed on the wall opposite. Carl strode over to the man and grabbed his head by the wiry grey hair over his ear and yanked it back. “I said, wouldn’t you agree, old man, old fellow?” He forced the head to do a nodding motion. “Yes, Carl, I would agree. I agree very, very much,” Carl said. “I don’t deserve any of this, because I’m a fucking imbecile. I’m a mistake for a man.” He released the hair and the head bobbed back into place, the eyes locking back onto the wall opposite again. A thin silver line of saliva ran from the corner of the man’s mouth. Carl mopped it up with his index finger and then dabbed the wetness onto the end of the man’s nose. “We don’t deserve any of this, do we?” he said acidly. “Do we?” No answer. He slapped the man hard across the top of the head in time to his words: “Hello, hello, hello! Is there anybody in there?” Wisps of grey hair floated from the man’s head, as if they were undersea worms poking from pink coral and waving in the currents.

He laughed. “God, you make me want to puke. Do you know that? You make me want to puke. Look at you. Is that what you call a human being? Is it? We don’t sit in our own crap and piss. I don’t. Others don’t. But you do. You’re doing it now. I can smell it. You’ve shit yourself again, haven’t you?” He slapped the man across the head again. “Haven’t you? Yes, Carl, I have. I’m an imbecile, Carl, that’s why. I don’t deserve the Henry Thomas Dawson.”

Carl spun away, his nose curling. The stench made him want to gip. He sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke to block out the smell.

“I can’t afford carpets like this in my house and yet you go and piss all over them. What’s right about that?” he said, turning back to the man. Carl bent to his haunches and stared directly into the man’s glazed eyes, the milky-blue irises giving off a dull sheen like the eyes of a dead fish. Carl thought about his mother who had been overly fond of fish. Brain food, she’d say. You want to have brains and get on, don’t you? Then eat it all up. Your head will be so full of them soon you’ll become a professor or something. Then his dad had laid into that very head, rattling his fish-fed brains inside his skull with that savage, ham-like hand of his. You’re thick, you are! Thick, thick, thick! You ain’t gonna amount to nothing, he used to say. Books? I’ll give you books! Paper strewn on the floor.. A spot of blood from his nose looking like a red wax seal on one of them. So he ate his fish, but he never did get to be a professor.

You promised me, mother, he thought. I hated fish. But you promised me.

He lifted the cigarette and held it close to one of the man’s eyes. The man didn’t flinch. Didn’t even appear to register the smouldering end. “I could stick this right in and you’d not even know, I reckon,” Carl said contemplatively. “I’ll bet I could hold this sizzling on your eyeball and you’d not even flinch. Right, eh? Tell me I’m right.” The cigarette hovered about a centimetre from the man’s eye. The smoke made the man blink, but not with fear. Fear was absent. “Mustn’t damage the goods though,” Carl said, returning the cigarette to his lips, then blew the smoke into the man’s face. “Want a drag?” He placed the cigarette between the man’s flaccid, colour-drained lips. “Not a smoker? Can’t blame you. It’s bad for your health.” Carl removed it, extinguished the cigarette between finger and thumb, knocking ash away with a flick of his nail, then sliding it into his pocket. He rose to his feet.

He heard someone tramping the corridor outside and unconsciously held his breath. The footfalls faded. “You’re my little nest egg,” he said. “You’re my goose that lays the golden egg.” Then he chuckled. “Isn’t that strange? How did eggs and money get wrapped up together like that? Makes you wonder. Well, makes me wonder. You don’t wonder anything, do you? That’s because you’re like all the high-class morons at Overton Hall.” He bent close to the man’s face. “But you did once, didn’t you? You were capable of all manner of things. Very, very talented once upon a time. You see, I’ve been doing a bit of research, a bit of digging around, sifting through the dirt, you might say. And if you dig in dirt long enough sometimes you come up with a gem. Or two. I never realised how valuable you were. You’ve been a very naughty boy. Incredibly naughty. If that wasn’t enough, so has Mr Miller. Mr oh-so-mighty Gavin Miller.” He sprang up, strode to the chesterfield and plonked himself down in it, his hands clutching the arms, fingers digging into the leather, his body agitated. “Two fish on one hook,” he said. He couldn’t avoid the image of the dead mackerel lying jewel-like on the kitchen worktop. The memory prised its way into his head against his wishes (Eat up, Carl. My Little Professor). “All I need to do now is reel them in. Cautiously, so as not to lose them. The Old Man and the Sea, eh? Read any Hemmingway lately? Not your cup of tea? No, he’s not everyone’s. I like him, see. The hunter, that’s me.” He imitated the raising of a rifle and aimed it at the man. He pulled an imaginary trigger. “Boom!” he said, the invisible gun recoiling.

He remembered cringing the first time he saw a dead fish, folding his arms as if to fend off death. Don’t be afraid of it, his mother said, it won’t hurt you, it’s dead. Look. She prodded it with a knife. Don’t, he said. As if it might burst into life and throw itself at him. She laughed, held it up by its tail in front of his face and he ran away with tears in his eyes. Afraid. Always afraid. He scrubbed away the image.

“Which is strange, really, because so were you once. The hunter. Tell me I’m right, eh? If you weren’t such a dumb bastard now I’d have to admire you. Your ruthlessness. But you can’t admire a cabbage, can you?”

He stood up again, walked swiftly to the man, cradling his head with a hand under a slack jowl, forcing him to look directly into his eyes. “Alas, poor Collie, I knew him, Horatio.” He smirked. He thought he detected a glimmer of a light in those foggy mackerel eyes.

“Let me into a secret. What’s it like, huh? What’s it like to kill someone?”

*  *  *  *

There was no reason why I should go back, but go back I did, six months or so after the
South Yorkshire
Chronicle
building had closed down.

I had always assumed it couldn’t look any worse, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Whereas once it had been a red-bricked beast, now it was a soulless red-bricked beast. In a way I felt sorry for the old thing, the way one might when confronted by a stuffed grizzly bear in a museum, its teeth bared, claws raised, menacingly harmless, alive but in image only. The
Chronicle
building looked pretty much the same now. It stood empty and quiet, life having slowly trickled away from it as people filed from its wooden doors for the last time like blood from a slashed artery.

As I studied its barred windows and the impenetrable blackness beyond, I considered what had happened to all the workers and where they were sitting now eating their pork pies. No doubt some of them, the more experienced and qualified, had been soaked up by some of the local rags, but no one wanted me, a mere junior. When I read the
Chronicle’s
lengthy and eloquent rendering of its own obituary –
‘…following fifty-five years of serving the locality with energetic, high quality articles that will sorely be missed, it is with great regret…’
– I somehow felt in my very bones that the words were tolling the demise of my short foray into journalism. I wasn’t sad, or indeed worried for the future; in fact I can’t recall feeling anything in particular, maybe a sense of relief that I could hang up my bicycle clips for good. And I suppose, in part, this was because I was inwardly confident that Fate’s hand would once again slip from its jewelled glove to give me a lift to the next rung of my cobbled-together ladder of life. Hadn’t it already done just that? There was no reason to suppose it wouldn’t do it again. It was simply a case of waiting.

In a strange way I looked to the canal for direction, this black, watery thread that I deemed to be important. Yet as I stood on the bank and peered into its sombre depths for perhaps half an hour or so, it refused to give up any of its answers. Even the
Chronicle
building appeared to do the same, its melancholy shadow sitting perfectly still on the waxy surface of the water, probing, no doubt, for signs of its resurrection. I sat down beside a clump of dusty nettles, tossed a smashed piece of roof slate into the canal, the agitated water causing the surface scum, with attendant paper, tab ends and crisp packets, to undulate like the swelling and falling of a grotesque belly. Bubbles rose from the cloud of disturbed mud beneath.

The thing I noticed more than anything was how quiet the place had become. There’d always been cars driving up to the old place, people leaving, entering, chatting, complaining, vans delivering, vans picking up. Now the car park was empty and desolate. And I became aware for the first time that a few of the buildings that shared this middle-of-nowhere spot - a tile warehouse, a ramshackle furniture store and a rickety tin roofed building that once housed two guys who used to cast concrete into paving slabs and garden gnomes - had all closed down. Brand new padlocks hung on the wire gates that led into the yard where once there had been rows of multi-coloured garden slabs, elaborate bird baths and fountains and concrete flower tubs with fat cherubs decorating their clumsy sides. I couldn’t be sure how long they’d been closed down. I hadn’t been aware of their departure. Too hung up with my own life, I guess. Only a car mechanic’s garage remained. I can still hear him even now, some way off in his oily den and the clink of metal against metal as he tried to revive flagging vehicles.

I wondered how long it would be till even this sound faded. It seemed inevitable. The whole world was grinding to a halt and dying; and the thick smell of dust, of heat on grey soil and broken concrete, of the foetid water below me, all this was the stench of its corruption. I looked around me and I perceived an incurable sore that was spreading forever outwards. One day it would consume the entire world.

In part my mood was due to my immediate position. I signed on at the local dole office again, I ran through the job adverts in the papers, I stood in the Job Centre and studied in minute detail the cards on the notice boards, but it was all to no avail. I could just about bear the disappointment of not finding a job, or finding a job only to discover it had been taken or I wasn’t suitably qualified. But it was more than dispiriting to stand in a silent queue of men (mostly men) who waited their turn to make their mark beside their name on the white cards at the dole office counter, to stare at the broad back of the man in front, who always seemed to be the same man in his soiled black coat with black, unkempt hair, with his smell of sweat and despair. Someone would sign, and then move silently away, and we’d all jerk forward a little, till someone else signed, and we’d jerk again. It was as if we were all chained together, prisoners of sorts, our legs moving almost in unison. Standing in the queue, I thought bleakly that one day I too would become yet another man in black in a long line of men in black. Forever shuffling. Forever signing. Forever queuing. Forever black. Forever forgotten.

“I don’t bloody care!” the man further down the counter shouted. “I don’t want to hear that! Look, I need my bloody giro. I need it today. I need it now. Can’t you get it through your bloody thick skulls, I need the bloody giro now!”

One or two heads glanced sideways at him. Most couldn’t care less, or they’d heard it all before, or they pretended not to care. I avoided looking at him. I stared at the man in front and shuffled when my turn came to shuffle. I just wanted to scribble against my name and get out of there into the fresh air. I was learning to turn off from the desperation of others. It was thick in this man’s voice. It wasn’t anger; he was screaming a plea for help. I thought it cruel that some of these men brought their children in with them to see them having to stand in line like this; and so the children stood beside their fathers and would shuffle alongside them, their eyes wide in wonder at the plastic plants, the high, glass-fronted counters with the pretty women behind, the paper-covered notice boards, the angry, red-faced man demanding his giro.

“Do you really think I want to be here?” he bellowed. “Do you think I bloody enjoy this?” He left the Job Centre grumbling to himself, his face red, the breeze of his passage lifting the corner of a green-coloured piece of paper on the notice board notifying all claimants about the Christmas holidays. Someone had drawn a jolly, fat Father Christmas on it in felt-tip pen, his sack bulging with presents that most of the people lining up to sign would never be able to afford to give to their kids.

And when I did get out I caught the bus and went to the old
Chronicle
building. Maybe I just couldn’t face going home again, or bother to look in the papers, or stay behind to scour the notice boards. So I sat on the canal bank and tossed slate into the water and waited for an answer to emerge from the scum, the crazy notion circulating in my head that maybe I should sit there until the decade ran itself out and we could all get to work on the next one. There was always something uplifting in contemplation of the new.

But it began to get cold, the winter Sun having burnt itself out before eleven o’clock in the morning. I hoisted myself to my feet and walked the four miles back home to save the bus fare. It was a bleak journey. I passed through the usual austere landscape, where even the grass was covered and weighed down by a grey, muddy film; along pavements that had been sprinkled over the years in a layer of black grit and coal dust that crunched underfoot, mountainous slag heaps on either side my only company. I passed a coking plant, whose futuristic grey structures of piping, chimneys and tanks had once gushed steam to the accompaniment of curious grinding noises and the great clanking of metal, but which now stood idle, with long tears of rust having dribbled down the massive structures in brown, shitty stripes. Above all was a sombre sky, clouds the colour of an aged grey skin. I felt the weight of futility pressing down on me, and I wished I’d paid the money and taken the bus.

Not wanting to go home, I wandered around my hometown for a few hours, visiting the haunts of my childhood, staving off my hunger by nibbling at a Mars Bar. The memories of those lost, endless days of bountiful sunshine helped fend off the chill of December. Why I did this I don’t know. I think, at the back of my mind, I was saying goodbye, for I was determined that I didn’t want to remain here in Overthorpe forever. I retraced my childhood steps, past the brooding edifice of The Mount, to the place where I threw bricks into a brackish pond and used to search out the tadpoles and water boatmen; to the tree and grass dens, and the secret place where I’d store my weapons of stones and rocks with which to defend my territory; to the street where we’d play football and I was always Alan Clarke or Billy Bremner. Every pavement, every gutter, every grimy brick wall, each of them had a memory seared into it, and though I appreciated those memories, I knew they were just that, and I had to move on. There was no room here for the generation of fresh memories. I’d used this place up a long time ago. It was like a huge piece of well-thumbed paper that was crammed with scribbles from ragged edge to ragged edge. It was right to leave it now. I
had
to leave it and find a fresh piece upon which to write. And it all looked faintly sordid. Tarnished. Not quite what I remembered.

In keeping with this pilgrimage of remembrance, I decided a visit to Connie Stone would be in order. She greeted me in her usual affable manner, all but dragging me over the doorstep and into the house. I think she needed someone to talk to as much as I did.

She had the radio on, and the coal fire was stoked up and hurling out waves of heat like a blast furnace. I sat in one of her new leatherette armchairs, sipping at a hot mug of tea that she brought me, and munching on a piece of Madeira cake she’d bought from the supermarket. I don’t think Connie was in the habit of baking, or even if she could for that matter. Everything came in tins, packets or plastic bags. I didn’t mind, the taste of artificial cream made a change to the fare my mother baked. Anyhow, I thought it rather radical of her; she delighted in telling everyone she was hopeless at cooking, especially the older women, who read it as a sort of sin. I relaxed in the warmth, as much at home in Connie’s house as anywhere.

We chatted aimlessly about the weather, the rubbish on TV, the man who’d died down the road, the sorry state of the country and having a woman prime minister that Connie said might bring the compassion of her sex to the post. But I detected something amiss in her voice. I pondered whether she’d changed over the years, or whether I was the one who’d changed, because there was a dull edge to her that hadn’t been there in the early days. Or was I only now mature and able enough to detect what had always been present? I was a little disappointed. It had been a disappointing day.

“You’re not working, I hear,” she said.

“The newspaper closed down,” I explained, needlessly, because she already knew that.

“No work around?”

I shook my head and hid my face behind my mug of tea. “I signed on at the dole today,” I said.

She sighed, nodding sympathetically. “I miss work.” Her eyes were focussed on the coals in the fireplace.

“Why’d you leave?”

She shrugged, folding her arms. “Bernard doesn’t like me working,” she explained. Then she corrected herself. “Well, it’s not as if he doesn’t
like
me working, it’s that he says he earns enough for the both of us, which he does, and that it was pointless me working too. I do miss it, though.”

It was my turn to nod sympathetically. I thought that some of the fire had gone out of her. She looked tired. A butterfly in a crystal jar. “Get another job,” I said, “if you miss it so much.”

“I think I miss my friends more than anything,” she said, riding over my comment. “We had such bleedin’ fun!” Her eyes brightened momentarily. “I hate being cooped up here. I can go out and shop, of course. I do a lot of that. Bernard likes me shopping, likes his food, likes his home comforts. I get to do a lot of shopping. But it just don’t do anything for me, you know what I mean, Collie?” She searched my face to see if I really did understand. I hadn’t shopped in months; I didn’t have the money. I’d relish the opportunity, and she perhaps saw this in my vacant expression. “All my cupboards are crammed full of stuff. We’ve got more than we could ever need, Bernard and me. But he likes me to shop, so I go out and buy something else. Well I’m sick of shopping, Collie. I don’t care if I ever see another bleedin’ supermarket. I’ve got twelve pairs of shoes! I love shoes, but twelve pairs!” She shook her head. “That’s almost obscene when a lot of people are out of work these days and don’t have money.”

I finished my cake and she urged another massive piece on me, and I was forced to eat it for fear of offending her. “How is Max?” I asked, more for the conversation than anything.

Her countenance lit up like a firework. “Oh, he’s doing really well. Really good. You know he’s at university now, don’t you?” I nodded. “My Max at university, who’d have thought it…”

     Exactly, I reflected darkly. Who’d have thought it? I still remembered him as the one struggling with his maths before Mr Walton’s sadistic blackboard. And yet there he was, A-Levels under his belt and studying for a degree or something. And here was I…

“He wants for nothing, does Max. All the books he needs he can have. And we send him his spending money so that he doesn’t have to worry about getting a part-time job if he doesn’t want to; and enough to cover his rent for the little flat he’s got himself. Lovely, it is. It’s got a telly and a fridge. He even had a bowl of fruit out on the table when I last visited. It looked
ever
so cosy.”