The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (9 page)

I grew up a long way from the city, and my childhood memories of woodland were happy, sunlit ones: playing with my friends; climbing trees; hacking paths through the undergrowth. Some woods are safe, I thought, watching the rough trunks and shadows flashing past beside me. Not these ones, though. Driving close to them, it always felt like there was something in there between the trees, watching you.

And of course, once upon a time, there had been.

My thoughts inevitably turned to my arrival in the city, a
year and a half ago. After Lise’s death, I’d taken a huge, hopeful leap career-wise by applying for a post here. I’d revered Detective John Mercer, a legend in the force, for years, and been desperate to join his team. A place as his interview man had opened up, and I’d been both overjoyed and nervous when my application was accepted. And then on my first day here, I’d been drawn into the hunt for a man known as the 50/50 Killer.

I say
man
, but because the 50/50 Killer wore a devil mask while committing his crimes, and we never fully discovered the real identity of the man behind it, it was easy to think of him as both more and less than that. He abducted couples, tortured them over the course of a single night, and forced one of them to decide which of the two would die. Only one of them ever remained alive at dawn. The survivor was left not only alone, but with the terrible knowledge that their choice had resulted in their partner’s murder – that they hadn’t cared enough to sacrifice themselves instead.
I’d die for you
, we tell the ones we love.
I couldn’t live without you
. The 50/50 Killer wanted people to understand that those promises were lies.

I watched out of the side window now as I drove past the place where, on that first day, a young man named Scott had emerged from the trees, tortured and confused. I’d spent the night interviewing him in hospital, while officers combed the woods for his partner, Jodie. And by dawn, despite our best efforts, Detective John Mercer’s distinguished career and mental well-being were both in tatters.

The scene receded slowly in the rear-view mirror. I’d slowed down as I reached it, I realised; I accelerated slightly now to compensate, glad to see it disappear. About ten minutes later, I reached the patch of the ring road where Charlie Matheson’s accident had taken place.

I pulled in by the side of the embankment on the left and got out of the car. I took a few photographs, although there wasn’t much to see: no sign at all of what had happened here two years ago. As I walked up and over the incline, the grass was soft and dry and seemed untouched.

At the top of the embankment, looking down the steep slope beyond, I recognised the landscape from the pictures in the file. It was easy to pick out the lone tree, about thirty metres down, that Matheson’s car had crashed into. But again, the land appeared undamaged by the incident, and there were no longer any tracks on the ground to indicate the path the vehicle had taken on its descent.

I took more photographs, but really, there was nothing to distinguish this stretch from any other. Something bad had happened here, I thought, heading back to the car; someone had been lost. At the time, there must surely have been marks and injuries to the land in recognition of that. And yet the grass had grown back, the tree had untwisted and righted itself. In less than two years, nature had healed those wounds without leaving so much as a scar.

I drove away wishing it could be that easy for people. But then in some ways perhaps it was. Whatever happens, your life goes on, whether you like it or not. Your life is stubborn like that.

I’d die for you
.

I couldn’t live without you
.

Both lies, I thought, remembering standing on the beach all those years ago, helplessly watching my girlfriend drown.

Both lies when it had come to Lise.

Sasha was home before me. I found her in the kitchen, chopping onions and garlic, with mince defrosting in the microwave. She’d changed into jeans and a thigh-length white T-shirt, one of my old ones. I walked up and hugged her from behind, pleased when she pressed back against me without hesitation. I kissed her neck and stepped away.

‘My turn to cook,’ I said.

‘I know. I just figured I’d make a start. Oh dear.’ She grabbed a sheet of kitchen roll and dabbed at her eyes, turning to face me. ‘Bloody onions. Anyway. You look surprisingly okay. You survived, then?’

‘Somehow, yeah.’

‘Was it because of my special coffee?’

‘I think it might well have been. How was your day?’

‘Ah, just the usual heroics.’ She shrugged, putting the kitchen roll in the bin. ‘What about you? Anything interesting to report?’

‘Not really. Pete decided to teach me a lesson by sending me on a wild goose chase. He said you wouldn’t punish me for getting drunk, so it fell to him.’

‘Ha! I always liked Pete.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll just get changed, then I’ll take over in here.’

‘Right you are.’

I hung up my suit upstairs, then threw on some jeans and a T-shirt of my own.
A wild goose chase
, I thought – except it was beginning to seem like it might be something else altogether, even if right now I wasn’t sure what. And yet my instinct had been to downplay the day’s events to Sasha, to not go into detail. I knew why, as well. I kept remembering the look on Paul Carlisle’s face: the horror that a life he’d left behind and moved on from might be rearing its ugly head in the present. And every time I pictured that, the knot in my chest tightened slightly.

Downstairs, I fried up bolognese, and set the pasta boiling.

‘Your turn to pick five,’ Sasha called through.

‘Is it? Okay.’

Once a week, we watched a movie together: turned off the lights and ate dinner on our laps, side by side on the settee. The routine was always the same. One of us would select five DVDs from the shelves, and the other had to choose one from them. We liked very different things. Sasha was a big science-fiction and horror geek, whereas I tended to go more for thrillers and dramas. Whenever it was my turn to pick, I always went for four films I wanted to watch, and one I knew she did. When it was her week to pull out five, the routine reversed itself. Neither of us had ever mentioned this arrangement out loud.

Tonight I selected two horror films instead of one, hoping
the unspoken gesture might go some way to make up for my behaviour last night, if that was still needed. I left the pile on the settee while I drained the pasta, and then we ate dinner together watching a horror film called
Pumpkinhead
. Sasha enjoyed it anyway. The things we do for love.

Afterwards, I took the bowls through and washed up, the water hot enough to leave the skin on my hands pink when I was finished.

I was still thinking about the case.

‘I’m exhausted.’

I turned to see Sasha leaning against the door frame, yawning.

‘Early night for me,’ she said. ‘You coming?’

I dried my hands and hung up the towel. I knew I should go with her, but the folded sheet of paper Paul Carlisle had given me felt heavy in my pocket.

‘I just need to check something,’ I said. ‘I’ll be up in a few minutes.’

‘Just a few?’

‘Not even that many. Promise.’

She smiled at me. ‘Good.’

Back in the front room, I sat down in the dark on the settee and logged into the departmental database on my tablet, then synched the device with the plasma screen on the wall. A few moments later, the television showed a still image of the woman in the hospital. In the gloom, it looked as though she was somehow hanging in the air between the television and the settee.

Then I did what I’d known I was going to have to but had been dreading all the same. I walked across the dark lounge unfolding the piece of paper that Paul Carlisle had given me and held it up beside the television.

There was enough light from the screen to see it clearly. I looked from one image to the other, attempting to mentally erase the scarring on the face of the woman in the hospital. Comparing. Back and forth. Over and over.

It was her.

A little older. A little more gaunt.

But definitely her.

I sat back down, then pressed play on the video clip, and listened half-heartedly while I turned the tablet to split screen and opened a blank document in the right-hand panel.

Provisional timeline

3 August 2013 Charlie Matheson’s car crash

28 July 2015 Charlie Matheson (?) reappears

For now, that was all there was to include. Two dates that bookmarked whatever had happened. They were like the dates on a headstone, except they delineated not a life, but a death.

Perhaps.

‘It’s dark where I’ve been,’ the woman was saying. ‘I remember that much about it. Everything’s very dark when you’re dead.’

I looked up at the screen. The expression on her face seemed much sadder than I’d recognised at the time.

What happened to you?

My thoughts were interrupted by Sasha calling from the top of the stairs.

‘I’m not waiting for ever, you know.’

‘Coming.’

I saved the document, then logged out and turned everything off. The woman on the screen disappeared, replaced by darkness.

Enough
, I thought.

That was more than enough for tonight.

Part Two

And She told Them that true goodness must always shy from the light. A Man may be good at heart, but many do good in search of reward, and that is selfish and not true goodness. True goodness would face the trials of Hell itself without asking for notice. It is neither bright nor loud and it draws no attention to itself. And She told Them that God therefore seeks out good that wishes not to be sought, and rewards it quietly in kind
.

Extract from the Cane Hill bible

Eileen

No such thing as monsters

John Mercer’s makeshift office was in the attic at the top of the house. He always worked with the door closed, but Eileen could often hear him typing from the bottom of the stairs. A soft sound. It passed from his fingertips on the computer keyboard, down the legs of the desk, then through the floorboards below.

She stood there now, looking up at the ceiling above, listening to the gentle patter of letters falling like rain on to a tin roof.

The sound made her nervous. But then again, the silences were worse – long stretches of time when she could imagine her husband sitting there reading through his documents, lost in thoughts it would be far better for him to leave behind. She’d gone in there once, when John had been out on some errand, and stared with a kind of vacant horror at the wall charts and noticeboards, all covered with scribbled dates and references. The maps dotted with pins and lines of coloured string. The printouts and photographs taped to the bare plaster, some of them so appalling that Eileen had looked away quickly before the reds and blacks could coalesce into an identifiable image.

She knew what they were, and it frightened her to picture John sitting there staring at them, or through them. Eyes were the windows to the soul, they said, and God knew she’d stared
into many that showed no hint of soul at all. But John’s eyes she’d always thought were more like doorways, and that if he looked at certain horrors for long enough, some aspect of them would take advantage of that and go inside. He was old now. Old and fragile, and not strong enough to bear such things. Eileen lived with the constant fear that her husband, former Detective John Mercer, might break once again.

So as unnerving as the typing was, she supposed it was better than the alternative. And since she could find the alternative anywhere else in the house, Eileen often found herself standing here at the bottom of the stairs, listening.

He’s all right
.

He’s still fine
.

She couldn’t stand here for ever, though; there was work to do. The pair of them had savings, but Eileen had become the primary breadwinner following John’s departure from the police a year and a half ago. They had been apart for a few months afterwards, before tentatively reconciling. Despite everything that had happened, the shared history stretching behind them had drawn them back together. She still loved him deeply, even if events had altered that love. Thinking back on the broad, strong, capable man she’d fallen in love with, it was painful to see him so reduced now. She had never imagined that, in old age, it would become
her
duty to care for
him
.

She went downstairs. While her husband worked in the attic, her own office was at the base of the house, in an extension built into the drive on one side. This was where she received her private clients; she specialised in therapy for abuse and violence. It was the flipside to her criminal work, where she would often find herself counselling the men who had perpetrated such offences in the first place. People sometimes thought that must make it harder, but in truth it rarely did. As John had written in his first book, everyone stood at the nexus point of the damage done to them and the damage they themselves caused. It was her job to help untangle that. Even the most apparently evil of
the men she had talked to was only a man, whether she saw a soul in his eyes or not. There was no such thing as monsters.

Although sometimes that could be hard to believe.

It was only just after eight o’clock, and her first client wasn’t due for another hour, but she set the coffee machine going and settled down in one of the armchairs with a small stack of case files. That afternoon she had one of her prison visits, and she wanted to make sure she was up to speed with the inmates she’d be talking to. The sound of the coffee machine gradually began to fill the heavy silence, and she felt the tightness in her stomach easing slightly ...

And then someone knocked at the door.

Eileen stared over, noticing the silhouette through the bobbled glass panels. She didn’t bother checking her watch; she knew what time it was. It wasn’t unheard of for clients to call round unannounced out of hours, and if they were feeling especially distressed and vulnerable she even encouraged them to do so. But there was something about the figure standing there that made her nervous. No obvious reason for it. Of course, she was nervous about a lot of things recently, her concern for John’s welfare lending everything an edge.