Darkness Demands Part 12

Paul. Ugly Bob has asked me to dance naked in the school canteen. So is that OK with you, Paul?

"Paul," she glanced over her shoulder, raven black hair swishing luxuriantly. "I'll have to go now. Sheena and Kari are waiting for me. Sorry about not being able to make it to the cinema."

"That's OK." It wasn't OK. It wasn't OK so much it sucked like the biggest Hoover in Christendom, but what the h.e.l.l could he do about it?

"Look," she told him and touched his forearm. "After I get back from my grandmother's I can meet you. That's if you can make it?"

He said that he could. And his heart beat a whole lot faster.

She nodded. "OK. The cemetery gates at seven?"

He smiled easily now. "I'll see you then."

Suddenly she seemed to lunge toward him; her face came up close to his. For one wild moment he thought she'd actually kiss him in full view of the entire school.

Instead, she whispered with a nerve crackling intensity, "Bring something with you."

The smile he gave her before she darted away was knowing. Inside, his heart thundered against his ribs. He looked round at the others moving like a tide from block to block. Surely he must look different to them now.

What was the word?

Transformed?

Changed?

No, a far more powerful description: Transfigured.

That was the worda transfigured. It's what happens to saints when they've glimpsed paradise: they glow as if lit up from inside by a whole rack of halogen lamps. Paul Newton felt like that right now.

He glanced at his watch. Eight hours until he met Miranda. Then they'd enter the quiet clutches of the cemetery together. h.e.l.l. It couldn't come quickly enough.

4.

John Newton returned home. The dog took up a position on the gra.s.s bank where he could bask in the sun. Family Haslem's home was secure, if a little untidy. He'd get Paul to tackle the raw meat in the kitchen later; otherwise the property would become a holiday destination for every fly for miles around.

He made coffee, raided the cake tin, checked his e-mail, and then opened the computer file labeled Without Trace. For a whole three minutes he stared at the flashing cursor.

"Well, what are you waiting for? The first chapter and synopsis has to be in the mail on Monday. Tom's going to be p.i.s.sed with you if you don't do it. Then you won't get the Goldhall contract, then the money stops coming in, then you lose the house, and poor little doggy and all your children go hungry." He sang the words under his breath; part encouragement, part terror tactics to get his backside in gear so he'd write that first chapter.

But it wasn't coming.

There was no spark. Without Trace would be a hash of warmed over old mystery cases. Tom was right. The book he'd conceived didn't possess a shred of originality. Breathing heavily out through his nostrils he leaned back in his chair in disgust. As he did so his eye took in the shelf where Blast His Eyes sat. Now that was a book with att.i.tude. So it had started out as a true-life mystery, just as his six preceding books, but it had evolved into a real detective hunt.

He'd begun with the usual book and archive research, blowing the dust off old newspapers (well the dust off old microfiche files would be more accurate) as he'd unearthed the account of a murder case from 1889. Behind every murder is often a compelling human-interest story. What drove the individual to murder? How did they try to escape justice? Were they caught? How were they punished?

The St. Paxton-Wellman case was no exception. What gave the case an extra splash of glamour was that it told a story of riches to rags-a member of the English aristocracy brought low by all too human weakness.

Lord St. Paxton-Wellman, a distant cousin of Queen Victoria, inherited a country mansion in Lincolnshire, just down the road from Lord Byron's estate. With the grand house came a fortune in the form of Indian tea plantations.

The boy was, as they say, set for life.

But instead of doing what the eldest sons of the English aristocracy should have done-that is acquiring a first rate commission in the army- he dedicated his life to pleasure. In turn that led to a pathological addiction to gambling by the time he was twenty-four. There were also rumors that he suffocated his illegitimate child borne by his scullery maid. However, good family connections meant he could pa.s.s the buck. A stable lad was convicted at the famous 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d Murder' trial of 1879. There were whispers at the time that the boy was a patsy. Even so, he was hanged at Lincoln jail, then buried in lime. As part of the research John visited the site where the stable lad and other hanged convicts had been interred. Innocently, the burial pit now lay beneath a supermarket carpark.

But even though Lord Paxton-Wellman evaded English justice he didn't slip the grasp of, perhaps, Divine justice. His wealth hemorrhaged from him like blood from a severed artery. By the time he was forty the estates were gone, his wife deserted him, he lost his manorial home.

Soon his lordship turned to crime. What's more, he had no hesitation in shooting anyone who got in his way. By then the nineteenth century was the age when science had begun to do the miraculous. He must have picked up a snippet of pseudo-scientific research that suggested the eyes of murder victims still preserved the image of the murderer, and that like a photographic plate could be developed. With the image of the murderer in police hands, an arrest would soon follow.

Well, that's how the theory ran. Of course it was all tosh. But Paxton-Wellman didn't know that. And so that's how the t.i.tle of the book originated. The wicked lord would literally blast out his victim's eyes with a pistol. Now the story alone would make Blast His Eyes a good commercial proposition for any publisher. But then came a minor miracle. John Newton carried on his book research, picking up tasty nuggets that would add weight to the book, and which eventually led to one of Paxton-Wellman's safe houses, where he found a box that had actually belonged to the man. John had been shrewd enough not to open the box there and then, but opened it live on a TV chat show the day the book was launched. Inside, there had been a monogrammed pistol (without doubt Lord Paxton-Wellman's); china figurines wrapped in newspapers (bearing the date 1889), a Spanish gold ducat, and, perhaps more strangely, diaries that detailed the results of several thousand backgammon games (the lord's obsession for backgammon knew no bounds, it seemed). John had even been able to round off the chat show with a satisfying account of the villainous lord's death by drowning when he tried to escape from the police by swimming across a lake.

Within days Blast His Eyes stepped neatly into the top ten hardback list. John and Val Newton went house hunting. And here they were.

"And here I am," John murmured, turning back to the computer screen. "Hunting for a follow-up."

He stared at the screen for a full five minutes. Then he closed down the computer.

"d.a.m.n it." He couldn't settle. As much as anything it was the events of the last twenty-four hours. Wondering about the origins of that letter he'd found in the garden had been nibbling away in the back of his head. Now he'd just learned that the Haslems had received the same-or similar letter. They'd burnt it in what looked like a good deal of panic, then fled the village.

But was there a connection between them running out like that and the letter? Was it just coincidence?

Leaning back in the chair, he stared into the blank eye of the computer screen. That blank gla.s.s eye stared right back into his, challenging him to make the connection. He felt a growing edginess. There were questions to be answered. He knew it. But then he should be working.

What's more it was no real business of his how people reacted to letters that were probably, when all's said and done, a prank.

But some weird prank. He poured more coffee. This was going to be a real caffeine bender today but so whata Restless, he switched on the radio, surfed through the channels, switched it off again, then picked up the letter that had arrived so mysteriously in the dead of night.

Mysteriously?

There you go again John Newton, he told himself, shaking his head. You've got a weakness for melodrama-just like old Lord Paxton-Wellman had a pa.s.sion for backgammon.

He stood with the coffee cup in one hand, the letter in the other, and read it through again: Dear Messr. John Newt'n, I should wish yew put me a pound of chock latt on the grief stowne of Jess Bowen by the Sabbath night. Yew will be sorry if yew do not.

Come on, please! Why had the prankster's imagination conked out at the end? Surely he or she could have signed off with some cryptic name-Mr. X. or Miss Y at least. Then why not something lurid like Yours Truly, the Skelbrooke Mangier or Billy Razor Hands?

All that for a bar of chocolate?

So why go to all the trouble of using what appeared to be genuine antique paper complete with Gothic handwriting right out of Edgar Allan Poe?

He took a hit of coffee. These questions had gotten under his skin. They itched so much he wanted to scratch them right out of there. His mind went back twenty-four hours. Keith Haslem's ranting as he bundled his family into the car was memorable enough. When Audrey Haslem complained to her husband that his language might be a tad colorful for the neighborhood he'd retorted: 'I don't care about the f.u.c.king neighbors. If the neighbors had any f.u.c.king sense they'd be clearing out, too.'

There was no doubt that Keith believed his family faced some kind of threat. They had been running away from danger. It's possible that Keith had dealings with the underworld (OK, it didn't seem that likely); in which case he might need to skip town. But then it didn't explain 'if the neighbors had any f.u.c.king sense they'd be clearing out, too.'

Unless, that is, the man had got a bunch of terrorists so stinking angry they were going to nuke the whole village. Admittedly, that was pretty unlikely.

John raised the letter to the window. Enough daylight filtered through to reveal the watermark of a face in profile. Yea G.o.ds. An ugly gargoyle face at that. He cast his mind back to when Mr. and Mrs. Gregory were looking for Mrs. Gregory's father. John didn't recall the exact words, Mrs. Gregory's language wasn't as memorably colorful as Keith Haslem's, but John would swear she'd been talking about a letter, too. He looked down at the piece of paper in his hand again, frowning as he tried to remember.

Yesa she told her husband that the old man had been upset by the arrival of a letter. But what kind of letter? A credit card statement? A letter from a long lost lover? A demand for unpaid taxes?

"Not on your life," John murmured. "He'd got one of these, too." He laid the letter out on his desk.

Now. If he was to visit the old man at the Gregory home, would he find a letter just like this one? A letter not that dissimilar from the one burned to ashes in the Haslem birdbath?

He felt a tingling in his spine. Accompanying that came a restless excitement. This was exactly the same sensation he experienced when he climbed into the attic in Lincoln to find Paxton-Wellman's hidden box of treasures.

He'd caught a mystery by the tail and he knew it. The detective inside of him burned to uncover the secret of the letter. Dammitt. He should be sitting down to that first chapter of Without Trace, but he knew he couldn't settle. OK, he told himself, you've got one hour to get this out of your system. Then you get back to the computer and d.a.m.n well write.

Moments later he walked through the front door, while calling back at the dog, "I'll only be a few minutes, Sam. You guard the place until I get back."

Then he followed the old Roman road into the village, thinking how he could phrase what might seem a bizarre question-and hoping he wasn't going to make a complete fool of himself.

CHAPTER 9.

1.

John Newton bought the information he required for the price of a couple of postage stamps. Yesterday, he'd seen the old man being followed up the lane by Martin Marcello, and as in most small villages the prime source of local information is the man or woman behind the counter at the post office. All he need do was bide his time until there was no-one else waiting to be served, approach the counter and say, "Morning, Martin. How are you keeping?"

"Fine, John. I'll be even better on Tuesday, once I'm on that beach."

"Oh, Val mentioned you were going away for a couple of weeks."

"I am. And I'm more than ready for it. Are you still busy writing those bestsellers?"

"I'm doing my best." He smiled. "Oh, I saw you up near my house yesterday morning."

"Ah, yes. Our ration of excitement for the day." Martin pushed the change under the security screen toward John. "I was stocking the shelves across there when I saw old Stan Price heading out of the village as fast as his legs could carry him. All he was wearing were pajamas and a ridiculous straw hat. G.o.d, I tell you, John. I hope when my time comes I go just like that." He snapped his fingers.

"Stan Price?" John deliberately formed an expression of someone not familiar with the name.

"You won't know old Stan, will you? He used to be a big cheese in Skelbrooke. You see those prints on the wall?"

John looked at a set of framed prints showing Skelbrooke's noted landmarks-the village hall, pub, church and some of the bigger houses.

"That one right at the enda no, to your left John. The big house painted yellow. That's where Stan lives."

John saw a house name.

"Ezy View House, Skelbrookea Ezy?"

"It's p.r.o.nounced Easy. Ezy View was the name of Stan Price's chain of TV rental stores. You know, he was the first person in Skelbrooke to own a color television set. Kids used to climb onto the garden wall to try and get a look at it through the windows. He knew what we were up to but he'd never chase us away." Martin rubbed his jaw, remembering. "Stan was a nice guy. He did a lot for Skelbrooke. And they do say that when local people fell on hard times he'd help them out. But there's no justicea he's completely senile now."

"You managed to get him safely back home, though?"

"For what it's worth. All that money he's got in the bank and he can't even remember what day of the week it is."

John saw that the conversation was petering out. Martin had turned away to start sticking postage stamps on a parcel.

John tried a little pump-priming. "Doesn't his daughter look after him?"

"Oh aye. He first started getting confused three or four years ago. He'd go up to the Water Mill asking to see some people who'd long gone from there. In the end his daughter and son-in-law moved in to look after him."

"It must take some doinga giving up your home to look after a senile relative."

Martin shot John a worldly glance. "The daughter's OK, a bit on the shy side perhaps, but the son-in-law strikes me as an out-and-out bloodsucker." Martin dropped his voice in a secrets-to-be-told whisper. "By all accounts the home they gave up was a pokey rented room. When they first got here Robert Gregory-he's the son-in-law-wore baggy a.r.s.ed jeans and T-shirts that looked as if rats had been at them. Now he struts round in made-to-measure suits like he's heir to the manora which in a manner of speaking he is." The door chimed as another customer entered the post office. Martin touched his nose. "He's just waiting for the old boy to pop his clogsa Now, what's it to be Mrs. Machen? The usual?"

John stepped back to allow the customer through to the counter.

"Have a good trip if I don't see you before," John said, satisfied with the information he'd gathered. "Pa.s.s on my best to Brenda."

"Will doa oh, John, don't forget your stamps."

"Thanks." John picked them up then slipped out of the post office.

Now he knew where to find the old man. But broaching the question of the letter was going to be a bit tricky. So, what should he do? Simply appear at the front door and say, Mrs. Gregory, I received a bizarre letter the other day. I think you got one too.

But then why on earth was he going to all this trouble over a hoax letter? The truth of the matter was that this whole thing had started a tingling in his bloodstream. He felt the same way when he'd visited the county archive office in Lincoln with the intention of checking old newspaper reports about the Paxton-Wellman case. Suddenly it had occurred to him to take a look at the Lincoln census of 1887. Logically it was a waste of time, but he'd felt that tingle, as if intuitively he knew he would find an important nugget of information. After two hours plowing through lists of property addresses and their occupants he had turned up one Mr. Zephraim Gordon, which was a known alias of Lord Paxton-Wellman. Hey presto. John Newton had discovered a hitherto unknown safe house of the aristocratic burglar.

Now that same tingle ran through his blood. He instinctively knew he was on to something bigger than a mere hoax perpetrated by a bored school kid. After all, a letter that was a mere practical joke wouldn't have provoked that kind of dramatic response in Keith Haslem, would it? Not to the extent that he'd run from the village like the four hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse were riding his way.

The yellow house he now knew as Ezy View lay just a minute's walk away. He realized he'd have to concoct some plausible reason why he was going to ask the questions he planned to ask. If he got it wrong he'd have the door shut in his face. That would be the end of that. Maybe he should play it straight? He'd be the concerned resident of Skelbrooke who'd received a letter. Now he'd heard that the old man had gotten one, too.

Oh well, he thought, here goes.

2.

The playground vibrated with excitement. Elizabeth's bandage trailed loose again as she ran with a group of boys her own age. They reached a corner of the playground where a girl from the top year was telling everyone what she had seen. "Then they brought him out on a stretcher."

"What was he like?"