Ben Cheetham - The Society of Dirty Hearts

“Where are you going now?” asked Robert. When he got no reply, voice rising, he continued, “I asked you a question. Don’t you walk away-”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Robert, leave him be,” interrupted Christine.

“No I won’t leave him be. While he’s under my roof-” Julian heard his dad say. Then he was out the front door and running for his car.

Mia wasn’t in the fast-food restaurant. After cruising around for a while, vainly scanning the streets for her, Julian remembered that he knew which school she went to. It was the same school his dad had attended. Not the best school in town, but as his dad had once said, a decent school, with decent people. At lunchtime, kids streamed out the gate — kids with middle-class written all over them. Mia was amongst them, but somehow aloof from them. As Julian approached her, he noticed other kids giving her looks, some hating, some mocking, some perhaps envying or even admiring. She didn’t appear to notice or care.

“I need to talk to you,” he said. Mia walked past him without looking at him. “Please,” he continued, “this is really important.”

She stopped and turned to run her eyes over his drawn, unshaven face. “Come on,” she said, almost expressionless, and continued walking.

Julian followed. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere we can talk.”

They walked along quiet suburban streets to a house — a well-kept semi with a garden and a privet hedge. “Is this your parents’ place?” Julian asked, surprised. He’d pictured her living in a flat on some run-down estate.

“Foster-parents’.”

At the front door, they met a girl about Mia’s age coming the other way. “Who’s he?” she asked, looking at Julian.

“None of your business.”

“You’re not supposed to have boys in the house when my parents are out,” the girl called after them as they made their way upstairs, putting special emphasis on the word ‘my’.

Ignoring her, Mia led Julian into a bedroom. It contained all the essentials — bed, desk, drawers, wardrobe — but there were no posters, books, cds, or any of the other things you might expect to see in a teenage girl’s room. There was a suitcase on the floor, open but unpacked, screwed up clothes leaking out of it, makeup, bits of cheap jewellery and photos jumbled in amongst them. Stretching out onto the bed, Mia looked at Julian expectantly.

Julian took a breath and told her how her best-friend died. He saw, perhaps, the faintest quiver in her eyes. But other than that, nothing. “Is that it?” she said. “Is that all you have to tell me?”

Before the previous night, Julian might’ve been tempted to call Mia a total fucking cold-hearted bitch. But now he knew — or at least, thought he knew — that her impassivity was a mask she’d learned to wear to protect herself. He shook his head, gesturing to the bed. “Can I sit?”

Mia shrugged. “Sure.”

He flopped down next to her, rubbing his eyes and murmuring, “Man, I’m so tired. I haven’t slept properly in a week.”

“Why?”

“I have these dreams.” Julian swallowed as he spoke, forming the words with a reluctant mumble.

“What kind of dreams?”

“Bad ones. It’s like there’s something in the bedroom with me, attacking me, trying to get inside me.”

Mia sat up, crossing her legs, curiosity replacing her impassivity. “You mean like a ghost or something?”

“No, not a ghost.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what happens?”

Julian told Mia what happened in the dream — the original dream, not the new version. She listened intently, fascinated. “That’s seriously creepy shit,” she said. “So how long have you been dreaming that stuff?”

“Since I was ten.”

“Fuck.” Mia looked at Julian with something close to sympathy. “I’d go totally out of my skull if I was you.”

“I almost did. You wouldn’t believe how many therapists I’ve been through.”

“Did they help?”

“Some of them did. The last guy I saw told me I needed to learn to accept the dream, not fight it. He said I had to let it come, in order to let it go. So I did, and it did go for a while.”

“But now it’s back.”

Julian nodded. “Ever since I heard about Joanne Butcher.”

Mia frowned, her eyes searching Julian’s. “Why would that make it come back?”

“Maybe because her disappearance reminded me of Susan Carter.”

“Who’s Susan Carter?”

“A girl from around here who went missing ten years ago. My grandma tried to help her parents find her.”

“Was she a copper?”

Julian smiled thinly at the idea. “No, she was a psychic medium.”

Mia’s eyebrows lifted. “You mean she could, like, speak to the dead.”

“Supposedly, although if you ask me it was a load of bollocks, one big act.”

“I dunno, I kind of believe in that stuff.” For the space of a breath Mia’s eyes went away again, lost in whatever she saw on the horizon of her mind. She blinked back to the real world. “So go on, what happened with your nan?”

Julian told Mia about the day his mum took him to visit his grandma, about creeping downstairs to the seance, about his grandma’s changed, distorted face. She shook her head, wide-eyed. “This just gets weirder and weirder. So how did you find out who Susan was?”

“I went to this therapist a few years later, and he reckoned that unravelling the mysteries of the dream would take away its power. So Mum took me to the library and showed me newspaper clippings about a girl called Susan Carter who went over to a friend’s house one evening, but never got there. A big search went on for her, but they didn’t find anything. It was as if she’d vanished right off the face of the planet. Anyway, about a year later the police arrested this truck-driver who tried to snatch a girl off the street in Glasgow. His name was Michael Ridgway. This guy was a loner, a real oddball. When they searched his house they found a box with bits of jewellery and girl’s clothes and underwear in it. Turned out, they belonged to other girls he’d snatched.”

“I’ve heard about that kind of thing — about how serial killers keep trophies from their victims. I remember seeing on TV about this guy who killed people by biting their throats, and drinking their blood, like some kind of vampire. He kept their heads as trophies.”

“Yeah, well this sicko had been trucking up and down the country for years, abducting and killing girls. That’s why they called him The A1 Murderer. When the police found out he’d been on a job in this area the day Susan Carter disappeared, they showed his trophies, or whatever they were, to her parents. There was a necklace the same as one she’d been wearing when she disappeared. It was obvious he’d taken her. Problem was he wouldn’t admit it. And since no one had seen anything, and they couldn’t find Susan’s body, and you could buy the same necklace on any high-street, they decided not to charge him with her murder. But they did charge him with six other murders and locked him up for life.”

“They should’ve cut his balls off n’all.”

“Maybe, but it wouldn’t have made much difference. The guy was only in jail a few months before he died of a heart-attack. That’s when Susan Carter’s parents went to my grandma.”

“And did your grandma find out where she was?”

“Course not,” Julian said, with a derisive little laugh.

“So the man in your dream is Michael Ridgway.”

“No. I haven’t got a clue who the man in my dream is, or if it’s even a man.” Heaving a sigh, Julian closed his eyes. “Whatever it is, I just want it to leave me the fuck alone.”

Something touched his cheek. It was Mia. Her fingers moved along his jaw towards his chin. She was smiling — not a come on smile, a concerned smile. He flinched away. “There’s something else.” His voice came heavily, as if dragged through deep mud. “You might not feel so sorry for me, you might not even want to know me once I tell you.”