Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

He could see her eyes narrow. But she didn’t disagree. When she spoke, her tone was even and reasonable.

‘If I thought it was safe enough for you to stay here after that terrible business with Tristram Boye all those years ago, why on earth shouldn’t it be safe enough for me now?’

Nicholas wanted to say, Because of the ghosts. Because Quill isn’t dead, she’s alive and living in the woods. She’s murdering again. He clenched his jaw. He couldn’t say any of this to her.

‘Or do you blame me for what happened to you down there?’ she asked.

Nicholas blinked. ‘No. Why would I?’

‘Because I didn’t keep you safe. Because I was. . I don’t know. . I was a bad mother. Because I didn’t move when your fa-’

Her eyes widened ever so slightly and she bit down the last word.

‘Dad? Dad wanted you to move?’

Katharine stood noisily, picked up the plates and carried them to the sink.

‘Donald wanted lots of silly things. That just happened to be one of his rare good ideas.’

Nicholas frowned. His father wanted his family to move? Why? Because Owen Liddy went missing in 1964? Or was there more he knew?

‘When?’

‘Nicholas! I don’t know.’

‘Before he started drinking?’

‘A long, long time ago. When we were happy and there was no good reason to move. Okay?’ She scraped the plates off with a harsh clatter.

‘ But there must have been a reason!’

Before he could press the point, the telephone rang in the hallway. Katharine clip-clopped out of the room to answer it. Nicholas sighed, and watched her listening as the caller spoke. Then she held the receiver out to him.

‘For you.’

He took the phone. It was Laine Boye.

‘Sorry to disturb your evening, Mr Close.’ Her voice was so crackly it could have been cast from Mars.

Katharine slipped into the bathroom and started the shower. There would be no more talking about Donald Close and Tallong tonight.

‘That’s fine,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Is there. . Can I help you?’

‘This might sound odd, Mr Close,’ said Laine. ‘But I need to ask you about a dead bird.’

The rain thundered down so heavily that Pritam could imagine that space itself was made of water, and was now pouring through rents in the sky’s tired fabric.

The three of them sat in the presbytery’s leather club chairs, finishing coffee. The mood was odd. Three very different people, each effectively a stranger to the other two. They had next to nothing in common. A neatly dressed Christian clergyman. A reserved, elegant woman recently widowed. And that long-limbed scarecrow of a man Nicholas Close. Would they ever have gathered were it not for these unusual circumstances? He didn’t think so. Yet they were surprisingly comfortable together. None had a loved one waiting at home for them. All had lost someone close to them recently. Sad, strange events had brought them together, yet there was something warming about each other’s company. Something easy and right, but very fragile — a fine rope across a wide chasm. Each felt it; the silence while they sipped was delicate and none wanted to break it.

After returning from the Gerlics’ house, Pritam had set himself busy to fill the time until Nicholas arrived. He’d mopped out John’s room, cleaned his ensuite, found a hundred small excuses not to go into the main church. When he heard a knock at the presbytery door, he had been surprised to find not Nicholas, but Laine Boye. She explained that Nicholas had invited her. Not long later, Nicholas himself arrived. Pritam made coffee, they exchanged small talk, and a silence settled that each recognised as a cue: it was time for serious talk.

‘Okay,’ Nicholas began. ‘I’ve told Pritam some of this, but not everything. Not by a long shot. Laine, you said Gavin mentioned a bird?’

Pritam felt the last word suddenly flutter in his gut like a real bird, nervous and ready to flee. He watched Nicholas walk over to the small bar fridge; he pulled out the plastic bag and untied it on the coffee table. Pritam’s heart beat faster as he saw again that violated little body, that disquieting woven ball for a head. He looked over to see Laine’s reaction to the mutilated bird, but her grey eyes were utterly inscrutable.

‘I first saw a bird like this four days before Gavin’s brother was murdered,’ Nicholas said, starting in 1982 with finding the dead bird and showing his best friend, Tristram. Then there was Winston Teale chasing them both into the woods, and watching Tris and his broken wrist disappear under the old water pipe through a tunnel full of spiders. How Tris’s drained body had been found miles away under tin and timber. Teale’s confession and suicide. Years later, Cate’s death. His fall on the stairs outside the flat in Ealing. The ghost of the screwdriver-wielding boy. Then more ghosts; sad, trapped ghosts. Cate’s ghost. Returning from London on a rainy night like this when Dylan Thomas disappeared. Elliot Guyatt’s confession and suicide, so eerily like Teale’s. Gavin’s dawn message punctuated by two sharp cracks of his rifle on which Thurisaz was scored: the rune that kept reappearing and seemed inextricable from death. Pursuing the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. The strawberries. The Wynard . The old woman and her dog Garnock that was no dog. The nauseating hand job. The archived flyers and news articles: so many missing children, so many dead men. Eleanor Bretherton, grim patron of this church, the spitting image of Mrs Quill the dressmaker. Her shop, now a health food store, with a rune marked into its door. Garnock attacking Suzette and wrenching out her hair, and Nicholas’s nephew falling ill the next morning. The odd power of the sardonyx and elder-wood necklace. And earlier today: a development sign erected, another bird talisman found, and a girl nearly snatched with Nicholas himself darkly urged to deliver her into the gloomy woods on Carmichael Road.

His story finished. The room fell silent under the cold gaze of Eleanor Bretherton, staring belligerently out from monochromatic 1888.

Pritam was exhausted, as if he’d just finished watching a disturbing horror feature that he knew couldn’t be real, but still made him want to avoid the shadows. He looked over to Laine Boye. She was watching him intently, as if gauging his reaction.

‘And, of course,’ said Nicholas, ‘a credible witness who could have confirmed that Quill and Bretherton were, forgive the pun, birds of a feather is dead. John Hird.’

‘True,’ said Pritam, and was surprised how quiet his voice was. ‘But there is this.’

He went to his desk drawer and returned with the photo of Mrs Quill at the church fete thirty-two years ago. Nicholas put out his hand, but Pritam stepped past him and handed it to Laine.

When Laine saw it, her lips tightened but her face betrayed no emotion. She stood and went to the hanging photograph of Eleanor Bretherton and compared the two for a full minute.

‘Could Quill be her grand-daughter?’ she finally asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas. ‘But there was no record of Eleanor Bretherton marrying or having children. She was a spinster.’

‘You tell me, Mrs Boye,’ said Pritam. ‘Are they the same person?’

Laine held the photographs side by side, comparing Quill’s and Bretherton’s scowls, their chins, their frosty alarm at being photographed. After a long minute, she returned the photograph to Pritam.

‘Similar,’ she said.

The rain outside roared.

‘So?’ asked Nicholas, looking from Pritam to Laine.

Laine looked at Pritam. He nodded — you speak first.

‘So,’ said Laine, ‘we have two photographs a hundred years apart with two women who look alike, but that means nothing of itself. A list of deaths and murders, but they were all explained away or confessed to. As for the bird, you could have mutilated it. We only have your word, Mr Close, that you found it. But. .’