Tom Graham - A Fistful of Knuckles

They squeezed themselves, flank to flank, onto the bench. Sam felt Annie nestle tighter against him. He nestled back.

‘Do you think she’ll show up?’ Sam asked.

Annie shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘But what do your instincts tell you?’

‘They tell me …’ For a moment, she chewed her lip and thought. Then she looked at Sam intently, with a strange expression behind her eyes. ‘I don’t know what my instincts are telling me, Sam. I … feel something … something about Tracy, and this whole case, but …’ She searched in vain for the right words, but gave up. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘ Try and explain,’ Sam prompted her gently. He took her hand. ‘Try, Annie. I might understand more than you think.’

He felt her fingers close around his.

‘Well,’ she said, her voice very low, her manner hesitant. ‘You know how I said this case was getting me down? The thing is, I’ve been worrying about it all the time. I’ve even been dreaming about it.’

‘That’s one of the hazards of this job.’

‘Oh, I know that. But this is different.’ She broke off, lost in her own thoughts, and then, choosing her words carefully, she spoke with great deliberation. ‘I’ll tell you. These feelings I’ve been getting, Sam … these fears … I’ve been having them for a while, just sort of vaguely floating about in the back of my head. I sort of ignored them. But then it all changed when the nurses here called me in to see Tracy Porter. She was fresh in — she’d just been beaten up. I got here and I … I sensed it even before I walked into the room where she was lying.’

‘What, Annie? What did you sense?’

‘That something was wrong. I mean, really wrong. You know that feeling you get when the phone suddenly rings at like three in the morning? You know how your heart jumps into your mouth, coz you know, you just know, it’s going to be something awful? Well, what I got was a feeling just like that. Even before I reached the ward they’d put her in, my heart was going, Sam, it was really going, and my palms were all damp, and it was like I was bracing myself for … for jumping out of a plane, or something. And what for? I mean, what the hell for?’

She checked Sam’s expression to see if he was following what she was getting at. Sam said nothing, merely held eye contact and gave her hand an encouraging squeeze.

Annie took a breath, and carried on. ‘So, anyway. I tried to keep my mind on the job, and I walked in the room, and there was Tracy on the bed, her face swollen and her eyes half shut with the bruises. You remember the photo. Now the thing is, Sam, I’ve seen worse stuff than this before. Hundreds of times. So have you. We all have, it’s what coppers deal with every day. But it was really upsetting me — and I mean really upsetting me. I got frightened, like I was the next one line to get battered like that.’

‘You felt vulnerable?’ Sam asked.

‘Yes! Helpless. And really scared, like I wanted to look over my shoulder all the time. Why would I feel that way, Sam? Why would it affect me like that?’

Sam sighed and fidgeted awkwardly. What could he say? How could he tell her that somewhere out there, something was approaching through darkness — something evil, something inhuman — something that knew Annie’s name, just as it knew Sam’s, and that all its power and malice was bent towards them? How could he tell her that he had glimpsed this thing, this Devil in the Dark? How could he say that it was through him, through his subconscious, that it was reaching out to her?

‘You said you’ve been having dreams,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me about those?’

Annie laughed nervously: ‘Shouldn’t I be lying down on a couch for that, with you sitting next to me taking notes?’

Sam smiled: ‘I’m not a shrink, Annie, but I reckon I might understand what you’re saying better than anyone. Now — tell me — what have you been dreaming?’

‘It’s all confused, you know, the way dreams are. At first I did my best to forget them, because I’d wake up scared, like the way you did when you had nightmares as a kid. But then, when I kept having them, I tried to remember so I could understand. They’re always muddled, Sam — images all on top of each other, like trying to watch BBC1, BBC2 and ITV all at the same time.’

‘Just wait for cable …’ muttered Sam under his breath.

‘All I remember of them are single moments. An image. A sensation. I know enough psychology to know if there’s any meaning in a dream it’s hidden away in the details.’

‘And what details did you remember, Annie?’

Closing her eyes, recalling the ghastly images of her nightmares, Annie said softly: ‘Sometimes I dream of things rotting. There are maggots crawling about. And sometimes I dream of …’ Her eyebrows furrowed. ‘… Sometimes I dream of a man … A man in a suit … A Nehru suit, like they used to wear in the 60s …’

Sam almost jolted.

‘A Nehru suit?’ he whispered. ‘No collar, no lapels …’

‘That’s the one. In the dream, the man always wears a Nehru suit. Expensive, sharp … I can’t see his face, but I’m frightened of him because …’

Sam felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed hard and asked: ‘Why? Why are you frightened of him?’

‘I don’t know.’ She furrowed her brow. ‘It’s like … It’s like he’s … Sometimes I feel it’s like he’s my-’

Quite suddenly, Annie gave a little gasp and sat suddenly upright. Her hand went to her chest, as if she were feeling her own heartbeat.

‘She’s here,’ she whispered. ‘It’s that feeling like before …’

Sam glanced down the corridor at the hospital foyer and spotted a frail young woman, little more than a girl, moving uncertainly amid the to-ing and fro-ing of the medical staff and patients. She was wearing faded denims with a polka-dot patch unhandily stitched over one knee. Her thick-soled, high-heeled sandals made her totter slightly, as if she had not yet learnt to walk in them, and the shapeless, man-sized lumberjack shirt she had on somehow only emphasized her fragility by sitting so bulkily on her.

‘Is that her?’ he asked.

Annie nodded.

As the girl drew closer, one unsteady step after another, the bruising around her eyes and mouth became more apparent. She had attempted to disguise it by letting her mousy hair fall down across her face, and by donning a googly pair of plastic sunglasses with thick, pink frames — but her efforts were in vain. She could have worn a paper bag over her head and somehow you would have intimated that the face beneath it was battered and traumatized. Tracy Porter gave off the air of being a victim the way a business tycoon gives off the air of mountainous wealth.

‘Are you up to speaking to her?’ Sam asked, putting his hand on Annie’s arm. ‘You’re feeling okay?’

‘My heart’s going again, like before. But I’m okay, Sam.’

‘Annie … this dream you were talking about … The man in the Nehru suit …’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, Sam, later. Let me go and have a word with Tracy, just me and her. If she’s not too jumpy, I’ll bring her over, yeah?’

Annie got to her feet, fixed her expression into one of openness, adopted unthreatening body language, and headed down the corridor towards Tracy. The girl flinched and glanced over her shoulder at the main doorway, as if she was ready to bolt back out. Not that she could bolt exactly, not in those blocky sandals. Perhaps teeter away at speed until she twisted her ankle.

Sam couldn’t hear what Annie said to her — no doubt words of friendliness and concern in order to win the girl’s trust just that little bit more. Tracy raised her hands to her face to cover the injuries, but Annie took the girl’s hands in her own and held them, making physical contact, bridging the gulf between her and this terrified, wounded creature.