Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

There is a bed, a wardrobe with a large oval mirror, a built-in cupboard to one side of the chimney breast. The boards are bare, stained black.

There is a greyish cast to everything. Croft guesses the room has not been used in quite some time.

“It’s not much, I’m afraid,” the woman says. Her name is Sandra. Symes has told him everyone including her husband calls her Sandy, but Croft has decided already that he will never do this, that it is ugly, that he likes Sandra better. “I’ve been meaning to paint it, but there hasn’t been time.”

She is too thin, he thinks, with scrawny hips and narrow little birdy hands. Her mousy hair, pulled back in a pony tail, has started to come free of its elastic band. Croft cannot help noticing how tired she looks.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “If you can let me have the paint, I’ll do it myself.”

“Oh,” she says. She seems flustered. “I suppose we could take something off the rent money. In exchange, I mean.”

“There’s no need,” Croft says. “I’d like to do it. Something to keep me out of mischief.” He smiles, hoping to give her reassurance, but she takes a step backwards, just a small one, but still a step, and Croft sees he has made a mistake already, that the word mischief isn’t funny, not from him, not now, not yet.

He will have to be more careful with what he says. He wonders if this is the way things will be for him from now on.

“Well, if you’re sure,” Sandra says. She glances at him quickly, then looks down at the floor. “It would brighten up the walls a bit, at least.”

She leaves him soon afterwards. Croft listens to her footsteps as she goes downstairs, past the entrance to the first floor flat where she and Angus McNiece and their young son live, and into the pub where she works ten hours each day behind the bar. Once he feels sure she won’t come back again, Croft lifts his luggage — a canvas holdall — from where he has placed it just inside the door and puts it down on the bed. As he tugs open the zip, an aroma arises, the scent of musty bedsheets and floor disinfectant, a smell he recognises instantly as the smell of the prison, a smell he has grown so used to that he would have said, if he’d been asked, that the prison didn’t have a smell at all.

No smell, and no texture. Being outside is like being spun inside a centrifuge. He keeps feeling it, the enthralling pressure on his ribs and abdomen, the quickfire jolts to his brain as he tries to accustom himself to the fact that he is once more his own private property. Just walking from the station to the pub — the long, straight rafter of Burnt Ash Road, the blasted concrete triangle that is Lee Green — gave him a feeling of exhilaration so strong, so bolt upright it still buzzes in his veins like neat whisky, like vertigo.

The pub is called The Old Tiger’s Head. Croft has read it was once a coaching halt, a watering hole for soldiers on their way to the Battle of Waterloo. More recently it was a tram stop, where trams on their way down from Lewisham Junction would switch from the central conduit to overhead power. Photographs of Lee Green in the early 1900s show the place when it was still a village, a busy crossroads between Lewisham and Eltham, creased all along its corners, faded, precious.

He begins to remove his clothes and books from the canvas holdall. The clothes will go in the wardrobe. He tries the door to the built-in cupboard, but it appears to be locked. Croft wishes the woman, Sandra, had felt able to stay with him in the room for just a few minutes longer.

Why would she, though? What is he to her, other than the sixty pounds each week she will get from him in rent money?

Croft wonders what, if anything, she has heard or read or been told about his case.

The child, Rebecca Riding, lived less than two miles from the place where he is now standing. A decade has passed since she died. In an alternate world, she would now be a young woman. Instead, she went to pick flowers in Manor Park on a certain day, and that was that.

Abducted and raped, then murdered. Her name had joined the register of the lost.

Did Croft kill Rebecca Riding? The papers said he had, for a while they did anyway. He has served a ten-year prison sentence for her murder. Even now that the charges have been overturned, the time he has spent living as a guilty man is still a part of reality.

He is free, but is he truly innocent?

Croft cannot say yet. There are too many things about that day that he cannot remember.

His first meeting with Symes consists mainly of Symes cross-examining him on the subject of how things are going.

“Did you manage to sign on okay?” As if penetrating the offices of the Lewisham DSS was a significant accomplishment, like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel, or scaling Everest.

Perhaps for some it is. Croft thinks of the faces, the closed and hostile faces of free people who through their freedom were unpredictable and therefore threatening. In prison, you became used to people doing the same thing, day after day. Even insane actions came to make sense within that context. In the offices of the Lewisham DSS, even getting up to fetch a cup of water from the cooler might turn out to be a prelude to insurrection.

All the people he encounters make him nervous. He tells Symes everything is fine.

“It was lucky about the room,” he adds, as a sweetener. “I’m grateful to you.”

The room at The Old Tiger’s Head was Symes’s idea. He knows Angus McNiece, apparently. Croft dislikes Symes intensely without knowing why. In prison, you come to know a man’s crime by the scent he gives off, and to Croft, Richard Symes has about him the same moist and fuggy aroma as the pathetically scheming lowlifes who always sat together in the prison canteen because no one else would sit near them, suffering badly from acne and talking with their mouths full.

Symes wears a lavender-coloured, crew-necked jersey and loose brown corduroys. He looks like an art teacher.

That Symes has been assigned to him by the probation service to help him “re-orientate” seems to Croft like a joke that isn’t funny.

Symes is telling Croft about a group he runs, once a week at his home, for newly released offenders.

“It’s very informal,” Symes says. “I think you’d enjoy it.”

Offenders , Croft thinks. That’s what we are to people. We offend . The idea of being in Symes’s house is distasteful to him, but he is afraid that if he refuses, Symes will see it as a sign of maladjustment and use it against him.

Croft says yes, he would like to attend, of course. It would be good to meet people.

“Here’s my address,” Symes says. He writes it down on one of the scraps of paper that litter his desk and hands it across. “It’s in Forest Hill. Can you manage the bus?”

“I think so,” Croft says. For a moment, he imagines how good it would feel to punch Symes in the face, even though Croft isn’t used to fighting. He hasn’t hit anyone since he was fifteen and had a dust-up in the schoolyard with Roger Burke by name, Burke by nature. Croft has forgotten what it was about now but everyone had cheered. He imagines the blood spurting from Symes’s nose the way it had from Roger Burke’s nose, the red coating the grooves of his knuckles, the outrage splayed across his face (how fucking dare you, you little turd), the pain and surprise.

Symes is finally getting ready to dismiss him.

“Tuesday at eight, then. Are you sure you don’t want me to email you directions?”

“There’s no need.” Croft isn’t online yet, anyway, but he doesn’t tell Symes that. “I’m sure I can find you.”