Black Rabbit Summer (34 page)

‘All right,’ Dad said, taking a pen and a notebook from his pocket. ‘What did this man look like?’

All I could really remember about the man with the moustache – apart from his moustache, obviously – was that he was slightly odd-looking, slightly hunched, and that he’d reminded me of an over-concerned father keeping an eye out for his child… only there hadn’t been any children around. It wasn’t much to go on, and I wasn’t totally convinced that Dad was taking me seriously anyway, but I did my best to describe the man I thought I’d seen.

By the time I’d finished, it was dark outside, and as I got up and went over to the window to close the curtains – yawning and stretching my arms – Dad got wearily to his feet and suggested that we both get some sleep.

I nodded and smiled at him, stifling another yawn.

He smiled back at me. ‘Are you going to be OK?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘Well, try not to think about things too much. Just get your head down and get some sleep. You’ll probably feel a bit better in the morning.’

‘Yeah…’

He nodded. ‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Yeah, ’night, Dad.’

‘See you in the morning.’

I waited for him to shut the door, listened to his footsteps going down the stairs, then I took Eric’s phone out of my pocket and sat down on the bed. I flipped it open, turned it on, and muted the ringtone.

I’d never felt more awake in my life.

It didn’t take me long to get the hang of Eric’s phone, and the first thing I found out was that he’d deleted all his text messages. Of course, it was possible that his outbox was empty simply because he hadn’t sent any texts recently, but, knowing Eric, I somehow doubted that. He’d always been a text maniac. He couldn’t let a day go by without sending a text to someone.

His inbox was empty too.

I exited the message menu, opened up his phonebook, and started scrolling down through all the entries. Some of them were just abbreviated first names –
Jo, Mart, Mich, Nic
– while others were abbreviated first names with the initial letter of the surname –
Ali F, Pet B, Rob S.
The names that interested me the most, though, were the names that didn’t really look like names. There were three of them:
Pyg, Amo
and
Bit.

PYG
I guessed was probably Pauly – Pauly Gilpin – but the other two,
AMO
and
BIT
, they didn’t mean anything to me.

I selected the details of all three entries. They were all mobile numbers and they were all on speed dial.

AMO
and
BIT
…?

I hit more buttons and checked out the Calls Received menu. The last ten calls were listed:

Calls 2_10 were received between Sunday and today. The call from
Bit
was received on Friday. The day before the fair.

The last ten dialled calls were:

All these calls were made in the last two days.

I sat there for a long time, staring at the phone, staring at the ceiling, staring at the phone, staring at nothing… trying to think, trying to work out if anything meant anything… trying to work
out how to find out if anything meant anything, and what that might mean…

If anything.

Maybe
none
of it meant anything? I mean, so what if Eric had been in regular contact with
Pyg
,
Amo
and
Bit
? The calls to and from Pauly didn’t necessarily mean anything – apart from the fact that Eric had been lying to me when he’d told me he didn’t have Pauly’s number – and
Amo
and
Bit
…? Well, they
could
be anybody. They could be just friends of Eric’s, perfectly innocent friends who didn’t have anything to do with Pauly or Stella or Raymond…

But I didn’t think so.

Eric had been up to something with Campbell on Saturday night.

They’d both been around when Stella had last been seen.

Eric had lied to me.

Campbell had twice warned me off.

Pauly had been in touch with Campbell.

Pauly had drugged the tequila…

Black flies buzzing…

Connecting disconnecting connecting disconnecting…

I knew that it all meant something, and I knew that the key to it all – if there
was
a key to it all – was finding out who
Amo
and
Bit
were, and it was incredibly tempting to just dial their numbers and see what happened. But it was also kind of scary too. What should I say to them? What would they say to me? Would they know it was me? Would I know who they were? And what if one of the numbers was Stella’s and someone found out that I’d called it? How was I going to explain that?

On the other hand, though, if I
didn’t
ring the numbers…

I stared at the phone, emptied my head, and hit the speed dial for
Bit.

The line hummed for a few moments, then hissed, and then it went dead. Nothing at all. No tone, no message, no nothing. Completely dead.

I tried
Amo
next, and this time I got an automated message: ‘
This person’s phone is switched off. Please try later or send a text.
’

I closed the connection and hit the speed dial for
Pyg.
The line clicked in, the dial tone rang, and after a couple of seconds I heard Pauly’s voice in my ear. ‘Eric? Is that you?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Eric?’ Pauly said.

I ended the call and switched off the phone.

Pauly sounded worried.

He sounded small.

He sounded a bit like Raymond.

And I hated him for that. How
dare
he remind me of Raymond? He was Pauly Gilpin, a conniving piece of shit, a sly little bastard who didn’t care about anyone but himself. He used people, abused people… he put drugs in people’s drinks. He was Pauly
Gilpin
, for Christ’s sake. How could he
possibly
remind me of Raymond?

It was obscene.

But it was true.

And that hurt. Because it made me realize how much I missed Raymond, and how much I wanted him to be here right now. If only he was here, sitting with me in this room… I could talk to him. I could trust him. I could tell him things that I couldn’t tell anyone else…

But he wasn’t here.

I knew that.

And as I closed my eyes to the whispered darkness, I knew that his ghost wasn’t here either. Ghosts don’t exist. The ghosts haunting me were chemical ghosts – hallucinations, flashbacks… I
knew
that. But I also knew that I’d heard Black Rabbit’s voice on Friday. In Raymond’s garden. When I’d sensed a soundless movement, and I’d looked down at my feet and seen Black Rabbit flopping past me and hopping back into his hutch…

Be careful. Don’t go.

I’d tried to convince myself that I hadn’t heard it, but I had. And that was on
Friday.
Before the fair, before the den, before I’d drunk any psycho-tequila.

And that didn’t make sense.

How could I be hallucinating
before
I’d taken the drug?

Unless…?

No, there were no
unless
es.

I’d heard Black Rabbit’s voice on Friday.

Be careful. Don’t go.

And again on Sunday.

Take me home… bring me home…

And Monday…

Or was it Tuesday?

It doesn’t matter.

And now…

In the silence of my head, I was hearing it again.

You know who knows…

My skin tingled.

You know.

I didn’t have to open my eyes to know that the porcelain rabbit
was looking at me. I could feel its black eyes in the darkness, shining like moments of light, like saddened stars…

The mother knows.

‘Whose mother?’ I breathed.

See her dark eyes, her white skin… she knows.

‘Who knows?’

You like animals, they make you feel good. She draws me on the black table to show him she knows him. You know who knows…

‘The fortune-teller?’

She knows.

It must have been some time around midnight when I tiptoed downstairs, opened the front door, and crept out into the darkness. Mum and Dad’s bedroom light was turned off, so I guessed they were sleeping, but I didn’t want to take any chances. So I’d turned off my mobile – and Eric’s too – and I didn’t stop walking on tiptoe until I’d opened the front gate and stepped out into the street.

I didn’t look back to see if there were any police at the top of the road, I just turned left and walked briskly in the opposite direction, hoping that I looked perfectly normal. I wasn’t sneaking out of the house. I wasn’t following the advice of a black porcelain rabbit. I wasn’t going to see a fortune-telling woman whose dreadlocked son’s caravan was stained with the blood of a dead girl.

The recreation ground was dark and silent when I got there. There were no flashing lights tonight. No crashing music, no
screams of laughter, no whirling wheels or booming voices swirling around in the air. It was just a recreation ground at night, a blurred black emptiness stretching out beyond the padlocked gates.

But it wasn’t completely empty.

In the distant dimness I could just make out a faint gathering of lights, and around the lights I could see the greyed outlines of several vehicles. I couldn’t tell what kind of vehicles they were, but I was fairly sure that one of them would be Lottie Noyce’s trailer. Her son had only been released from questioning today, and the police were still checking his caravan,
and
they might want to talk to him again… so he had to be staying somewhere.

As I clambered over the locked gates and began heading across the park towards the lights, I could see that the vehicles were parked in a rough semi-circle in the shade of some tall park trees. A generator was chugging away quietly somewhere out of sight. The ground was packed hard, rutted with wheel tracks, and I guessed this was the place where all the fairground vehicles had been parked on Saturday night. It was hard to imagine now, but this must have been the far edge of the fairground, the place where I’d seen Nicole and Luke staggering off into the darkness…

It was
all
hard to imagine. The lights, the chaos, the whirling confusion… Nicole’s dead eyes as Luke led her off into the shadowed maze of lorries and trucks and vans and trailers…

There’d been dozens of vehicles then, but most of them had gone now. All that was left – standing quietly in the green-grey darkness – were two trailer vans, a caravan, and a Toyota pick-up with a deflated bouncy castle in the back. Both of the trailers had lights in the windows, and neither of them had any markings.

I suppose I was half-hoping that one of them might say
Madame Baptiste
on the side, or maybe
Noyce & Son
or something. But they didn’t. So I just stood there for a while, about ten metres away from the trailers, watching and listening, trying to work out which one of them belonged to Lottie Noyce. It was a pretty pointless thing to do. The curtains were closed, so I couldn’t see anything, and the only sounds I could hear were the soft chug-chugging of the generator and the whisper of a night breeze in the trees. But I didn’t seem to mind. I was quite content just standing there, soaking up the dark tranquillity of the park, breathing in the scent of the sleeping grass, listening to the silence…

The sky was clear and starry black, and for the first time in days there was a slight chill to the air. I turned and gazed out over the darkness. Where was Saturday night now? I wondered. Where had it gone? Where were all the laughing faces, the streaming crowds, the dodgems and the teddy bears and the whirling wheels? Where was Raymond? Where was the past? Where was –?

I sensed something then – a soundless movement.

Right behind me.

A quiet breath, the whisper of a presence…

‘Raymond?’ I muttered, turning round.

Despite the hope in my voice, I don’t think I really believed it was Raymond, but there was still something inside me that died a small death when instead of seeing Raymond I saw the tall figure of Tom Noyce in front of me. He was standing very close, still and pale in his grubby white boiler suit, his eyebrow studs and his lip ring glinting dully in the night. His icy blue eyes looked down at me through a tangle of dirty blond dreadlocks.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

His voice was a gentle growl.

‘I’m Pete Boland,’ I told him. ‘I’m a friend of –’

‘What do you want?’

I looked up at him, wondering briefly how a man so tall and with so much hair could creep up behind me without making a sound.

‘What do you want?’ he repeated.

‘Tell your mother I’m here,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘She’ll know why.’

He stared at me for a long time then, and as I gazed back at him, looking into those cold blue eyes, I tried to imagine if he was capable of having blood on his hands. I thought I could sense
something
about him, a vague impression that had something to do with life and death… but there wasn’t anything malicious about it. It was more of a down-to-earth kind of feeling, a practical acceptance that life
depends
upon death. Animals eat animals. Life has to be taken. Blood has to be spilled.

I could imagine Tom Noyce catching a fish or killing a chicken, but that was as far as it went.

‘Come on,’ he said simply, turning round and heading off towards one of the trailers. ‘She’s waiting for you.’

I suppose I was expecting Lottie Noyce to look exactly the same as Madame Baptiste – the same thick braid of dark brown hair, coiled into a bun on her head, the same old-fashioned brown woollen dress, buttoned up tightly to her neck. But, of course, that was Madame Baptiste the fortune-teller. And Lottie Noyce wasn’t Madame Baptiste. She was just Lottie Noyce: a middle-aged woman with long brown hair, wearing a plain black T-shirt and jeans, sitting at a table at the back of the trailer, drinking tea and smoking a handrolled cigarette.