Dead Silent (44 page)

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. I felt powerless, Laura limp in my arms.

Claude moved further away, out of the shadow of the stone shelter now and heading along the river bank.

‘Claude, stay there,’ Joe said again.

‘Leave him!’ I shouted. ‘Save Laura. He’s not important.’

Joe faltered, wanting to go after Claude, but then he looked at Laura and he scrambled over to me. He pushed Laura onto her front and began to push hard on her back. Water spewed out of her mouth.

Claude walked away quickly. Joe threw Laura onto her back, and then pinched her nostrils as he tilted her head backwards before blowing two quick breaths into her. The kiss of life.

Laura’s feet looked wrinkled and blue from the water and I held her hand as Claude scuttled along the shingle by the river, heading for his car. Laura remained lifeless, but I was jolted by Joe as he put his hand onto her chest and pressed hard, like rapid pumps. Then he went to blow more air into
her mouth…but it felt more pointless with each passing second. We didn’t know how long Laura had been submerged. I thought of Bobby again, blissfully happy at school, not knowing what was happening to his mother, or how his life would change when he came home. And what about me? What would I do now? I had lost too many people close to me. I didn’t think I could take another loss.

I raised my eyes to the sky, let the raindrops hit me like pinpricks, the clouds a blanket of grey as I looked up.

I heard Claude’s Mini turn over and then grumble into life. Joe shot me a glance as it was put into gear and reversed back onto the road.

Then I heard something else. A cough, like a rattle in Laura’s chest. Joe heard it too, because he looked at me, his eyes wide, and then bent down again, renewing his efforts.

There was another cough, and I saw Laura’s chest take a big heave as she sucked on the air.

I put my hands to my face and felt my tears soak my fingers.

I was looking out of the bedroom window, at the dark hills that surrounded our house. I had my face pressed close to the glass, trying to see past the reflections caused by the bedroom light. It was always on now. Laura couldn’t sleep in the dark, not without bringing nightmares, and I wanted her to take as long as she needed to get things right again.

It had been over a month since I had pulled her out of the hole dug by Claude Gilbert, but I still did this every night, looked out of the window, checking for Claude Gilbert, wondering whether his thirst for revenge would bring a visit. He was out there somewhere, I knew that.

And it wasn’t just Claude, because I had made some powerful enemies. Roach had been suspended from his duties as the police waited for DNA tests to be done in Claude’s Belgravia pad. If any came back that matched Claude’s DNA, then he was looking at a spell in prison for assisting an offender. But people like Roach made friends in the force, and those who didn’t know the full story thought I had wrecked a good man’s career. My car was stopped for a routine check whenever I went out, and so I had started to use Laura’s more and more. I worried about how it would be for Laura though when she went back. She had helped to bring down one of her own.

Alan Lake’s status took a dive as well, no longer the poster boy of the northern art set. He had once been a dangerous man. I wondered whether he might pay me a visit, now that he was looking at another spell in prison for perverting the course of justice—his one-time fall guy happy to come forward to clear his own name—but my guess was that he would just try and sit it out, perhaps hoping that his notoriety might improve his sales once things calmed down.

The press had gone wild though, even with Claude gone. Harry English played his part, adapting my article and syndicating it worldwide, but none of that seemed to matter any more. I hadn’t written a word since Claude had vanished.

It had seemed more like relief at first, that I could spend some precious time with Laura, but then I realised something else: I didn’t want to work. As Laura rested, and I insisted that she did a lot of that, I tried to start my novel again, but whenever I was in front of a keyboard, my fingers froze, unable to make the words jump onto the screen. My last story had ended with Laura spluttering for air on a wet Lancashire river bank as I sobbed into her neck, my northern reserve gone, no longer the tough guy. The paramedics had taken over. Oxygen. Blankets. A breakneck rush through the countryside to get her to hospital, but that was all a blur. I just remembered Laura’s hand in mine, the twitch in her fingers telling me that she was alive, and so I gripped them hard and kissed them, just grateful for the second chance.

Laura told me to go back to work, to give it time, but I knew I didn’t want to write any more. I had no stomach left for the chase, and I wanted to settle for my life.

Laura, of course, wanted to go back to work, to take the sergeant’s exam, but her bosses were strict about it. Stay away. Get better. They didn’t want her to get delayed shock and bear the cost of her disintegration.

But I knew Laura. There would be no disintegration. She was strong, much tougher than me, and she was going to get better for Bobby, so that the mother he had wasn’t just some empty shell, but was the mother he’d always known. Fun. Loving.

I looked back at Laura. Her dark hair was splayed across the pillow, her arm draped over my side of the bed, where I should be, instead of staring out over pitch-black Lancashire hillsides.

I wanted to whisper that I loved her, but I didn’t. I still held back my feelings, but I had resolved to open up more. Anyway, I wanted Laura to sleep. Someone had to, because I didn’t sleep as much as I used to. Most nights were spent like this, watching Laura sleep, her breathing gentle, her face bathed in the yellow glow of the lightbulb.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small red box. I opened it and looked at the ring, one diamond set in platinum. I did that a lot, just looking at the ring, waiting for the right time to ask, but there never seemed to be one. I had almost lost her, and I didn’t want that to happen again.

I turned back to the window, one hand cupped around my face; all I could see were the dark outlines of night, a whole world beyond my little cottage in the hills.

But I knew that somewhere out there was Claude Gilbert, the man who had killed his wife and lied about it as if it had never really mattered. The man who had run away again to leave Mike Dobson to face the court on his own, charged with murder, his confessions to Joe Kinsella cleansing his conscience but ending his life as he knew it.

More importantly, Claude had tried to kill the woman I loved and, for as long as there was still life in my body, I wanted to know where he was, just so that I could hunt him
down one more time and give him a taste of the hurt he put me through.

I heard Laura move, and as I looked round, I realised that the ring box was still open. Her eyes were open, and I saw that she was looking at the box. I looked down, and then back at Laura. I didn’t know what to say, feeling caught out, worried that I had spoiled a moment, but then she smiled, and I knew then that everything was going to be all right.

Read on for an exclusive extract from Neil White’s new novel, to be published by AVON in 2011.

Rupert Barker nodded to sleep in the semi-darkness, the light coming from the glow of the coal fire, as orange flickers bounced off the Christmas decorations draped over the tree. His favourite armchair did its work, as always, high-backed leather, and he had drifted in and out of a doze for most of the afternoon.

Then he heard a noise.

He sat up quickly and looked around. The newspaper slid from his knee to the floor. He couldn’t hear anything else, apart from the crackle of the fire. Perhaps it had been in his dream. Then he heard it again.

His eyes shot to the window. It sounded like someone was at the fence that ran along the garden at the back of his house, climbing over maybe, the noise like heavy feet kicking against the wooden panels, the fence the only thing that separated him from the darkness of the church yard.

He pulled himself to his feet and groaned as his knees froze for a few seconds, age catching up with him, sixty-six the following month. He shuffled towards the window, but he felt scared, exposed. He was in a room at the back of the house, the curtains open, and he knew that whoever was out there would be able to see in. When he reached the window, he pressed his face against the glass to blot out the glare from the fire and tried to see into the garden. He could see
only shadows and the silhouette of the church tower, a square Norman block with the iron finger of the weather vane creaking in the breeze, a dark outline against the clear sky, the stars emerging as dots in the blanket.

He cupped his hands around his eyes. There wasn’t much to the garden, just a square patch of grass surrounded by plants and trees, a bird-feeder hanging from a branch. A laurel bush in one corner took all the water from the ground, so that the grass was threadbare underneath, and some bamboos he had planted a couple of years earlier swayed in front of the fence. But there was no one there.

He stepped away from the window, told himself that it must have been a cat, or maybe kids playing in the church yard. But then he thought he saw some movement from the side of the laurel bush, something large and fast. He went to the window again. There was something there, and he shouted out when he saw it turn and rush at the glass.

Rupert stepped back, scared, and tumbled over the chair he had been sitting in. He was falling, flailing at the air, the flicker of the hearth turning sideways as he headed to the ground.

He landed heavily, searing pain coming from his wrist, but then he heard the back door open and heavy footsteps came into the house.

Rupert looked up and saw the outline of a man, tall and broad, his clothes dark, black trousers tucked into his boots and with a woollen hat hiding his hair. A hand was outstretched.

‘Are you all right?’ the voice said.

Rupert looked up and then shuffled quickly along the floor, moving away from the intruder until he felt his back hit the wall. ‘Who are you, and why are you in my house?’

‘I’m sorry, Doctor Barker, I didn’t mean to scare you, but I had to come and see you,’ the voice said. He sounded scared,
the words coming out with a tremble. ‘You’re the only one who can help me.’

Rupert felt his stomach turn over.
Doctor Barker.
It was a patient, it had to be, thirty years as a child psychologist giving him a hit-list of the frightened and vulnerable across Lancashire, helping children who showed worrying signs that they were heading the wrong way.

‘I can’t help you,’ Rupert said. ‘I’m retired. Look at me. I’m just an old man now.’

The man stepped closer to Rupert, and his face came within the light of the fire. The flames danced around his features, so that his eyes seemed to glimmer menacingly. Rupert smelled stale beer and cigarettes and sweat. Then Rupert recognised something, just in the way that he tilted his head as he took in what Rupert had said.

‘No, no, it’s you I need,’ the intruder said, his voice breaking. ‘It’s happening again.’

‘What’s happening again?’ Rupert said.

‘The need,’ the intruder said.

‘What need?’

‘Don’t talk like you don’t know, doctor,’ the intruder said, his voice breaking. ‘We talked about it, you taught me how to control it, but I can’t do that any more.’

Rupert closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember where he had seen that stare before. The tilted head, the wide eyes. But the man in front of him looked nearly forty, and so it meant going back too many years.

‘When does it come, this need?’ Rupert said.

‘All the time now,’ the man said. ‘Before, it would come mainly at night, when I was alone, feeling, you know, wound up, but now it’s there when I wake up, like an itch, an urge.’ He paused, and Rupert thought he was trying not to cry. ‘It’s all I think about, Doctor Barker. I want to hurt someone.’

Rupert closed his eyes for a moment.

‘I follow people,’ the man continued.

‘What do you mean?’ Rupert said, his eyes open, alarmed.

‘Just that,’ was the reply. ‘I see someone, and I start to imagine what they would be like naked, and then I think of how they would be if I was hurting them, how scared they would be.’

‘Have you hurt anyone yet?’

The man shook his head.

‘You need help,’ Rupert said quietly. ‘It can’t come from me. I’m too old now, retired, out of touch. But you must get help. Speak to your doctor. Trust them like you trusted me.’

The intruder paused, and then he said, ‘You said you would be there for me, and now I need you, you’re sending me away.’

‘No,’ Rupert said, his voice steady now, trying to keep the intruder calm. ‘I’m telling you where to get help. Speak to your doctor. Please. It’s for the best.’ Rupert sat up. ‘I don’t remember you. What’s your name?’

The intruder shook his head. ‘I thought I mattered. I see people all the time, you see. On the street, in their homes, and I want them, and I know that I will take it. I want to stop myself, but it never ceases. All day. All night. You have to stop it, Doctor Barker.’

Rupert shook his head. ‘No,
you
have to stop it,’ he said. ‘Don’t make it my fault. You have the power now.’

The intruder took a deep breath and put his head back. Rupert closed his eyes and waited for the blow, for his life to be squeezed away, but there was nothing. He opened his eyes slowly, and he saw that he was alone again, just the orange flickers around the walls, the back door swinging open, letting the heat out from the fire.

Laura McGanity looked around the scene in front of her and tried not to smile. She had earned her sergeant stripes, nine months in uniform, working in the community, but now she was back where she wanted to be, on the murder squad. And even though this was a tragedy, someone’s death, she felt that familiar flutter of excitement as she took in the blue and white police tape stretched tight around the trees and the huddle of police in boiler suits holding sticks, ready for the slow crawl through the undergrowth, looking for scraps of evidence. A footprint, a dropped piece of paper, maybe a snag of cloth on the thorns and branches. This was it, the start of the investigation, the human drama yet to unfold.