Turquoiselle Read online

  Carver caught the train. With a suitable change, it would drop him close to the Tenterden pickup point, where the other car, the ‘cab’, would be waiting. His own car he would collect from Lynchoak tomorrow for the drive into London.

  The train was full, buzzy with mobiles, laptops and miniaturised fried music, if not conversation. When Carver glanced around, he felt a jab of almost inert shock. The man from the Merc was already installed, only a few feet away among the seatless and standing commuters. He balanced there, clamped by other bodies, yet swaying and sore-thumbian, woolly grey. He did not look at Carver.

  Carver reviewed the best moves to get shot of him before picking up his transport. If evasion was out of the question, Carver thought he would have to wait before heading for the pickup. To let the ‘cabby’ give a vehicle the slip was one thing, but a direct foot-follower might pose a more immediate threat. Carver had not been advised either of this possibility, or of how best to tackle it.

  He made a decision. He would get out at the next halt, secure a real cab, and drive in that over to Tenterden.

  The train was approaching another station. As Carver rose, the coatless jumper man turned and looked straight at him. The flat stodgy face broke in a wide and familiarly friendly grin. Carver ignored it. He eased his way towards the further set of doors. The train had slowed and now stopped. Along with a clump of uninvolved others he stepped off on to the platform.

  Carver paused a moment then, watching as the train absorbed its new dose of passenging customers. The man was just visible, no longer smiling, only blank, and as the train resealed itself he and it glided away, a collective piece of characterised scenery removed from the stage.

  The ‘cab’ dropped him without argument just at the edge of the village, by the church. He and the driver had exchanged the normal bare minimum of words. A few of them centring on the driver’s discontent. His engine had started acting up. Carver did not mention either the Mercedes or the man’s arrival on the train; he could save these events for Latham tomorrow. Nothing had followed them now.

  Walking up through the village, there were anyway still plenty of people about, lights on everywhere, (even the church had been lit for some service, or organ practice), and The Bell was blazing. Carver could see Ted through the window, dancing what seemed to be a gig. What had that other business been, that take of Johnston’s on Ted’s seeing ‘fairies’. Johnston had surely misunderstood, though he had been correct about the figure in the wood, the man with the black blob for a head.

  In the lane the streetlamp nearest the village was on, but farther up darkness, technically unimpeded, reassembled. The boughs were bare enough even so at last that they left wide holes through to the sky, clear and starry, and with a new moon already high.

  Carver waited briefly near the house, looking over at it, noting too the way the woods were, and the tree-fringed fields behind him.

  How cold everything appeared, colder than any actual coldness of atmosphere, a night-scene painted with ink-stained ice and shut behind a frozen pane of glass.

  Carver thought after all he would send a short memo to Latham via the phone in the ‘playroom’. He should maybe mention the man in the woods too. Whoever had put the action on, there had been a lot of it.

  What would happen next, tonight?

  Carver knew he must sleep tonight. It was an early start tomorrow. The train to Lynchoak and then the drive up to London. Perhaps therefore eat, then take a break of five hours, that would be enough. Then woods-watch sentry duty again. He unlocked the house doors, aware all the while of the night pressing through its ice-glass at his back. He glanced out from the inner doorway, as usual. The sheer silence had a kind of sound. Sara, his mother, had been sometimes hysterically afraid of the dark.

  Downstairs the phone, the landline, had again begun to ring. This had happened seven times now since eight o’clock. Each time too the mechanical voice offered to receive a message, and each time no message was given.(But the phone did play up. All the phones did.)

  Reluctantly he had gone to see who, or what, made the calls. There was no number. A glitch then. Or cold calling, maybe. They, human or robot, could be persistent. He thought he would unplug the phone when he went up to sleep, and when keeping watch.

  He had eaten steak, burnt as he preferred it, and tomatoes bought from the farm shop. He made more coffee. From time to time he switched channels on the TV above the kitchen breakfast bar, (reception was poor), but there was no report that seemed to have anything to do with Dusa, or her death. Perhaps by now he should reckon there would not be.

  The phone rang again as he closed the dishwasher door.

  He went out, and noted a number which, on this occasion, revealed itself. It was Maggie’s landline.

  With a sort of inevitable extra unwillingness, Carver put the phone to his ear.

  He did not need to speak. The female voice was already screaming.

  “Car – I have to come home! I have to! Oh God, Car – please – are you there? Is it you?”

  “Yes, Donna, of course it is.”

  “Car – please help me, Car – please – I have to get home–”

  “Try to keep calm. What is the matter? I thought you wanted to stay on?”

  “She’s keeping me here–” shrilled Donna. She seemed frightened, nearly demented. When her voice dropped, as next it did, it was breathless and shaky. “I’ve only got a moment – she went out – to get some wine, she said – I can’t use my phone, Car – she’s stopped me recharging it – so it doesn’t work – and her two – she’s hidden them – she’s keeping me prisoner, Car – Car you have to believe me – I’ve only got a minute – seconds – Car help me – get me out–”

  “Do you mean Maggie?” he asked slowly, quietly and distinctly .

  “Yes – yes – Maggie – who else? Maggie. She’s been drugging me or something – I kept falling asleep – she kept saying I had to rest, I was all in – I don’t know what she gave me – it may harm the baby–”

  Ah, the baby again. Carver said, “Donna, are you really saying your mother has gone crazy and has–”

  “I don’t know if she’s gone crazy, Car. I don’t know, Car. She’s always been – well, odd, sometimes... Carver – I can’t leave this fucking house –” The last sentence came over in a thin savage wail. “She locks me in if she goes out. Takes the keys. Car – please – you have to come–”

  He thought, with a horrible lack of startlement, let alone compassion, or any sense of personal sadness, She’s gone crazy herself. She’s beyond reason. It was as if a wall of granite, miles thick, miles high, separated them. It was as if she were an actress, acting all this very badly in a lousy TV drama he must now switch off. He wanted, he found, to switch it off quickly. And he wanted to stay behind the granite wall.

  “Donna,” he said, “I can’t come over tonight.” She said nothing. “I have stuff I have to see to, can’t get out of it. I’ll come tomorrow evening, after I get back from London.” Lynchoak, he thought, was near enough to Beechurst. It would be simple. If he had to, he could bring this mad woman home then. But not now. Not tonight. He must keep tonight – between them.

  He was very tired, that was it. He would not be safe driving all that extra distance, after all the driving already today, and only one hour’s sleep caught up on the previous night. He would be a fool to try to drive. God knew what was wrong at Maggie’s. Nothing, probably. Donna was drunk. Or something in the pregnancy – if there was one – had upset the chemicals in her brain. Which chemicals anyhow never entirely kept steady, going on her general demeanour over recent years.

  “Just try to keep calm,” he repeated to her new silence. “Take things slowly. Maggie isn’t going to hurt you. We’ll sort it all out tomorrow.”

  Then she breathlessly whispered, and he grasped she had not listened, had not heard his denial of her, his decision of not yet going over, rescue deferred. “She’s back. She’s back. Her car’s there. I’ll – Oh Christ
–” and the phone, presumably put down, went dead.

  Carver stood in the hall, listening himself again to the other silence of the darkness, which was not like Donna’s silence at all.

  Could something so irrational be going on? Maggie of the Chevrolet off her head – but why – for what reason? Maggie was fairly grounded, sufficiently sane. It was Donna who might not be.

  Donna who had alleged Carver had attacked her. Donna begging him – the attacker – Please Car – please, Car – to save her from a blonde dragon with such nicely moisturised scales and elegantly manicured talons, and an independent bank balance donated by several approving and satisfied male lovers who had never found fault.

  Carver left the phone active, he would not unplug it yet. That would be his single concession to Donna’s outcry. She could have a further twenty minutes, before he grabbed his four or five hours of sleep. Twenty minutes to evade her wardress with the drugged wine, and call him again.

  Upstairs, as the computer in the ‘playroom’ shuffled its files for him, he thought Donna herself had doubtless forgotten to recharge her mobile phone, or lost it – she had lost two in the past six months, leaving one in a pub in Beechurst, she said, somehow dropping the other during a ramble through a park somewhere. Had she always been this feckless, this ‘dotty’? Not in the beginning. No.

  The file flicked open its screen pages.

  He read, as he had done already several times, the introductory paragraphs. The Third Scar purported to be a script in the making, sponsored by a movie outfit that required some private funding. It had been dressed up, Carver thought, rather like a modern mystery for a nouveau Sherlock Holmes, with the implicated supernatural undertow inherent in, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Sussex Vampire. A curse was threatened with the manifestation of a Third Scar. But the scar had three rival meanings: 1) A mark on the left arm or hand, of some unspecified sort, 2) A scar (or scaur) being the steep craggy outcrop of a cliff or mountain. The third meaning was stranger. 3) Postulated the use of Scar as a family name, the final descendants to bear it, three in number; the third and last being the child of the other two.

  The plot involved, inevitably, crimes and secrets, not least the apparent curse that brought potential death no less thoroughly than the danger of a phantom hound, or a predilection of some thirsty foreign female vampire.

  The phone rang again.

  Despite himself Carver tensed. He got up, went to the door and along to the head of the stairs. There he stayed. The mechanical voice broke in, offering the caller its message option.

  What would Donna say now?

  A night-cold, night-silent rage pulsed through Carver, gushing upward from his feet – and perished as another voice than Donna’s entered the house.

  It was male. Seeming young. Diction exact. Not wasting a word. For it only offered one. “Silvia” said the voice. Nothing else. Message given and ended.

  Carver sprang down the stair. The phone showed only that the number was withheld.

  He had already texted Latham, by the agreed channel, to register the tail to Tunbridge and on the train. And the visitor in the woods. There had been no response, nor had Carver expected one. Like the Donna problem, that was for tomorrow.

  But this. What to do with this?

  He checked the games key Icon again. The signal had begun to blip. But it was the same clue, the verdict of the judge which still indicated the initials S.D. The Alert Level however had gone down to Blue – today’s Lucky Stone was now Aquamarine.

  The computer seemed jumpy, too. It froze, came back... He shut off the Scar file, and unplugged the machine. Downstairs he did the same with the landline. Later he would expunge all the house lights again, aside from that of the glassed-in porch. For now he left them on. It was later than he had planned. Almost ten o’clock. He could not, now, sleep as long as intended.

  He would not bother with the news. Opening the kitchen’s back door, Carver stepped out on to the patio, among the beaming outdoor lamps. He looked about and down the garden, the ornamental (mental) benches, the lawn, the bushes and established trees, the pear that sometimes fruited a harvest with the scent of honey and the taste of rotten wood; it had done nothing this year.

  Leaving the house shut and lit up, Carver moved down the garden. Seen from outside, the uplighter glare from the village still bloomed against the clear indigo glass of the sky. The white slender moon was westering, but bright. Nothing suspicious was about. He could hear far-off traffic.

  He walked towards the shed.

  The blue-green luminescence inside the shed had either not been there, or was unnoticeable in the beginning, Carver thought. And when at first it began to show, he had dismissed it as his own misperception, at least for a short while. It was quite pertinently like the glow – the afterglow of thieving — that had lingered for him on those things he stole in his childhood and teens; an optical illusion no less profound and affirming for being recognised and labelled. But now, little by very little, as the amount of small scattered objects he presently conducted home, and so into the shed, grew in number and sequent density, so the glow had increased. Less than a bloom, it magnified to a sheen. And after this, an actual illumination. Everything he took currently, of course, came from the Mantik building in Whitehall, and in itself was unvaluable. Pristine unused discs and cartridges, batteries, unink pens, tiny and now nearly redundant notepads, grips, clips, tags, tabs...the very last item to date had been the memory card for a make of camera with which Carver himself had never been issued. That theft he had placed inside the shed on the morning after Donna enacted her initial five-star mad-scene, the morning before Carver met Silvia weeping mercury tears in the corridor, and she had said Go to hell, and then I must talk to someone.

  None of the thieved articles, as they never had been, were of any lasting use, and normally of no use to him. If they could have been, he never used them. Practical use was not their worth or significance.

  As he unlocked the central door of the shed, something flew suddenly up from a tree beyond the back wall. After dark that was uncommon. But then again, the light of the shed might have deceived the bird, as neons and streetlamps might elsewhere.

  Carver shut and relocked the shed door from inside. He glanced from the night-blind four back windows to the front seven.

  How alien, he thought, his house looked from here, a retro smartish ‘80’s, ‘90’s-ish erection, with certain, now-dated kinks of structure. Its stark lights made it a target.

  Carver turned to look around him.

  The effect of snow-heaps, that had always struck him about the things stored in the cupboards of the chain of flats when he was a boy, lessened here, on closer inspection. There was more room to lay them out, these trophies. More space for individual or group identity.

  The glow rising from them – blue-green like the two Lower Alert colours duly mixed, Aquamarine and Emerald – what caused it? He had never noticed such an effect anywhere in the tarpaulined, scaffolded building in Trench Street, let alone the supply stores – the ‘stationery cupboards’. Carver though did not believe any longer his imagination was to blame. His imagination did not work in that way at all. It was no doubt his imagination that sometimes made the glow seem a little less.

  Without prelude, a bolt of crucial tiredness struck him a soggy blow. He did not frequently experience such draining energy-slumps. He would have to, he concluded, go back at once and sleep, even though, now, less than three hours could be scrounged before he should resume his watch on the woods, assuming he meant to keep it.

  He ran his hand swiftly, less a regulation plain caress than an obligatory contact, over a row of the stolen things. Enough.

  He moved instantly back towards the central door of the three, the one that could open and close. And halted. Behind him – what? – to the rear side of the shed only the four windows, facing the garden wall and the woods. And one of these windows as his periphery vision had told him – Carver turned.


  Outside the window, inside the wall, something stood, upright and solid and very close.

  It was black, viscous rubbery black, and the head was composed of the same material, having no features: a sculpted blob. But then – as if the turquoise gleam in the shed had flared – Carver saw after all one feature. Eyes. Black and shiny, in-and-unhuman. Splitting the mask of darkness. A pair of eyes in a faceless face, looking, looking, looking into his own.

  Carver was not amazed. As he would not have been amazed if nothing had happened. He had tempted them in the lane, walking back, dawdling under the isolated and mostly unlighted lamps; now by walking out here, the house lit like a beacon behind him.

  He went directly to the door he had not fully locked, and opened it quickly and jumped straight down on to the concrete apron, turning as he did so to the figure, where it pressed close to the shed.

  And something now really did happen. Something changed. The sky – was very bright – somewhere, far off, a sound – Carver was no longer there. Nothing was.

  Eight

  Just before he was meant to start at the secondary school at Sucks, (as Andy called it), Sara and he had to move again.

  The new place was another flat, a partial clone of the previous several they had inhabited since escaping his father. Found for them, and with Sara getting assistance with the rent, (and to bolster that, working her endless hours cleaning), they were still inside the zone they had occupied, by then, for two years. And Andy was still enlisted, at first, and if seldom in situ, at the primary school in Potters Road.

  In the future he would wonder if Sara had ever, during that time, been informed of, or threatened about, his truanting.

  If so she never relayed the experience. She might, worn out and edgy as she was, even have forgotten it. He himself had been informed, threatened, and bawled out on the matter, which meant nothing to him. It was no longer legal in schools to beat kids up over their misdemeanours. Accordingly he did not care.