The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (19 page)

‘The man who cut your face?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well why don’t you tell me? Or is that not allowed either?’

She stared back at me, considering it.

‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll tell you about the Devil.’

The story came out in fits and starts, and her self-control began to falter even more as it did. The fear she felt just thinking about the man who had held her captive was obvious.

For the first couple of days after her abduction, as far as it was possible for her to keep track of time, she had been left alone in her cell. When she did sleep, she would wake to find
that food had been delivered: simple provisions of bread, fruit and ham on a tray, along with cups of water.

‘Always when I was asleep. So he must have been watching me.’

Probably, I thought. Why go to the trouble of abducting someone and keeping them in such circumstances if you weren’t going to watch them?

It was on the second or third day that she received a visitor.

‘I could smell him before I saw him.’ She looked disgusted now, as though she still could. ‘There was just this foul stench in the air, as though something had gone bad nearby. Something dead and rotting. And I could hear him too, moving around in the corridor. He took his time. I think he was playing with me.’

Despite the fear she’d felt, she had called out. There had been no reply. A little way back from the door, she’d peered through the hatch, sensing him nearby but still out of sight.

‘Then suddenly the smell got worse, and he stepped into view. His eyes wide, right up against the hatch. I jumped back. Screamed.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He laughed,’ she said simply. ‘And then he told me that I was dead. That I’d been in an accident, and that I was in Hell for my sins. And he told me that he was the Devil.’

For that first visit, there had apparently been little else, and even regarding subsequent visits, she couldn’t tell me much. She had seen him clearly once, she said – looked right at him – but it had made him angry.

‘The Devil doesn’t like people looking at him,’ she said.

So she could only describe him a little. Every time she saw him, he always wore the same thing: a black suit with a white shirt underneath. From the single time she had looked at his face, she knew that he was old – perhaps in his sixties or seventies – and bald, but there was little to distinguish him beyond that.

‘He didn’t cut me at first,’ she said.

‘How long was it before it started?’

‘A month, perhaps.’

She could only guess; there had been no clear difference between day and night in her cell. But after a period of time during which the man she called the Devil had repeatedly explained the situation to her – that she was dead and in Hell; that she would have to repent for her sins – the torture had begun. Other people were present to restrain her, she claimed, but it was the Devil who did the cutting itself. With a light behind him that cast him in silhouette, he worked slowly and precisely, often standing back to contemplate her illuminated face, as if it were a painting he was working on. He appeared to have a plan for the patterns he was carving into her skin. Each time, when he was finished, the wounds were tended to and cleaned with antiseptic.

‘He always used his fingernails,’ Charlie said, gesturing to the scars covering her face. ‘He never needed a knife.’

Strangely, she seemed calmer now.

‘And why did he do it?’ I said. ‘You said he seemed to have a plan. You had to repent for your sins?’

‘Yes. The wearing of sins.’ She looked at me. ‘Are you a sinner, Mark?’

‘Probably.’

‘Everybody is. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s hard for people to admit. That’s the point. In life, we hide our sins and imagine that nobody sees them, nobody knows. We even hide them from ourselves. We think the past is the past, but it isn’t. They’re always there, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘And sins have to be made manifest in order for us to be cleansed. It is a form of acknowledgement. Do you see? We must admit our sins and crimes before we can repent. We must wear them.’ She gestured at her face. ‘One by one.’

I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose for a second, trying to gather my thoughts. This was an interview; this was what I did. But it was hard to keep track and hold
it all in my head and figure out where to go next with the discussion.

‘And what sins are you wearing, Charlie?’

‘I want to go home.’

I opened my eyes. She was still looking at me, but the expression on her face had become desperately sad.

‘I know.’

‘Why won’t Mercer come? I want to go home.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But Paul’s moved on. Like I said, he’s living with someone else now, and she’s pregnant. We’ll have to work something out.’

‘Not
that
home.’

Her voice was smaller than ever; she knew deep down that she was admitting something terrible. Even so, it took me a heavy moment to process what she was telling me.

‘You want to go back there?’

‘I was
promised
. After I told this man Mercer – that was supposed to be the end of it.’ She looked up and raised her voice now, as though she wanted the sky to hear. ‘Mysterious ways, right? Well I’ve done everything I can, and now I want to go home. I deserve to go home! I’ve earned it, haven’t I?’

‘Charlie—’

‘I deserve it, don’t I?’ She looked back down at me, her eyes almost imploring. ‘After everything?’

I didn’t know what to say. After everything that had been done to her ... she wanted to go back there. And for some reason, she wouldn’t be allowed to until she’d told Mercer whatever it was she was supposed to. In her head, at least. How would whoever had kept her even
know?

‘You don’t deserve what’s happened to you,’ I said.

‘You have no idea.’

The thought I’d had yesterday came back to me again.

‘Where
were
you, Charlie, on that last day? Before the accident? You left for work in the morning, but you didn’t go.’

She just looked at me.

The frustration finally rose up. I had so many questions I
wanted answers to. Where had she been that day? Why had she been told to ask for Mercer, a man she didn’t know? And as my gaze moved over the elaborate scarring on her face, I wanted to know why she had been targeted in the first place. In her own words, the cuts had been done to a design. It was a mask of admission; of repentance.

‘What sins are you wearing?’ I asked again.

And again Charlie stared back at me for a long time, still saying nothing. Then she turned her head away from me.

‘That,’ she said softly, ‘is what I need to tell Mercer.’

Eileen

Sit with me

‘It’s for the best.’

‘Yes,’ John said. ‘I know.’

Eileen glanced sideways at him as she drove them home. She had never seen her husband look so tired and beaten down. He was half collapsed in the passenger seat now, staring out of the side window without taking in the scenery moving past them. His head lolled slightly, guided by the motion of the vehicle. Even the bright sunshine on his skin somehow made him seem less alive than he should be.

It scared her, what effect today’s events might have on him. He was so difficult to read sometimes, and the expression on his face right now was utterly blank. It was easy to imagine he was thinking nothing at all, but she knew that wouldn’t be true. There was too much clockwork in that head of his, and it wasn’t good for him when it all began clicking and turning. He couldn’t cope with the noise it created. She could sense that visiting the department today had started movement off in there. Despite how calm and still he was, Eileen was frightened that the turning in there wouldn’t stop, and of what the consequences would be for him. For both of them.

That was why she’d had to leap in. Cut the meeting dead. For his sake, and for hers.

‘We should never have gone,’ she said.

‘It was important to find out what they wanted.’

‘Yes, well. Now we have. But they should have known better, after everything that happened. After they forced you out. It was unfair of them even to ask.’

John sighed. She glanced at him again, but he was still staring out of the window.

‘They had no choice.’

‘They had
every
choice,’ she said. ‘It’s not your job to be interviewing witnesses and suspects for them. Not any more.’

‘I meant no choice in forcing me out.’

Eileen couldn’t think of what to say to that. He was right, of course, and perhaps it had been disingenuous of her to bring it up in the first place: trying to make the department into an enemy so that she could pair up with John against it. The truth was that she’d wanted him out of the police long before it happened, and if they hadn’t pushed him, she would have done her damnedest to force him out herself.

‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s for the best.’

Her turn to sigh then. His turn not to reply.

But it
was
for the best – and not simply because of the effect getting involved might have on his mental health. Her heart had broken for him back at the department. For a moment he had seemed to come alive again. When he was advising the team on what they needed to do, she had caught a flash of the man she’d fallen in love with all those years ago: smart and capable, and more animated than she’d seen him in a long time.

And that couldn’t last.

Many years ago, Eileen had watched her mother die: a slow, agonising descent into dementia that had left her incoherent by the end. The gradually diminishing figure in the hospital bed she visited might have had her mother’s shape and form, but it had none of the content; the woman she had loved so deeply had become all but absent.
It’s for the best
, her father had told her. Not that the illness wasn’t a bitter and cruel one, he explained, but at least she wasn’t aware of it. It was true that
there had been a sense of serenity to her, and that the fractured fantasy world she inhabited seemed to bring her some degree of peace. If she laughed often at things that weren’t there, what did it matter, so long as she laughed?
It’s worse for us
, her father had told Eileen and her sister.

Maybe that was true for the most part, but there were also moments when her mother had been more lucid: when it was clear she recognised her husband and daughters. Eileen would hold her hand, recognising the fear and confusion in the old woman’s eyes, and her mother would squeeze back, and Eileen would know that she
knew
. Just for a few minutes, or even seconds, she was being given a fleeting glimpse of the real world. When that happened, she understood what she was losing, what she had already lost, and how much it all meant to her. In those moments, Eileen didn’t think it was worse for the rest of the family at all.

Watching John in the department had reminded her of that. He had lived for police work, and it had been taken from him, and she knew he had spent the past year and a half mourning that loss in his own way, acclimatising himself to it. Today had provided a reminder of what he had lost – given him a glimpse of his old life again – and she had watched him seize it as strongly but fleetingly as her mother had gripped her hand all those years ago.

And it wouldn’t last. Even if he had stayed on and talked to Charlie Matheson for them, he wouldn’t be
involved
– not in the way he wanted or needed to be. The advice he’d tried to give them wasn’t advice they needed. And what had Mark told her yesterday when she’d asked how it was in the department these days?

We’ve moved buildings. Apart from that, it’s the same as always
.

They didn’t need him. When they were finished with him, they would discard him again. Like her mother, he would return to his own world, confused and distressed by the experience, and there’d only be her there to hold his hand then.

When they arrived home, John made his way up to the attic. Eileen followed him to the base of the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ she said.

‘Just to do some work.’

She watched him climb the stairs, slowly and awkwardly.
How old he looks
, she thought again – but then perhaps she did too. They were both now years older than her mother had been when she began wasting away. Against all odds, they were still together, and Eileen had a sudden realisation that time was drawing to a close for both of them. They were not going to grow old together; they already had. Before too long, John wouldn’t be climbing these stairs any more, or else he would be climbing them without her to watch him and worry.

‘Don’t you think you should rest?’ she called up.

‘I’m fine. I won’t be long.’

Sit with me
, she wanted to blurt out.
Let’s just sit together for a while
. But of course she would never do that. He was too drawn to his research; too lost in it, for all the comfort it brought him. How would it feel to sit with him, knowing he would rather be elsewhere?

Even worse, what if he said no?

He closed the attic door gently. Eileen stood at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, waiting for the sound of his typing to begin; the sound that reassured her he was at least not staring into space, not turning too much over in his head. But it didn’t come. And finally, when the silence became unbearable, Eileen made her way back downstairs.

Groves

A man without a face

‘So,’ Sean said, ‘do we think this might be our guy?’

Groves was sitting at his desk in their shared office, with Sean leaning over his shoulder, so close that he could smell the coffee on his partner’s breath, and the tang of his aftershave. He was trying to ignore both.

‘Yes. I think it might be.’

Groves clicked to replay the snippet of footage he’d extracted from the stack sent over from the CCTV suite. It showed one small event during the last evening of Edward Leland’s life. The camera the clip had been taken from was on a post just past the end of a short row of shops, the nearest of which was obscured onscreen by a long stone canopy. The pavement was only partially illuminated. The newsagent’s, bookie’s and post office had been closed at that time, with only a takeaway and an off-licence open, spreading their light out in skewed rectangles over the tarmac.