A Twist of the Knife (21 page)

Rod had never been on the real ghost train, further down towards the end of the pier, because he’d seen people coming off it looking terrified; it scared him too much. Also, it was too expensive for his tiny budget. He could have six goes on these slot machines for the price of one sixpenny ghost train ride.

But the machine he liked the most, on which he spent most of his shilling each week, was the
Guillotine!

He would push his penny coin into the slot, and then watch as a blindfolded Marie Antoinette was dragged to the guillotine, placed face down, and then after some moments a character would pull a lever, the blade would slide down, slice clean through her neck, and her head would drop into a basket. Then the lights would go out again.

Every time he watched, he wondered, was she still conscious after her neck had been severed and, if so, for how long? And what, if anything, did she think about while her head was lying in that basket, in those final moments of her existence?

Years later, as a forty-year-old adult, the attractions on the pier, like its name, had changed. The wooden penny-in-the-slot machines had been moved to a museum underneath the Arches, close to the pier, where they were maintained in working order. You could buy a bag of old penny coins and still activate the machines. He took his own kids to see them, but they weren’t impressed; they were more interested in computer games.

But his own fascination never went away. He was enjoying a successful career as an actuary for a reinsurance group, in which his natural curiosity was able to flourish. His job was to calculate the odds, much like a bookmaker might, of accidents and disasters happening. One role, for instance, was to calculate the odds against rainfall happening in particular regions. In some parts of the south of England, much though the country had a reputation for being wet, he was able to demonstrate that, in fact, there were only ninety-four days a year when it actually rained – he defined it as there being precipitation at some point during the twenty-four hours of the day.

Some of his friends called him a dullard, obsessed with facts and statistics. But he really, genuinely, loved his work. He liked to refute the saying that ‘No man on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.”’

‘I would say that,’ he would announce proudly in the pub and at parties. And it was true. Rod loved his work, he really did. Facts and statistics were his life; these were the things that gave him his bang. He loved to analyse everything, and break it all down to its component elements. He loved to be able to tell people stuff they didn’t know – such as what was the most dangerous form of travel, what your percentage chances were of dying of a particular ailment, or how long you were likely to live if you reached fifty.

It used to infuriate his wife, Angie. ‘God, don’t you ever
feel
anything?’ she would ask him.

‘Feelings are dangerous,’ he would retort, which angered her further. But he wasn’t being frivolous, he genuinely believed that. ‘Life is dangerous, darling,’ he would say, trying to placate her. ‘No one gets out of here alive.’

Once at a dinner party, he had raised the subject of his childhood fascination with the slot machine with the guillotine. A neurosurgeon friend, Paddy Mahony, sitting opposite him had said that he reckoned after being guillotined, people could remain conscious for up to two minutes. Or was it ninety seconds? Rod could not quite remember, although it was pretty relevant now, since one moment he had been texting his mistress, Romy, and the next he had looked up to see all the traffic ahead of him on the fast lane of the M4 had stopped dead.

He was surprised at just how calm he felt as the bonnet of his Audi, bought for its safety points after analysis of crash statistics, slid under the tailgate of the truck. He frowned, thinking that there had been a law passed, surely, that they needed a bar to stop his car doing just what it was now doing – sliding under the tailgate while the occupants are decapitated. Like the guillotine.

Funny
, he thought,
to be lying on a wet road, looking up at exhaust pipes and bumpers and number plates and brake lights
. Not the way he would have chosen to exit this world, but it certainly was interesting to see if Paddy was right. Although, of course, he could not see his wristwatch. That was still in the car attached to the rest of him.

‘Hello,’ he said to a woman who climbed out of one of those little Nissan Micras, a bilious purple colour. ‘Could you tell me the time?’ He mouthed. But no sound came out.

She screamed.

This was not going well. Then she vomited. Fortunately she did not splash him. His sense of smell was acute at that moment. He felt no pain, but smelled diesel and puke. It was normally a smell that instantly made him puke too. But not today. He heard a siren.

Suddenly, he remembered that old nuclear bomb thing of his youth. The
four-minute warning.
The warning you might get in the event of a pending nuclear attack. People being asked what they would do if they had only four minutes left to live.

That threat had sort of faded away and been forgotten.

He remembered another dinner party he’d been at a while ago. Everyone was asked what they would do in their last four minutes. Then someone, he could not remember who, had suggested just one minute. ‘That would really concentrate your mind!’ he had said.

Now, by Rod’s calculation, he would be lucky to have another minute.
Strange
, he thought,
our obsession with the time. Here I am, able to count my future in seconds, and I’m not worrying how my wife and kids are going to cope. All I want to know is the bloody—

During my research for the spooky novels I wrote in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I interviewed a large number of people, from all walks of life, who believed they’d had a paranormal experience of some kind. Some years back, seated next to HRH Princess Anne at a charity dinner – she’s a sparky lady and great fun to talk to – she told me a very convincing story about a friend of hers who had a poltergeist in her home. And the late great comedian, Michael Bentine, made my hairs stand on end with stories about his father who carried out exorcisms.

I talked to mediums, clairvoyants, scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and became good friends with a truly extraordinary character, the late Professor Bob Morris, who had been appointed as the first Chair of Parapsychology in the UK, heading up the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University. What made Bob Morris a fascinating man, to me, was that he was a scientist – a physicist – who had had a paranormal experience early in his life, which had opened his mind to the existence of the paranormal.

I learned from him an astounding statistic: that a survey was taken, in 1922, of scientists in Britain who believed in God. The results came out at 43 per cent. The same survey was repeated in 1988 and, very surprisingly, the results showed exactly the same percentage. But there had been a significant shift: fewer biologists now believed in God, but more mathematicians and physicists proclaimed themselves believers.

I listened to a large number of views and stories of strange experiences, and I talked to leading sceptics as well. For eighteen months, in 1990 and 1991, I hosted a regular Friday night radio phone-in show, taking calls from members of the public who had experienced something uncanny, or inexplicable, ranging from sightings of apparitions or bizarre coincidences to past-life memories or a sense of déjà-vu. In 1993 I was commissioned by the BBC to present a show in Scotland, in which I was given carte blanche to travel around interviewing people who claimed to have had paranormal encounters.

Many of the stories I was told were chilling, some were distressing, but the majority, when I examined them further, turned out to have credible rational explanations. I learned that both the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church employ diocesan exorcists – although they are given the less dramatic titles of Ministers of Deliverance
.

The role of a Minister of Deliverance is to investigate any apparent paranormal occurrence brought to the attention of the local vicar or priest, and for which they had no explanation. But of major importance in this role is to rule out the paranormal wherever possible and produce rational explanations. As an example, there was a papal edict in the Catholic Church, issued over two centuries ago, warning priests not to confuse demonic possession with the tricks played on people’s minds as a result of grief, and stating that no exorcisms should be carried out on anyone within two years of them suffering a bereavement.

I became good friends with one Minister, a senior clergyman with considerable experience of people who claimed to have had paranormal encounters, and who is himself an extremely caring and rational man. I will call him Francis Wells. He is a modern-thinking clergyman, with a distinguished university background in psychology, who has deep faith but once confided in me that he had problems with the conventional biblical image of God. His primary objective in all cases brought to him was to try to find a rational explanation. For instance, he was regularly called in to investigate people deeply disturbed by occurrences following Ouija board sessions. His view of such sessions, after over thirty years of investigations, is that the Ouija does not open up channels to the spirit world, but rather opens up the Pandora’s box of demons that each and every one of us carries in our psyche.

I asked him if he had ever, in his career to date, experienced something that could not be explained in a rational way. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Twice.’

This is the first story. At his request, to respect their privacy, I have changed the names of the people involved.

In 1987 a young married couple, Geoff and Kerry Wilson, had recently had a baby son, Darren. Geoff worked as a plumber and Kerry was on maternity leave from her local council job in Croydon. They had been living in a rented basement flat in Croydon and had saved enough money to put down the deposit on a small house on a brand new housing development in the area, built by a national brand-name company.

They moved in when Darren was three months old, and were blissfully happy to finally be in a home of their own. Kerry was a keen gardener, and was happy to be home alone with Darren, who was a delightful, happy and calm baby, while Geoff was away much of the day, and often late into the evenings, working his butt off now that he was the sole breadwinner of the family.

Four weeks after they had moved in, early on a late November morning, Kerry woke suddenly, feeling concerned that something was wrong. She looked at the clock and saw it was 7 a.m. The baby monitor was silent and she realized she had missed Darren’s normal 3 a.m. feed. She went through into his room and was confronted with every mother’s worst nightmare.

Darren lay face down against the mattress. She felt total panic as she gently turned his motionless body over. He was cold, and solid as wood, and his face was a deep mottled blue. The paramedics, who arrived twelve minutes later, were, tragically, unable to resuscitate him.

To add to the hell of the following hours, they then had to deal with the police interrogations. Whilst they were allocated a Family Liaison Officer, a kindly, sympathetic woman PC, they were also subjected to the house being treated as a crime scene, and grilled by two CID officers. They faced the further agony of knowing little Darren was to be subjected to a post-mortem in the mortuary. Police interviews, as well as interviews with a forensic psychologist and a forensic psychiatrist, continued for several days, making them feel – through their intense grief – like criminals and distracting them from the funeral arrangements.

Kerry, who had stopped drinking from the moment she had learned she was pregnant, took to the bottle; Geoff was arrested for drink-driving and faced losing his licence – and his livelihood. He was dependent on his van for his work.

Eventually, they were left alone. Darren’s body was released by the Coroner, and he was buried in a tiny white coffin. In the days following the funeral, Kerry and Geoff, occasionally joined by their parents, sat in desolation in the front room of the new house that had, just a short while ago, seemed so full of promise. The little garden at the rear, where Kerry had dug beds on both sides of the lawn with an ambitious planting plan, looked increasingly sad, with the grass growing unkempt and weeds sprouting.

To make them feel even more isolated from normal life, most of the units on the estate were still, as yet, unsold, so they had few neighbours to talk to and share their grief with. Kerry’s best friend, Roz, put on a brave face but was totally freaked out, and kept giving excuses why she could not come over. There was just one other young couple, directly across the close – Rob and Mandy King. Mandy was seven months pregnant, and she and her husband felt a kinship with Geoff and Kerry. Kerry’s parents were as supportive as they could be; but they were almost equally grief-stricken and, after a while, they began to avoid contact as much as they could because they just distressed Geoff and Kerry more. Their neighbours, Rob and Mandy, became almost their sole lifeline.

Geoff ignored the brown envelopes of bills that fell daily onto the doormat. He really didn’t care about anything. He could function just sufficiently to make the occasional three-mile round trip to the supermarket, with his wife driving, to buy basic food and cheap wine. They were each drinking a bottle a day.

The doctor prescribed tranquilizers for Kerry, and also sleeping pills after her seventh consecutive night of lying awake crying. Geoff tried to cope without either. He spent his days sitting in front of the television, watching anything that was on, absorbing nothing. He used to like reading, but the pages of any book he picked up contained a meaningless jumble of words.

At 2 a.m. on a Wednesday night, three weeks on, Geoff woke, badly needing to pee and his head throbbing from the booze. He climbed out of bed without turning the light on – not wanting to wake Kerry – pulled on his dressing gown, found his slippers, and shuffled out onto the dark landing, heading to the toilet.