Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) (4 page)

Puzzled by her choice of words, he wondered if she perhaps had some kind of disease. She looked thin enough that something might be eating her away from the inside. The suit jacket hung loosely on her frame and her legs beneath the hem of the skirt were so thin that he was afraid they might buckle if she stepped away from the wall and put all her weight on them.

Cancer? Was that it? It might explain her demeanour, the way that she didn’t seem to care, and that faintly hostile coldness behind her eyes.

“It’s nice to see a new face around these parts,” she said, as if continuing some conversation the precise details of which he’d missed. “You get sick of these mardy bastards around here.” She twitched her head, indicating everyone else in the pub. “Sometimes I want to smash their faces in just to see what they’d do.” She smiled at last, but it was a bitter expression that didn’t quite suit her long face. “Do you know what I mean, or am I scaring you?” The question was a challenge. He could feel it. She was testing him, feeling him out.

“No, I knew exactly what you mean. Sometimes I get like that myself.” But it ran deeper than that. He knew it even if he was unable to vocalise his feelings. This place – it lent force to the everyday negative emotions people had, and it amplified them. He didn’t know how, or why, it happened, but here in the Grove bad thoughts took on substance, became even worse deeds-in-waiting. All it took was a trigger, and sometimes the finger pulling that trigger was the last one you expected.

There was a pause, then, and she looked around the room, her face resuming its previous set expression of mild distaste. Marc tried to judge the true shape of her body underneath her clothing, and he was left with the off-putting impression of skin and bones. Usually he was attracted to women with a fuller figure, and he failed to understand what it was about Abby that he found so appealing. Was he simply drunk and horny and had seen an opportunity here, or did the attraction run deeper than merely the possibility of a quick fix of empty sex? He couldn’t be sure; his thoughts refused to settle and his emotions were unfamiliar.

“How about another?” he said, draining his bottle. He’d abandoned the whisky in favour of sticking to beer. He was already too drunk to repair the damage, but at least he could prevent drinking himself insensate.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” Gratitude – this was new. He felt like he might be getting somewhere.

His journey to the bar this time was fraught with anxiety. Although the pub was quieter now, and he knew that he wouldn’t collide with anyone, he felt too exposed. His drunkenness was a badge of dishonour; it was difficult putting one foot in front of the other without stumbling.

He made it to the bar and clung on for dear life. He looked down at his hands. The knuckles were red.

“Yer in there, mate.”

He turned to his left and examined the owner of the voice. It was a short, fat man dressed in jeans and a ripped black T-shirt that was pulled out of shape and faded from being washed too many times. “Sorry?”

“The lass,” said the man. “She’ll go with anyone, her. Yer in for a shag the neet.”

Marc blinked. His eyes felt gritty. The man’s smile was wide and vaguely threatening, as if he were pushing for a fight.

“We’re just chatting,” he said, wondering why he felt the need to justify his actions to this stranger. “You know, a bit of harmless fun.”

The man shook his head. The muscles in his neck bulged and there was a blue tattoo of a swallow on his throat.

How witty
, thought Marc, resisting the urge to grin.

The man turned slightly, so that he was facing Marc head-on. He was broad; his biceps were large and hard. More tattoos snaked down his wide forearms. “Don’t worry, mate. I’m only havin’ you on. Bit of a laugh, like. But, seriously, if you play it right she’ll take you home with her the neet. Game on, like.”

The barmaid – a different one this time; they must have changed shifts – came over and Marc ordered another bottle of Becks and a white wine and soda. He glanced back at Abby. She was slumped against the wall, her eyes heavy-lidded, starting to close, and her hips swayed gently to the music. She was even drunker than he felt. Now that she’d let her guard down, he could see how far gone she really was.

He carried the drinks over to the jukebox. Johnny Cash was singing about a Ring of Fire. Behind him, the short, fat man and his friends started to laugh. Marc was too tired, and too drunk, to even care.

“Ta,” said Abby, straightening her spine and attempting to smile. The expression was lopsided. Marc thought that it was an apt metaphor for how he felt.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re both a bit pissed here.” He glanced out of the nearest window. It was getting dark. “I haven’t a clue what time it is, but I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast. How about going for something to eat? My treat.”

She slid a few inches down the wall and then forced herself to stand straight again. “How about a takeaway?” she said. “We could go back to mine and order one in.”

“Yeah, okay.”

The men at the bar laughed again.

“Come on, then,” said Abby. She gulped at her drink, draining the glass in seconds. Her eyes were glassy. “Let’s fuck off out of here.”

CHAPTER FOUR

R
OYLE SAT IN
his car and watched the estate, hoping that he didn’t see anything nefarious go down. He was off-duty, half-drunk, and incapable of acting professionally if anything did happen. He watched as a couple of young boys made their way towards Grove Alley, laughing. They walked with the stylised gait of chimpanzees: bow-legged and with their arms bent and swinging as if they were carrying rolls of carpet under their arms.

Wannabe hard men; trainee gangsters. This place was full of the fuckers.

Royle switched on the police radio and listened to random call-ins: a possible burglary in Cramlington, a domestic in Near Grove... all the usual night-time scenarios. He switched it off again and stared through the windscreen. The boys had gone. The street was quiet and empty. It was late. Some of the lights in the houses were still on but others lay in darkness. He could hear the steady rhythmic thud of bass-heavy dance music coming from somewhere across the estate.

He got out of the car and nipped along Grove Street, then followed the Roundpath until he came to the gate in the hoardings that surrounded the old concrete tower block. He stood outside and stared in at the Needle, at its cruel walls and its boarded windows. There was a light on in the security cabin that squatted in the building’s shadow. He turned and walked a few paces along the Roundpath, stopped and bent low to the ground. He reached down and ran his hands over the loose gravel; small stones and wood chippings passed beneath the tips of his fingers.

This was where it happened. The man, Simon Ridley, had been stabbed to death by a person or persons unknown. His two friends had been standing with him when it happened, but they were unable to identify the assailant. Ridley had died almost instantly. Royle remembered coming out here to see the body. A young constable had already been on the scene, making the area secure with police tape. The body had been covered by a white sheet that was too small to hide everything and Ridley’s legs from the knee down had been visible. There had been a lot of blood on the ground; it had stained the sheet.

He’d lifted the sheet to look at the man’s face. The victim had been smiling.

Even now, over three months later, he could not forget that smile. He dreamed about it regularly; it followed him through the darkness. At the time he couldn’t be sure what it was about the corpse’s facial expression that had disturbed him so badly. Only afterwards had he realised that it was because it was a smile of pure irony.

Royle didn’t usually become emotionally involved with cases, and his level of obsession in his work was manageable – at least most of the time, and apart from one special case. But this one was different; he wanted to know the real reason behind that smile. He needed to find out who had stabbed Simon Ridley, and why they’d done it. Royle knew that his thought process was flawed, but for some reason he couldn’t help thinking that if he answered these questions he might be able to understand more about his own life, and about the ghosts that haunted him.

He rose to a standing position and took one final look at the Needle. The place had always made him feel uncomfortable, as if the cold, grey structure hid something that wasn’t quite ready to be seen. He’d worked this patch long enough to know that strange things happened in the Grove. The estate was like some kind of locus for negative energy; in Medieval times it would have been considered cursed. Once he had read an article in a magazine about something called the Hum – low level electro-magnetic waves that some people were able to hear in the form of a low-frequency humming noise. These people heard it all the time; whenever they were close to electricity pylons, the sound became more apparent. One theory was that the Hum originated from all the electrical goods people pack into their homes. It had even driven one or two people insane.

There was something like that operating here, in the Grove. But it wasn’t a discernable sound. More like a feeling, a sensation; like the slow, burning sensation at the nape of the neck when you feel like you’re being watched. He felt that all the time. It only ever went away when he left the estate.

Royle had a name for it: he called it the Crawl. Because that’s how it felt: as if invisible insects were crawling across his skin, wandering around all over his body. The sensation wasn’t exactly invasive, but it was persistent. Sometimes he wanted to rip off his clothes and leap into a river to wash it off – anything to be rid of the terrible feeling that things were crawling all over his body, treating him like a patch of ground.

The Crawl.

He could feel it now; he could always feel it, when he was here, on these streets. Thinking about the Crawl made it seem worse, because it drew his attention to the sensation.

He turned away from the hoardings and walked back to his car, head down, skin crawling, shoulders hunched, and with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his coat.

Royle drove out of the estate towards Grove End. He passed very few people, apart from a couple making their way along the street from the direction of the Unicorn pub. The woman was tottering on her high heels and the man looked pensive, slightly out of place in his surroundings. He thought he recognised the woman, but he couldn’t be sure.

The farther Royle travelled from the source, the less bothered he was by the Crawl. Eventually, when he was roughly a mile away from the Needle, the feeling stopped completely and he was able to relax. The three whiskies he’d enjoyed earlier that evening no longer warmed him. He reached out and turned on the car’s heating system, listening to the slow suction of air into the interior of the vehicle.

When he arrived at his flat he sat there still waiting for the car to heat up. After a couple of minutes he got out and walked to his door, fishing his keys out of his pocket. He let himself in, climbed the stairs, and went straight to the drinks shelf. He took a sip of whisky before taking off his coat. It felt good, like an old friend.

The off-license downstairs was still open but he had enough supplies to see him through most of the following week.

He supposed that it had been stupid to rent a flat situated directly above so much temptation, but he’d long ago realised that it was impossible to fight his cravings. He could manage the problem, but would never defeat his addictive nature. Vanessa wanted to arrange for him to attend AA meetings, or see a counsellor, but he wouldn’t accede to her demands. He knew that he was drink-dependent – he wasn’t an idiot, locked into a cycle of self-denial – but the basic fact was that the dependency sustained him. If he didn’t have the drink, he’d lose his ability to cope with the job he did. Almost everyone he knew on the force had a drink problem. Nobody talked about it out in the open, and as long as it didn’t affect the way you did your job, it was simply accepted as part of the territory.

He walked across to his tiny stereo and flicked on the radio. There was a late-night phone-in programme about street crime. He changed the station to a sports discussion show and sat down in his chair by the window. He liked to watch the streets at night. It gave him a sense of the mechanics of how society worked. There were phases of activity after nightfall: the early evening crowd of street kids marking out their territory, then the after-pub crowd staggering home, followed by an emptiness that seemed almost holy.

Sometimes, when he sat and stared out of the window, he saw signs of something bigger than himself, a vast conscious energy that stirred the litter in the gutters, the leaves on the trees, the swings in the playground opposite his flat.

Royle had never been a religious man, but as he got older he became more aware of his burgeoning spirituality. He wasn’t sure what he believed in, but he knew that he believed in something – or that he
wanted
to believe.

In his trouser pocket, his mobile phone began to vibrate. He took it out and opened the text message. It was from Vanessa.

Are you awake?

It was a system they’d worked out between them. He struggled with insomnia and the pregnancy was causing her to sit up late at night, unable to sleep. So if one of them wanted to talk, or simply to listen to another voice on the phone whatever the time of day or night, they’d send a quick text to see if the other was amenable to a chat.