Black Wood (3 page)

I dropped teabags into mugs of boiling water. ‘You hardly knew him, Shaz.’

She blew air through her nose and counted to three before she replied. It really wound her up when I called her ‘Shaz’, so she had to go through the breathing ritual before she could speak.

‘I knew him enough to know he had bad energy, Jo …’

I wanted to slap her. Who was she to tell me things about Scott? Instead I handed her the mug and she blew on it and gave me a patronising smile. Then she picked up Craig’s mug and headed back through to the shop.

‘Oh,’ she said, nodding towards a stack of books piled up behind the door, ‘can you bring that top one through, please. Customer’s here to collect it …’

I picked up the book.
Javascript: The Good Parts
. A website design manual. There was a Post-it on top that said ‘Gareth Maloney. Sat AM.’ I flipped the book over to read the back and pushed the door open with my foot. I had a mug in one hand, the book in the other. My head was down, so I didn’t notice who was in the shop, but I’d sensed that it still wasn’t busy.

A man stood bent over the counter, scribbling his details onto the little form for the loyalty card thing. I really didn’t pay much attention until he stood up straight and turned to face me.

I froze.

An image from a long time ago flashed in my mind … cold, dark eyes. I’d caught only the briefest glimpse that day, but it was him. I was sure of it.

I tried to blink the image away, but it stayed. A sudden wave of nausea washed over me.

‘Ah, here she is,’ Craig was saying. His voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. ‘Jo, Mr Maloney’s a web designer. I was just telling him that you’re
our
resident design whizz …’

He let his sentence tail off.

I started shaking; my hand wobbling so much I was in danger of spilling coffee all over the book. I was only vaguely aware of Sharon at my elbow, lifting the mug out of my hand.

Gareth Maloney. After all these years, I finally had a name …

‘Jo? Are you OK? Maybe you should sit down—’

Maloney stared at me, his expression unreadable.

You don’t remember me, do you?
I thought.

But how could either of us ever forget?

They wait until darkness falls. The house blanketed in black.

‘Will we get in trouble?’ the boy says. He already feels the pins and needles. The little bubbles dancing inside his stomach.

‘Not if you keep quiet. Stay close to me. Keep your gob shut.’

The boy follows. He wonders why they don’t take the car, but he doesn’t ask. They walk across fields, keeping tight to the trodden paths that line the edges.

By the time they reach the wood, he is panting slightly.

The man walks fast. He has longer strides than him. The man carries a bag on his shoulder. An old military thing. Soft canvas. Long.

Long enough for the shotgun.

The boy thinks about the other things in the bag. He shivers.

The boy has always been fascinated by the traps.

Strong circles of metal. Big sharp teeth.

He is not allowed to shoot. ‘When you’re older,’ the man says.

Each time they go, he is older than the last. But he is never old enough.

The man lays the bag on the bark-mulch floor. The zip makes a loud noise in the silent wood. The birds are sleeping. The crows, the sparrows, the finches. The noisy, happy birds.

Other birds are awake. The owls. The boy can feel their bright-eyed stares reaching him from their nests in the trees.

A solitary
twhoo
confirms their presence.

They are waiting to see what happens next. There is a scurrying in the undergrowth. Mice, voles. Maybe foxes. Rabbits? The man lifts the torch from the bag, flicks it on. He holds it under his chin.

‘Boo,’ he whispers.

The boy grins.

The man lifts the shotgun from the bag. Snaps it open. Checks the ammunition.

‘Come on then,’ he says.

The boy takes his cue. He lifts the traps from the bag. One. Two. Three.

‘Now remember …’

‘I know, I know,’ the boy says. He is not stupid. This is not his first time.

He takes the first trap, snaps it open. The man shines the torch and the gleaming metal teeth glow like a monster’s snarl in the dark.

He fastens the little clip at the side, careful not to put his fingers anywhere near the gaping maw.

He places the trap on the ground, at the base of a dark, rotting oak. Its drooping, diseased branches hang like tentacles. Ready to grab.

The man walks deeper into the woods. The shotgun cocked. Ready.

The boy lays two more traps.

Then follows.

‘How much further?’ the boy says. He is tired. The wood is still quiet. The inhabitants can sense the danger. They stay in their holes.

He follows the man deeper into the woods. There is no light. It has been sucked up into the ether. The only thing to guide them is the torch. The boy follows the beam up ahead. Listens to the sounds of their two sets of footsteps crunching on tiny twigs.

Snap
.
Snap
. Like bones.

The man stops. ‘Ssh,’ he says, ‘see that?’

The boy follows the beam of the torch. It ends at shining dark eyes.

He sees the stripe, silhouetted in the spot of light.

A badger! They’ve never had a badger.

The man hands the torch to him. The shotgun is cocked and ready.

He shoots.

There is a low groan, a whimper. Then a
fluhmp
as the animal drops to the stinking, damp forest floor.

The metallic reek of blood, the smoky tang of fresh shot.

Sergeant Davie Gray rolled the centre pages of the
Banktoun Mail and Post
into a ball and launched it overarm towards the metal bin. It bounced off the rim and seemed to hover for a second before it fell to the floor.

‘Ooof! Close, but no cigar.’ PC Callum Beattie spun across the room on his wheelie chair and picked up the paper, then rolled back and seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to line up his shot.

‘Get on with it, man,’ Gray said. He was getting bored of the game now. He’d missed three in a row, the third being the only one to touch the bin at all. Beattie, of course, had managed to get all five of his goes bang on target.

The phone rang. Beattie flinched just as he released the paper ball and it went wide, bouncing on the worn navy carpet before coming to a stop. He swore.

Gray picked up the phone and held a quieting finger to his lips.

‘Banktoun Station. Sergeant Gray speaking. How can I help you?’

‘It’s me. Got a job for you. Hope you’re not too busy …’ The voice implied it knew they were anything but. Not for the first time, Gray wondered if his boss had the CCTV feed going direct to his BlackBerry. Luckily Beattie always remembered to reposition the camera that faced the area behind the counter when they were on the skive.

‘Oh, er, good morning, sir.’ Gray rolled his eyes at Beattie. Beattie stood up and mimed someone swinging a golf club. Inspector Gordon Hamilton jeopardising his Saturday-morning tee-off time to call the station? This must be good.

‘I’ve had a call from Martin about someone making a pest of themselves up at the Track. Nothing’s actually happened. Yet. Best go and take a look, though, eh? I said you’d call him. Right. Got to go.’ He hung up before Gray could reply.

Gray stared at the phone as if it was a poisonous snake, then placed it back in the cradle and sighed.

Councillor Martin Brotherstone was one of Hamilton’s cronies from the Rotary Club. He lived up at the new houses (the ones that Gray liked to call ‘Lego Mansions’) that bordered the old railway line that the locals called ‘the Track’. There’d been no trains on it since the late sixties and now it was all marked trails and bark-mulch paths, the unruly trees and bushes stripped back. It was popular with dog walkers and joggers during the day. At night it was a haven for underage drinkers, the bushes rustling with the low sounds of couples looking for a ‘secret’ place to shag. It was just him and his son, Pete, who was one of those lads that the older folk liked to call ‘slow’. Gray wasn’t sure if it was autism or some other thing that affected the boy. It wasn’t something that people talked about. Brotherstone’s house directly overlooked the railway line and he spent most of his time spying on people who went about their daily business. This was part of his campaign to reinstate the line, arguing that by running trains again he could rid the town of the riffraff and delinquents who spent their time hanging about at its peripheries, just waiting to cause trouble. The fact that there rarely was any trouble up there was by the by. On a particularly slow evening, Gray would take a drive up there to scare away the underage drinkers, but most of the time he just let them be.

The crime rate in Banktoun was pathetically low.

Their current community objectives included managing antisocial behaviour in the Back Street, keeping an eye on the drug dealers that frequented Garlie Park (both of these, unsurprisingly, only occurred after pub closing time), and, Gray’s personal favourite, dishing out warnings to folk who parked for more than the allotted half-hour at the bottom end of the High Street where it led down to the river path. They’d once had a traffic warden to deal with that particular task, but she’d been deemed ‘economically non-viable’ in the last budget cut. Plus, she’d been a miserable, ticket-happy witch who’d had the cheek to ticket Gray’s car when he’d only nipped in to collect his Chinese.

It had been
years
since something of any significance had happened. The usual small town stuff. A missing husband who turned up days later with a stink of some other woman’s perfume and his tail between his legs.

There was only ever that one guy who never ever came back.

Gray occasionally wondered if he’d turn up on the other side of the world sometime. Then there was that thing with the kids down by the burn, and the attack in the park – the non-attack, really, as she’d refused to report it formally, despite his best efforts to get her to make a statement. You got the occasional assault, usually between drunken rivals. Nothing very exciting, but, in truth, that was how he liked it. This thing at the Track would be kids mucking about. Nothing more.

He picked up his hat.

‘I’m nipping out, Callum. Act sharp, son.’

‘Eh? Ach, come on. I’m bored shitless here. Can I come with you?’

‘Naw. Lorna’s no’ coming in. You’ll need to stay put, in case the Big Ham phones back. Tell him I’m away up to the Track for a look. See you later.’

Sunlight was bouncing off the windscreen of the squad car parked in front of the station. He glanced up and down the street, at the folk milling about. Taking it easy. There was no rush. Maybe he’d nip down the road for a wander first. A wee circuit. Pop into the bakers. It was the wrong direction, but he could always drop off a sausage roll for Beattie when he walked back up.

He made up his mind.

Beady-Eye Brotherstone could wait.

Craig sent me to his flat. I didn’t argue, but I knew I wouldn’t stay there long. The closeness of their relationship suffocated me. Apparently Rob’s fancy law firm had taken him away to some team-building thing in Perth for the weekend. One of those things where you build rafts out of packing crates and pretend to value your colleagues. I couldn’t see the point of it myself.

We looked after each other in the shop.

After I’d almost spilled coffee everywhere, Craig had ushered me back through to the stockroom and left Sharon to deal with the open-mouthed Gareth Maloney. The face I’d never thought I’d lay eyes on again.

‘Is she all right?’ I’d heard him say, the door swinging shut behind us.

Sharon answered in her soothing tone. ‘Jo’s having a few personal problems at the moment, Mr Maloney. She should really be at home resting, but she’s so dedicated to her job, you see …’

‘Oh, right. It’s just that she looked so freaked out there. Like she’d seen … like she’d seen a ghost or something. And please, call me Gareth,’ he added. ‘I’m new here. Well, not new as such. I’ve been away … I thought the bookshop would be a good first port of call, like-minded folk and all that … seeing as most of the ones I knew when I was a kid have upped and left …’

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Sharon said. ‘I mean, it’s a nice enough place to live … bit boring, like.’

I zoned them out. What was he doing back here? After all this time?

Craig had made me drink a glass of tap water. It was warm and tasted of old pipes. ‘Jo,’ he said. ‘You need to take a break. This thing with Scott … you’re not saying much about it, but I know it’s going to mess with your head … I
know
you, Jo. Are you gonna tell me what happened?’

How could I tell him what happened?
I
had no idea what happened. One minute we were sitting there eating pasta and the next he’d flipped his lid and told me it was over. Thinking about it, he had been a bit quiet lately. Coming home late. Drinking too much. But I just put it down to work stress. Maybe he was just bored with me and didn’t know what to do? I don’t have a brilliant track record with men, but I’d always thought that Scott was different. That he got me, somehow. Despite my … quirks.

But this feeling now … this creeping
fear
that had come over me … It had nothing to do with Scott. This was something else entirely. A deep wound that I thought had been knitted together had been ripped apart. The neat fissure, slowly widening, ready to reveal the scar tissue deep within. I looked up at Craig and felt my eyes welling up. There was so much I wanted to tell him.

He handed me a bunch of keys.

I rubbed at my eyes, wiping away the tears. ‘I’ll get a spare one cut,’ I said, before slipping out the back door and onto the street via the dark little alleyway that housed the toilet and the bins. A bit of fresh air. Clear my head.

Think.

The street was much the same as before. A few more out and about, woken by the too-bright sun of a midsummer morning. We were in the midst of a mini-heatwave. A full week already and forecast for more. Most of the town’s residents were pink-faced from it already. Far too much flesh on show. Scotland was just asking for a skin cancer epidemic. Sun cream was an expensive commodity, reserved only for the Trades fortnight spent in a Spanish holiday resort.