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And get this - this is just how pitiful I’d become that night - I began to weep again, silently though, no blubbering this time, the tears oozing from my good eye to slip down my cheek and well along the jawline.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard Louise Broomfield say before feeling her hand rest over mine. ‘Please forgive me, Dis, I didn’t mean to be so insensitive.’

The insensitive sensitive. If my misery hadn’t been so enormous I might have smiled at that. Instead I pulled my hand away and snuffled against the knuckle.

‘Okay,’ I murmured. Not, ‘It’s okay,’ because it wasn’t; just okay, leave it there. I revived the half-dead cigarette in my other hand with a long draw and its glow wavered in my trembling fingers. My tears dried and surprisingly, I felt a little better, as though the emotional release had somehow lightened my load, or at least shifted it so that it was less uncomfortable. The mood wouldn’t last, I knew that, but it was a reprieve, short though it might be. I blew my nose and stuffed the crumpled handkerchief back into my trouser pocket.

‘Can we talk some more?’ The clairvoyant was cautious. ‘Would that be all right?’

‘I’m tired,’ I told her, and it was no exaggeration. I could have added that I’d emptied out, there was nothing left in me that night. Events will do that to you.

‘A few more minutes.’ She was pleading, not insisting.

‘One more minute. Then please… leave.’ I could have cursed again, but I just didn’t have it in me.

‘I’ve shown you I have the gift…’

‘Sorry, lady, but you haven’t proved a thing to me.’

‘I took your pain away.’

The headache…?’

Tour pain. You were badly hurt when I first arrived: are you in physical pain now?’

I blinked. My mind probed my body, my fingers touched my bruised ribs; I looked at my hands, examined the marks and grazes where they’d been trodden on; I thought of my battered head and hump. I blinked again, turned to the clairvoyant, the healer.

‘It won’t last, the pain will come back,’ she said apologetically. ‘But right now you’re not feeling any discomfort, are you? Perhaps some stiffness, and I’m sure you’re quite numb in places; but there isn’t enough pain to cause distress, is there?’

‘How…?’ It was never going to be a fully completed question, but the situation at least required an attempt.

‘I explained before. I took the pain from you and discarded it. It will probably return the moment your scepticism overwhelms the idea it could really happen. Only surprise is preventing that from occurring right now.’

She’d got that right: disbelief was already setting in and the first twinges were already starting.

‘I’ve been very disturbed since Shelly Ripstone first came to see me,’ the clairvoyant said without wasting a second more of her minute. ‘I could tell she was deeply troubled the moment I opened my door to her and I sensed it wasn’t just because she’d recently lost her husband.’

‘How could you tell?’ I really was curious to know.

‘I’d been prepared beforehand.’

I suppose I regarded her quizzically.

‘I had been hearing strange voices for a few days, jumbled voices, confused, distraught. I could make little sense of them until Shelly came to my home. They had first begun when she rang me to book an appointment, and once she was there with me, they became clearer, one of them more distinct than the others. This voice was that of a young man who told me he was Shelly Teasdale’s son. Shelly only confirmed what I suddenly knew.’

I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting - all this was getting too silly. ‘Wait a minute. You’re telling me you actually heard a voice telling you this? A voice from out of nowhere?’ I didn’t bother to hide my incredulity.

‘It isn’t quite like that. They aren’t voices as such. In fact I only hear voices when those talking to me are dead.’

I brought her to a halt with a raised hand; I needed time to let all this sink in.

Louise Broomfield sighed. ‘I’m sorry it’s so difficult to accept, but there it is, this is what happens when I’m contacted by outside entities. I can’t explain why the deceased appear to have proper voices and others communicate with thoughts and visions.’

Then why did you tell me you
heard
the voice of Shelly Teasdale’s son along with these other voices.’

To make it less confusing for you. It isn’t important, Dis; messages have their own way of reaching me. In this case I was sent thoughts and images. The main one, the one who claimed to be Shelly’s son, said there were others with him, but it was all so distorted. In my mind I could see vague shapes, figures that appeared to be in pain, or in great anguish, I’m not sure which. I had the feeling that they were trapped somewhere. I saw walls without windows, and doors, lots of doors with strong locks. And everywhere was so dark; these people were just shapes moving in darkness.’

Perspiration beaded her forehead and she dabbed it away with a tiny handkerchief that smelled of lavender. She fixed me with those pale green eyes.

‘I saw you, Dis. Amongst all those contorted images I saw you.’

What? You’ve never met me before tonight’

‘Yours was the clearest image of all, although it didn’t make sense to me at the time. It was only later when Shelly had hired you that it took on any significance.’

‘She told you the private investigator handling her case was a hunchback and then it all made sense to you. Yeah, it had to be me you saw in those visions.’

They revealed to me that this particular person had also lost an eye in an accident when he was a boy. When I came here I was still in doubt, but as soon as I touched your forehead I knew you were the one. It came to me as surely as if you had told me yourself. That’s why I’m begging you to help Shelly find her son, Dis. That’s the key to all this; finding him will lead us to them all.’

‘Even if there was some sense to this, how do you propose I find the boy? There is no record of Shelly Teasdale’s son ever being born, let alone having died, and the hospital where she claims to have given birth burned down years ago. The trail - if there ever was one - is stone cold dead.’

‘I can only tell you you’ve got to try.’ The clairvoyant’s eyes searched my face as though she might find some sympathy there. She seemed desperate when she added: ‘I think they’re counting on you. I think they know you’re the only one who
can
help them.’

‘Why? Why me?’

She shook her head slowly, almost as confused as I was. ‘I… I can’t see that. It just isn’t clear to me. But I know I’m right, Dis, I
can feel
the truth of what I’m telling you.’

‘Okay, okay. Let’s just say you are right. I’m not saying I’m going along with this, but just for a moment, let’s say your feeling is correct. How do I go about finding Shelly Teasdale’s lost son - assuming he really is alive?’

Why should Shelly pretend she had a baby all that time ago?’

‘Let’s not get into that right now. I can only say I’ve dealt with crazy people before. But if it is all true, how can I find him if there’s no record of him ever having existed? I’m an investigator, not a magician.’

‘Because the voices, the visions, have provided us with a clue.’

That startled me. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘You never gave me the chance.’

‘So tell me now. What kind of clue?’ Yes, I was full of scepticism right then, and when Louise Broomfield revealed exactly what that clue was, I nearly threw my hands in the air in exasperation.

‘Sometimes we see things in dreams that appear to make no sense at all,’ she proceeded with hardly any embarrassment, ‘until later you realize they were there to represent something important to you. It might be something very ordinary, mundane even, or it might be something that’s highly significant.’

She fumbled with the tiny, lavender-scented handkerchief, twisting it in her fingers while I waited impatiently.

‘I saw wings,’ she said. ‘Hundreds upon hundreds of wings. They were of all colours and they flapped madly, as if agitated or frightened, and they made a terrible, thunderous roar. It was as if… as if they were trapped too.’

And as she spoke, I saw those wings in my mind. The odd thing was, my own image was among them. I saw myself in the midst of thousands of fluttering wings.

Only I did not hear their flurry: I heard their screams.

11

For the second night I fell into a dreamless sleep, which was not only unusual given the events of that evening, but extraordinary, because I’d always suffered - and I mean
suffered
- from full-Technicolor, Dolby sound, Senserama dreams and nightmares since I could remember. You’d have thought that the past two nights would have made things worse.

As it was, I slept soundly and awoke around 8.45am, which was pretty late for me. I felt a little hungover and my limbs were stiff, but apart from that and a few bruises (the worst was the discoloured swelling below the absent eye) I was fine. I think mentally I had absorbed the bad things -the humiliation, the fear, and the self-pity - while I slumbered. I was instantly awake and just as quickly out of bed, heading for the bathroom; only when I was in mid-flow did thoughts of the previous night steal into my consciousness. I pondered them long after concluding my daybreak liability, finally flushing the loo and returning to my bed where, pyjama-clad (I rarely slept naked), I reflected further, oblivious to cold feet and parched throat.

What the hell was going on in my life? Beggars, beaches, bitches and batty old ladies - the images spun round my mind like a carousel filled with harpies. And then there were the hallucinations to contend with, the monsters in mirrors, the face that stared back at me in the bathroom. What did
they
mean?

When my feet eventually became too cold - even in summer it took a while for my basement flat to warm up in the mornings - and my throat too parched to bear, I wandered into the kitchen and made a brew. A cup of tea rather than coffee, a couple of paracetamols for the general pain, which had nothing to do with the beating I’d taken, and my head began to settle so that I could think more clearly. Taking the mug of tea and collecting my cigarettes on the way, I went into the sitting-room.

After my third cigarette and second mug of tea I reached for the phone and made three calls.

The Ripstones’ residence was one of those big but not quite grand homes set back from the broad road that runs from the top of the South Downs, through Brighton’s suburbia and down to the sea itself. The area up there is quiet and expensive, just a little dull, and in winter the wind tears up from the English Channel to rattle windows and worry rooftops. Apart from the quietness - if you liked quietness, that is - the other advantage was that within minutes you could be in the centre of a town large enough to be a city, with all the amenities that come with it, or, moving in the opposite direction and in even less time, you could be among the meadows and valley woodlands of the Downs themselves. From the tops of the rises you could see as far as the hills around London itself, although on this particular day, because there was still too much moisture left in the air after yesterday’s showers, this now warmed by the morning sun, mists ran across the valley floors, veiling green pastures and wooded areas, and the distance was lost in white haze.

I’d taken a slight detour before arriving at Shelly Rip-stone’s place, driving to a favourite spot on the Downs that overlooked a huge rent in the hills known as Devil’s Dyke, and I’d sat a while in my car, windows down so that the breeze could waft through. I’d watched the shifting mists below as they rolled lazily across the landscape, sunshine catching open patches, turning green pastures to shimmering gold, but my thoughts were of my own life and the apprehension that had suddenly filled me even before I had made the phone calls. In my heart, if not in my head, was the feeling of something momentous about to happen to me, something as inexplicable as it was certain, an eerie sense of impending… what? I had no idea. But with it there also came a feeling of excitement, which was just as unaccountable.

Sitting there in my car, the soft wind up there breezing through my lank hair, I tried to analyse the sensation, tried to understand its cause, but answers came there none. There was only confusion - and wonder. Yes, a deep, disturbing wonder. And it scared the hell out of me.

I drove from the parking area and headed towards Shelly Ripstone’s place, doing my best to calm this inner turmoil by concentrating on the road. The pragmatist in me would not allow those vague yet potent thoughts to hold sway: I was a PI doing a job, at that moment employed to help a grieving widow find her missing son, real or imaginary, and there were procedures to follow, rules of the game that would keep me on line and eliminate fanciful notions that might only get in the way.

But if it really was as straightforward as that, I wondered, why had I asked the clairvoyant to meet me at my client’s address?

Within four minutes I was driving through a set of open double gates to park in the semi-circular, paved drive. By then I was composed, those irrational thoughts tucked away in some dim corner of my psyche, perhaps to be taken out and examined at leisure later on, for now my innate professionalism fully in charge. Climbing from my car - a nondescript Ford Fiesta, beige in colour, elderly in years, its only special feature a hidden isolation switch wired in series with the coil so that with the switch in the ‘off’ position, no one other than me could start the engine. It prevented the car from being stolen and while on surveillance I could always claim my vehicle had broken down (neither the pushiest policeman, nor the best mechanic could get it to move once it was in that mode) - I took a moment to look up at the house. Two storeyed, white painted, red-tiled roof, I guessed it had been built around the 1920s, with extensions added and picture windows replacing former, more traditional windows over the years, the whole building much larger than originally planned. It was a wealthy man’s - or in this case, a wealthy widow’s - abode, but by no means a palace. Gerald Ripstone had lived well, but I guessed he’d never been part of the jet-set.

A small blue Renault was parked in front of the mock-pillared porch (one of the later additions, I surmised) and I wondered if it belonged to Louise Broomfield. The clairvoyant had left her number with me the previous night, and after first speaking to my client, I’d rung her to say perhaps I’d changed my mind about the case and would she meet me here? My third call had been to Henry at the office, letting him know my plans for the morning.

Lumbering awkwardly up the porch’s two steps, I rang the doorbell and waited. It took a couple of seconds for the door to swing open and for Shelly Ripstone to smile out at me. Along with bright make-up she wore a look of expectancy on her face, and she was dressed in loose-fitting black slacks, gold and black sandals on her manicured feet, and a tight pale yellow sweater which seemed to be moulded over her ample breasts. Her ash-blonde hair was held back from her cheeks by a black velvet bow at the nape of her neck and, although her eyes initially betrayed the slightest revulsion at what stood before her, they swiftly recovered again and lit up in welcome.

Thank you, Mr Dismas,’ she said in a breathless, Marilyn Monroe way. ‘I’m so glad you changed your mind.’

‘I’m not sure that I have yet,’ I said, stepping inside the hall as she made way for me. ‘It depends on what information you can give me today.’

Her frown, I think, was a reaction to the bruises and cuts on my face, particularly the swelling below my missing eye, rather than my reservations.

‘Are you all right, Mr Dismas?’ she asked, her voice full of concern or curiosity, I couldn’t be sure which. Your poor face…’

‘Kind of spoils my looks, doesn’t it?’

She didn’t catch the irony: not a flicker of a smile. ‘Oh, you poor dear,’ she said.

I dismissed it with: ‘It’s okay, really. No pain - not much, anyway. It’s not as bad as it looks. Is Mrs Broomfield here?’

She was and she was waiting to greet me in a room just off the hall itself, a lounge area that boasted an awful russet-red wall-to-wall carpet, broken by a white shag-pile rug in front of a York stone fireplace and two mammoth pink settees that faced each other across a wide glass-and-chrome coffee table. Hanging over the polished teak mantelpiece was a picture of Shelly and a middle-aged man, presumably her late husband, Gerald; it was one of those photographic portraits, varnished and stippled to look like an oil painting. Although cunning lighting and obvious retouching had conspired to bring out Gerald’s finer characteristics, nothing could disguise the plumpness of his face and the plumpness of his nose and the plumpness of the flesh below his chin; nor could his hair be made to look other than sparse and his paunch other than portly; nevertheless, there was a cleverness in his eyes, an alertness to his expression, that told you he had been nobody’s fool. Standing close behind and over him, as if he had been sitting for the portrait, Shelly looked harder than she did in real life and oddly proprietary, as if she were the dominant partner, as if she were in charge of Gerald and not the other way round, which hardly related to the impression she had given in my office. Maybe it had been a trick of the flashlight, an erroneous image caught in that split second; the camera mostly lied, I told myself.

Louise Broomfield was dressed in the same clothes as the night before, although minus the pink raincoat, and as she rose from one of the settees a warm smile spread across her chubby face.

‘I’m so pleased you changed your mind, Mr Dismas,’ she said as a greeting.

‘Dis,’ I reminded her. ‘Call me Dis. Even my enemies call me Dis.’

I took her proffered hand and was taken aback by her sudden change of expression. Her body swayed slightly and I felt resentment rising at what I mistakenly thought was her unguarded aversion to the contact. I’d assumed she had grown used to my looks the night before, but I guess broad daylight brought out the worst in me. I suppose I couldn’t be blamed for taking her reaction the wrong way and my irritation soon broke surface.

‘I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind,’ I said brusquely, letting go of her hand. ‘I still think this is a wild goose chase.’

The clairvoyant was about to reply when Shelly, who had followed me into the room, spoke up. ‘It isn’t, Mr Dismas,’ she insisted. ‘Why can’t you just believe me?’

I turned to her. ‘Because I deal in facts, not fancies.’

It was as if I’d slapped her face and Louise Broomfield quickly interjected. ‘Yet you’re here today, so you must feel there is some truth in what Shelly has told you.’

‘Right now I don’t know what I feel,’ I replied. ‘Last night you convinced me to give it another shot, but in the cold light of day…’ I regarded her meaningfully’… I’m not sure if I’m wasting my time.’

This meeting was your idea.’

‘I like to think I’m a pro, as well as a businessman. I don’t like disappointing my clients and I don’t like turning away a good fee.’ I didn’t mention the wilder notions that had entered the equation. ‘I’ll explore all avenues to complete an assignment successfully, as long as there are avenues to be explored.’

‘Why don’t we all sit down and have a nice cup of tea,’ said Shelly placatingly - or was it desperately? Then you can ask me anything you think might help.’

That would be sensible,’ agreed the clairvoyant. ‘And thank you for being so frank, Dis.’ The puzzlement in her eyes told me she couldn’t quite understand my irritation.

‘No tea for me,’ I said a little huffily, because I’d expected something more of Louise Broomfield; she was supposed to be a
sensitive,
after all.

‘Coffee then. I’ve got some already made.’

Shelly Ripstone disappeared before I could decline fur- ther. I only wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, my mood rapidly changed since I’d arrived. I guess I was annoyed at myself for allowing Louise Broomfield to persuade me that I really could help the widow. But then I realized the clairvoyant’s influence had been minimal -I, myself, had resolved to see it through only that morning; in fact, I’d awoken with the conviction that I
had
to see it through.

‘Are you feeling any better today?’

I wasn’t sure to what Louise was referring: my physical or my mental state. Perhaps she was only making polite conversation in Shelly’s absence.

‘I’m okay,’ I replied curtly, still misunderstanding her reaction to me a few moments earlier.

She was giving me that weird look again, a kind of scrutiny that was searching beyond the physical, and at last I began to realize her reaction wasn’t one of abhorrence.

‘Have you ever had any kind of spiritual experience, Dis?’ she asked out of the blue.

Surprised again, I couldn’t at first think of a reply. Then, stalling, I said: What d’you mean exactly?’

‘Have you ever had an out-of-body experience, have you ever seen a ghost, heard voices in your head?’

‘You must be kidding.’

‘No. No, I’m not.’

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable under her inspection. I remembered - how could I forget? - the visions in the mirrors.

‘I don’t think I have,’ I told her. ‘No, I’m sure I haven’t’ Hallucinations didn’t count. What makes you ask?’

There’s something about you…’ she shook her head and at last dropped her gaze.

We were interrupted by Shelly returning with a tray of tea, coffee, and even chocolate biscuits. ‘Coffee was made just before you arrived, so it’s still fresh.’ She smiled at me and I could see the hope there in her eyes. I told myself that maybe her late husband’s money wasn’t the important thing, that maybe she really did want her son back for himself. (Of course, if the birth
was
in her own imagination, then maybe her smile was that of a crazy woman.) ‘I know you only drink tea, Louise, so I’ve made you a pot all to yourself. Shall I be mum?’

I smiled at the irony of her last words, wondering if it was a deep-felt but subconscious plea. I watched as she poured tea, then coffee for herself and me, the perfume she wore today - Chanel No 19, I suspected - almost as powerful as the coffee aroma. She kept up a barrage of noise-speak about the changeable weather, how difficult it was to find good housekeepers, the price of lemons and other nonsense I couldn’t be bothered to take in, all of it a verbal discharge of her own nervousness. I waited for a break in the flow.