Pressure Head (2 page)

He nodded at Dave as he got up to where we were standing. “Southgate.”

Dave didn’t so much nod as curl his lip. “Morrison.”

And it hit me where I knew him from. It was all I could do not to stagger back, winded from the blow.

Morrison. Phil Morrison.

The last time I’d seen him, we’d still been at school. It wasn’t a time I looked back on with a nostalgic, rosy glow. My last name’s Paretski, a legacy of my great-grandma’s Polish stepdad, so naturally enough I was known for most of my school life as Parrotski. With the occasional Parrot-face or Polly thrown in for variety. I didn’t exactly like it, but I couldn’t say it really bothered me either. Although I did feel a bit envious of my older brother for having managed to get away with plain old Ski as a nickname.

Then Phil Morrison caught me looking at him in the changing room after PE—well, who wouldn’t look? He was the fittest lad in the school—tall, blond, athletic—and he came up with the bright idea of calling me Poofski.

It caught on instantly. Soon, hardly a day went by without a joke at my expense. Games lessons were the worst. “Don’t let Poofski follow you into the shower!” was a gag that never seemed to get old. My maths teacher, Mr. Collymore, even called me it once. I mean, I’m sure it was a genuine slip of the tongue, and he apologised afterwards, but they were laughing about that one in the classroom for days afterwards.

For all I know, they laughed about it in the staff room too.

And now he was here. Against all laws of probability or even human decency, apparently queer. And I was supposed to get used to it?

Morrison must have noticed my reaction, as he looked at me with his eyes narrowed. Suddenly, his face cleared, and a half smile flickered across his lips. “Parrotski,” he said with grim satisfaction.

Well, it could have been worse. And I was long over being intimidated by him. “That’s
Paretski
, if you don’t mind,” I snapped.

“You’ve changed a bit,” he said cryptically.

“So have you.” I tried to inject as much meaning as I could into those three words. I wanted him to know I knew his little secret. I wanted him to feel like the bloody hypocrite he was.

Zero reaction. Either it didn’t work, or more likely, he just didn’t give a monkey’s what I thought about him.

Dave huffed impatiently. “
If
you don’t mind me interrupting this touching reunion, we do have a body to look for. And Morrison? Unless you’re here to hand deliver a map drawn by the murderer, your services are not required. This is an official police investigation, not a bloody free-for-all.”

Morrison raised an eyebrow. “Oh? When did you join the force, Parrot—Paretski? Good thing for you they dropped the height restrictions.”

My jaw tensed. “I’m just here as a consultant.”

“Know a lot about hiding bodies, do you?” God, I’d forgotten just how much his snide tone got up my nose.

“Used to think about it all the time back in school,” I said pointedly.

“Girls!” Dave broke in with an exasperated shout.

We both whirled to look at him, probably with identical hangdog expressions. “Sorry, Dave,” I said, to establish myself firmly as the reasonable one. “Time to get started?”

“Too bloody right. Come on. And Morrison? If I find you trampling on the evidence, you’ll be cooling your heels in jail, understood? As soon as we find anything—
if
we find anything—the family will be informed.” Dave grabbed my elbow and more or less hustled me into the trees. We stopped once we were out of sight of the grassland. “Right—do your stuff.”

I sighed. “What, after all that?”

“Oh, come off it, Tom. Don’t play the prima donna with me, now. What was all that with you and Morrison, anyway? The short version, please. Young love gone bad?”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” I warned. “Not unless you fancy pulling him in on a charge of assaulting an officer. We went to school together, that’s all. We weren’t exactly friends.”

I jumped as a hand like a bag full of sausages clapped me briefly on the shoulder. “School bully, was he? I know his type. All bluster and no bloody bollocks.”

Phil Morrison had bollocks, all right. I remembered that from the school showers. You might say I’d made something of a study of the subject. Didn’t think Dave would appreciate me mentioning it, though. I took a deep breath, and tried to clear my mind.

Phil Morrison’s bollocks kept creeping back in there, though. Sod it. “You want to give me that picture again?” I asked.

Thirty seconds staring at Melanie’s pretty, kind face soon got my mind out of the gutter. “Right. Okay.” I handed it back again and closed my eyes. Could I hear something? Feel it tugging at me? I turned around slowly, trying to judge where the pull was coming from. There. I stepped forward, remembering in time to open my eyes before I walked into a tree.

Dave didn’t say anything, and neither did I. We just followed the line I’d sensed. My work boots soon picked up a thick coating of mulched-up leaves, stuck on with mud. On a crisp, frosty morning, this might be a pleasant place for a walk, but right now it was just soggy and dirty. It even smelled damp. Every now and then a twig that had somehow managed to escape getting soaked through would snap loudly under my foot, but more often I’d put my boot in a muddy patch and have to pull it free with a squelch. Brambles snagged my jeans and clutched at my hair.

As the pull got stronger, I sped up. Dave started puffing a bit and occasionally cursing, probably at the mess the mud was making of his shoes. I forced myself to slow down, but it was nagging at me, and I found my pace quickening again.

It wasn’t Melanie’s voice. I don’t see ghosts—at least, I don’t think I do. The girl in the park when I was a kid had seemed like a spirit, but I think it was just the way my child’s brain interpreted things. These days, I just feel a pull, a sense of something
hidden
, of something
not-right
. It’s like… I’ve never taken drugs—too much weird stuff going on in my head as it is—but I imagine it’s like the pull a hopeless addict feels towards the next fix. Only without the high when I finally give in to it.

Fortunately, I usually only feel it when I’m actively listening—I know you can’t listen for a feeling, but language really isn’t accurate for this sort of thing—or I’d probably go stark raving mad. After all, when you think about it, the average household has six to a dozen things hidden in it. The wife’s saving-up-to-leave-him secret piggy bank; the teenage son’s porn. His dad’s porn. These days, quite often, his mum’s porn. And don’t get me started on the subject of sex toys…

I’d veered off course, I realised. Feeling guilty, I wrenched my mind back to the matter in hand. Where had she gone…? Dave started to say something, so I held up a hand to shush him.

There. I stepped forward.

When you’re twenty-nine and you find a body, as I said earlier, you don’t get to go blubbing for your mother. You get Dave clapping you on the shoulder and heaving a resigned sigh, while the other police officers throw you suspicious looks. Nobody shields you from the sight as they shine their torches into the bushes and light up the mess some bastard made of a young woman’s skull. Your mind’s well able to interpret the blood, the misshapen dent where the bone pushed into the brain, and your imagination fills in the pain and the terror she must have felt.

And when you walk out of the forest and leave them to it, you find Phil Morrison waiting for you.

It was twilight by now, but he wasn’t exactly easy to overlook. He loomed out of the shadow of the trees like Herne the Hunter on steroids.

“Have they found her, then?” he demanded.

I nodded curtly and went to walk past him. He grabbed my arm.

To say I wasn’t happy was an understatement. I don’t like people grabbing me. Never have. “Oi! Get your bloody hands off me!”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I just want to talk to you, that’s all.” He didn’t let go.

“Why don’t you go and talk to the police? They’re the ones doing all the detecting. I just found her for them.” His eyes narrowed, and I realised I’d given away more than I should have.

“How did you know where she was? Did you see her being dumped here?”

“I didn’t see anything, okay?” I tried to shake off his grip, getting more and more annoyed as he refused to let go. “I just find stuff.”

“Stuff? Like dead people?”

“Yes, okay? Look, for fuck’s sake, I’ve had a hard day and it ended with me cuddling up to a corpse. Will you let go of me or do I have to call one of the coppers over? I’m sure Dave Southgate will be only too happy to pull you in on the trumped-up charge of my choosing.”

He released me, and I rubbed my arm. “So what’s the deal?” he asked. “You know people in low places, they tell you stuff, you tell the police?”

“No. I’m just good at finding stuff, that’s all. It’s a talent. Like dowsing.”

“What, that water-divining crap? Bollocks!”

“Whatever.” I strode off towards my car, pissed off beyond belief to find him walking by my side, his long legs easily keeping up even with my most annoyed pace.

“Come on, what’s the real deal? Look, I’m working for her parents, here. They’re going to be devastated when they find out she’s dead. The least anyone can do is get them some justice.”

Great. Now I felt pissed off
and
guilty. I rubbed my hip, realised what I was doing and jammed my hand in my jacket pocket where it couldn’t betray me.

When I glanced at Phil, I could tell he’d seen.

“Look, I’m sorry about that,” he said, with an awkward grimace.

“About what?” I asked nastily.

“Well, you know. About the leg.”

“Oh. I see. So making my last year at school a living hell, you’d do all that again, would you?” Bastard.

“Oh, for—” Phil’s hand made some kind of abortive gesture, and he looked up and away from me. “We were kids. That was just joking around.”

“Too bad I never went through with the suicide attempt, then. That’d have made a great punch line.”

“Like you’d have ever killed yourself.”

Right then, I could definitely have killed him. I’d just ripped the bandages off my soul, and all he’d done was sneer and rub salt in the wound. “Oh, and you know me that well, do you? I suppose you’ve been on one of those profiling courses, and now you think you know everything about everyone.”

“No, but I know you. We were at school together, remember?”

We’d reached the car park by now. I fumbled in my pocket for my keys. “Like I could ever forget—”

“Yeah, and I remember you too. You were always so bloody…” He threw his hands up, as if clutching for a word. “Self-contained,” he finished.

“Self-contained? What the bloody hell does that mean?”

“Oh, you know. Don’t try and pretend you don’t. Like you didn’t need anyone else. Like we were all just a little bit thick compared to you.”

What? I stared at him, speechless.

“You know,” he continued, “you wouldn’t have got so much stick from everyone if you hadn’t been so bloody standoffish.”

“Standoffish?
I
was bloody
standoffish
?” My voice rose so high on the last bit it cracked.

“Yeah. Always looking down your nose at people like me just because we came from the council estate.”

“I—
what
? Bloody hell, Morrison, have you even noticed you’re a foot taller than I am? If I wanted to look down my nose at you, I’d need a sodding stepladder! I can’t believe you’re even saying that.
I
was the one nobody liked. Poofski, remember? Because I haven’t bloody well forgotten what it was like, being the butt of your oh-so-funny jokes every…bloody…day.” The keys in my hand jangled as I punctuated the last few words with jabs of my finger at his overdeveloped chest.

Then I got in my van, slammed the door and drove home, seething.

I’ve got a little house in Fleetville, which is part of St Albans but has its own shops and pubs, so it feels like a separate community. It’s way less pretentious than most of the villages around here. It’s pretty ethnically diverse, so the shops are more interesting than in a lot of places—there’s a halal food shop and more takeaways than you could get tired of in a month of not cooking. You see a lot of ladies in saris or headscarves, and blokes in ethnic gear too. Brightens the place up, I always think. I live just off the main road, handy for the shops and the pub. Parking can be a pain—well, it’s St Albans, isn’t it?—but I can fit the van on the drive, and there’s usually room to park my little Fiesta in front.

At least the cats were pleased to see me, I thought with a smile as I walked in my front door. Merlin wove his slender, black body in and out of my legs ecstatically, and even Arthur deigned to get off his fat, furry arse and pad into the hall to welcome me.

They’re both toms, although most people assume slim, sleek Merlin is a she. Personally, I think he’s gay. He’s always rubbing up against Arthur as if he’d like them to be more than just good friends. Fortunately Arthur’s too thick to notice. He’s a big ginger bruiser who’d probably flatten Merlin if he realised he fancied him. Not very metrosexual, old Arthur.