Shepherd's Cross (10 page)

‘Not if I have any say in the matter,’
replied Ben, delivering his best effort at a seductive smile as he closed the
door behind her.

If it wasn’t for the snow, Cara would
have skipped down the drive like she was sixteen-years-old.

6.30pm:
Bronwyn Hess reclined in her bath with the contented smile of a Cheshire cat.
Glass of wine, scented candles, Adele singing to her from the portable stereo
on the windowsill; life didn’t get much better than this. And to top it all
off, her friend Cara had called to invite herself over for the night. January
was a quiet time of year for a Youth Hostel manager, and Bronwyn welcomed the prospect
of having some company.

They’d met shortly after Cara had first
arrived in the village, and had warmed to each other immediately. Perhaps it
was due to them being of a similar age, or maybe because they were both
immigrants to Shepherd’s Cross, but they had soon formed a close friendship.
Bronwyn was hoping that Cara would accompany her to The Fallen Angel later that
evening – a far more appealing backdrop to good conversation than a cold, empty
Youth Hostel. There were no guests booked in for tonight; besides, she hadn’t
cooked anything for dinner, preferring on Friday evenings to rely on the
dubious ingredients of a Fallen Angel lasagne.

When Adele had finished performing the
final song on her album, the sound of the spinning cd came to an abrupt halt
and the room fell silent. The manager’s quarters, as they were rather
flatteringly referred to, were situated on the upper floor of the two story
building, at the far end of the corridor. This afforded Bronwyn a nominal
degree of privacy during the busy summer season, away from the prying eyes of
hormonally-imbalanced boy scouts and seasonal farmhands. The building dated
back to the early seventeenth century, having served most of its life as a
coaching inn for merchants and travellers. It had been converted to a Youth Hostel
shortly after the Second World War, when the demand for food and agricultural
labour was high. From around the 1960s, when leisure and holidays became both
more popular and affordable, the Hostel had experienced a surge in visitors of
all ages, keen to enjoy themselves and explore the surrounding countryside.
These were the glory years, before the era of cheap package deals to warmer foreign
lands, and although the Hostel still continued to attract its fair share of
tourists in the spring and summer months, it constantly struggled to hold its
head above water, having spent most of the previous fifteen years stumbling
along in survival mode.

Bronwyn was familiar with the peaks and
troughs of life as Hostel manager, taking advantage of the quiet times to catch
up on repairs and decorating the rooms. However, she was in her element when the
place was full; her naturally ebullient personality well-suited to entertaining
guests with far-fetched historical stories of wild highwaymen and rampaging
Scottish invaders. If she had a group of girl guides or boy scouts staying with
her, she loved nothing more than sending them off to their dormitories with a
bedtime tale of ghostly shenanigans still fresh in their heads, the Hostel’s
old creaking floorboards and clanging water pipes helping to accentuate the spooky
atmosphere.

While she was comfortable with being
alone in the Hostel during the daytime, going about her chores and pottering on
with her duties, she didn’t enjoy being by herself when darkness fell. The
eerie tales, with which she took great pleasure from scaring her guests, would
pick their moment to crawl from her memory and swim around her mind as she lay
in bed; daring her to investigate that unfamiliar sound she thought she’d heard
coming from down the hallway, or the black outline of a figure standing by the
door. She was perfectly aware that there was nothing to be afraid of, but the
subconscious thought is often more powerful than the rational mind; and the
imaginative sounds and shadows would occasionally grow to such a level, that
the only way to calm herself down was to switch on the bedside lamp and fall
asleep under its protective glare.

Fortunately for Bronwyn, there would be
no need to sleep with the light on tonight, so it was with a happy heart that
she climbed out of the bath and dried herself, folding her long black hair into
a towel that she expertly tied around her head. She’d only just pulled on her
dressing gown when she heard a loud knock at the front door downstairs.
That
must be Cara
, she thought. S
trange; she normally comes to the back
entrance.
She tied the cord on her dressing gown, stepped into her
slippers, and walked quickly down the hall.

‘Coming!’ she shouted, taking the stairs
two at a time and jumping off the third one from the bottom. ‘I hope you’re
ready for a girl’s night out?’ she shouted as she rushed to the front door, but
there was no answer from the other side. She didn’t pay any attention to the
lack of reply, eagerly sliding back the security chain and turning the latch to
the unlocked position.

‘I thought you were never going to get
here,’ she said, opening the door towards her. ‘It’s such a lovely surprise
to….’ There was nobody there; nothing apart from falling snow and the faint hum
of a streetlight. She poked her head outside and looked around; but the absence
of Cara, coupled with the freezing wind biting at her scantily-clad body,
forced her back inside to the safety of the Hostel.

She turned to return upstairs to the
bathroom, her stride now lacking in its earlier purposeful enthusiasm. As she
approached the top of the stairs, her mind still confused as to why there’d
been nobody at the door, she became conscious of a faint sound coming from
inside the bathroom; a gentle whimpering like that of a child. Bronwyn froze to
the spot, cocking her head to the side in a concerted effort to identify the
sound. The crying was definitely coming from the bathroom,
her
bathroom,
where up until two minutes ago she had been standing in front of the mirror,
thinking about how she could do with relocating a couple of pounds from her
backside to her boobs. The crying wasn’t that of a distressed baby; it was
softer, more like that of a small girl. A weak, soulful sobbing that filled
Bronwyn with a profound feeling of pity and concern, almost overriding the fear
she felt rising within her. As afraid of the dark as she was, she felt an
inexplicable urge to see inside the bathroom; to find out who was crying.

She moved from the top of the stairs to
the hallway, turning slowly to face the bathroom door. The hanging lamp that
served to illuminate the entire upstairs landing suddenly went dead, plunging
the hall into almost complete darkness; the only remaining light now coming
from the three scented candles that had accompanied her bath, their dim glow
barely visible through the gap between the hallway floor and the bathroom door.

The light may have disappeared but the
crying continued. Bronwyn found herself caught in a battle between heart and
mind: her heart ordering her to go to the bathroom and help the distressed
child, her mind screaming at her to run downstairs and get the hell out of
there.
You have to go and look
…y
ou can’t leave her crying there. And
where the hell are you going to run to? You can’t
just turn up at
someone’s house in your dressing gown. You have to see who’s there.

‘Alright!’ she said, speaking aloud to
the darkness surrounding her. ‘Get a grip, woman.’ Hearing her own voice helped
reassure her, so with a deep breath, she walked towards the bathroom. She
reached the door and took hold of the handle. The sobbing was still there, and
as much as she wanted to make a run for it, she knew that she needed to see
inside. She turned the handle and slowly pushed the door open, its creaking
hinges spoiling any opportunity for her to peek into the room without being
heard or seen.

Stepping inside and anxiously scanning
the room, she couldn’t initially see anything out of the ordinary. But she was immediately
conscious of the temperature; the room was ice cold. It was like standing
inside an industrial refrigerator, her breath visibly freezing as it flowed
from her lips into the surrounding air. As she stood shivering, she noticed a
slight movement coming from behind the shower curtain, which had been pulled
across its rail, leaving it hanging halfway along the length of the bathtub. Panic
rose to the surface and filled her head with terrifying images of what might
lie behind it. However, instead of running away, she reached out her arm and
gripped the edge of the curtain. With one firm tug, she pulled it back; and
almost immediately her world fell silent, tripping into the kind of slow-motion
surrealism reported by people who profess to having had an out-of-body
experience. The sight Bronwyn was met with caused her to awkwardly stumble
backwards, grabbing hold of the side of the sink to prevent her from falling to
the floor. Trying her best to compose herself, she slowly pulled herself up and
looked again towards the bathtub.

A naked girl was cowering in the corner
of the tub, her head buried between her knees, which in turn were tucked into
her arms in a futile attempt to hide herself from the world around her. All across
her back were the most horrific bruises imaginable, with scars of various
lengths that looked to have been caused by either a whip or a knife. The girl
was filthy, her long brown hair matted with grime and blood. As Bronwyn backed
away, the girl looked at her and began to speak. ‘Help me,’ she cried, her
voice so weak it was barely audible. Bronwyn leaned forward, straining to
understand what the girl was trying to tell her. ‘Help me…please…help me…don’t
let them hurt me…please.’

Bronwyn took a step closer towards her. ‘Who,
darling, who wants to hurt you? Don’t worry, you’re safe here, nobody can hurt
you here.’ Even though she couldn’t see her face, Bronwyn guessed from her tiny
body that she couldn’t have been any older than five or six.

‘Please,’ continued the girl. ‘They want
to kill me. You have to stop them before it’s too late.
Before they bring him
back.
’ As she spoke, several of her scars began to bleed, the blood
dripping in lines down her back into the bath. She started shaking
uncontrollably, her body convulsing as her crying gradually changed to
incoherent moaning.

Bronwyn could see that the girl was
dying right in front of her: blood now pouring from the jagged scars that
riddled her naked body, filling the base of the bathtub until it became deep
enough to have formed a dark red puddle around her legs. Regardless of her
fear, Bronwyn couldn’t allow herself to stand idly by any longer. She moved
closer to the girl. ‘Don’t be afraid, darling. I’m right here. It’s going to be
alright.’ She reached out her arms to touch her, but it was too late: the
girl’s eyes closed as the last of her life drained from her. She let out a
final, exhausted whimper and slumped to the bottom of the tub; lying face down
in her a pool of her own blood.

Bronwyn’s eyes filled with tears, her
heart broken as she stared helplessly at the girl lying deathly still in front
of her. She didn’t hear the sound of the backdoor opening and closing
downstairs, or the familiar voice of Cara calling her name and asking why she
hadn’t switched the damned heating on. Outside the bathroom door, the hallway
light flickered back into life. Bronwyn didn’t move; she was in another place,
a parallel universe, a different reality.

But when she looked up to see the girl
again there was nobody there, not even the slightest shred of evidence that any
of what she had seen had taken place at all. She frantically scanned the
bathroom - but to no avail. It was as if she had imagined it all. She leaned
over the tub, only to see the last of the soap suds from her bath disappear
down the plughole.

‘I hope you’re decent?’ Cara asked as
she entered the bathroom, ‘I didn’t hear you answer so assumed you’d b…’
Bronwyn was standing in the room, her back towards Cara. ‘Bronwyn,’ said Cara,
taking a step towards her. ‘Are you alright?’ Bronwyn slowly turned to face her
friend, but she offered no sign that she recognised her, her glazed eyes
staring at her like those of a dead fish. ‘Bronwyn, you’re starting to worry
me, stop messing about. Bronwyn? Bronwyn!’

Cara reacted in just enough time to
catch her friend as her eyes rolled back and she slumped to the floor.

8.00pm:
Tina Radcliffe, landlady and chef at The Fallen Angel, stood behind the bar
with a stern face and folded arms, mistress of all she surveyed. Although well
known for her lack of humour, she couldn’t help but be pleasantly surprised at
the amount of cash ringing through her till so early into the evening. In spite
of the weather outside, the place was heaving; as if people had concluded that
the only way to fend off the snow was to come together and drink to its
downfall.

The pub’s traditional interior was a far
cry from the shiny surfaces and floor-to-ceiling mirrors that typified the
modern bars of Newcastle: walking into The Fallen Angel was like stepping back
in time; exposed stone walls and wooden beams criss-crossing whitewashed
ceilings, which hung so low, that anyone over six feet tall needed to be on
their guard if they didn’t wish to exacerbate the severity of their hangovers
the following morning. The pub was divided into two main rooms separated by a
long, horseshoe-shaped bar, from which staff could serve customers at either
side. The front room was misleadingly known as the ‘formal bar;’ misleading as
you wouldn’t be refused a drink even if you were to walk in wearing dirty
wellington boots with your dog in tow. However, it was generally accepted that
if you wanted to enjoy your tipple in relative peace and quiet, or sit with
friends and chance your arm at one of Tina’s dubious culinary delights, the
formal bar was the place to go. The second room, or ‘back bar’ as it was
referred to, was the room of choice for the younger generation, or for those
who fancied a game of pool or darts. Smaller than the formal bar, the only time
when you weren’t guaranteed a seat in the back bar was on Saturday afternoons,
when the local lads and lasses gathered to watch whatever football game was
showing on the giant TV that hung ominously on the far wall like a black,
two-way mirror; uncomfortably out of keeping with the more traditional fixtures
and fittings that surrounded it.

Frank Gowland was the first customer to
have entered the formal bar that afternoon, and it wouldn’t take a gambling man
to bet on him being the last to leave it later that night. Already on his sixth
beer, he was propping up the bar, perched precariously on a stool next to the
cigarette machine and looking for all the world like he’d lost a pound and
found a penny, his torn overalls covered in the grease and paint stains of a
hard-working man; although everyone in the village knew all too well that Frank
Gowland and hard work went together like oil and water.

‘Frank Gowland, straighten yourself up
and quit staring into your pint like a man with a limp dick – you’ll scare away
my customers. And why do you insist on coming in here dressed like a homeless
tramp? I’m trying to run a respectable establishment here, not a bloody soup
kitchen!’ In addition to Tina’s lack of humour, she was also well known for her
rather direct manner and unsympathetic way with words.

‘Scare away your customers? I’m your
number one customer! You should be treating me with the respect I deserve,
woman. You’ve done bloody well off of the money I’ve spent in here. Besides,
wearing this gear gets me work – you can’t have your local handyman poncing
about in a three piece suit, can you?’

As much as he wound her up, Tina had to
acknowledge that Frank Gowland was a major contributor to her beer sales. While
she often found him irritating, the hard times she’d known in former years,
sweating ten hours a day for peanuts in a hot and stinking hospital
launderette, had taught her never to bite the hand that feeds you. With
regulars like Gowland, there was a fine line to tread between keeping them in
order and keeping them at the bar.

She rolled her eyes in despair and moved
further down the bar to serve a waiting customer. As soon as her back was
turned, Gowland sneered at her and resumed his favourite pastime of staring
into his beer and bemoaning the unfairness of the hand that life had dealt him.
He was joined two minutes later by Edward Bainbridge, husband of Charlotte; his
freshly-pressed and barely worn Barbour clothes making him instantly
recognisable as one of the Rowan Lane gang. He looked down at Frank and raised
his eyebrows.

‘Care for a drink, Frank?’ he asked,
arrogantly nodding at Tina to attract her attention.

Gowland sprang to attention like a
demented jack-in-the-box: asking Frank Gowland whether he’d like a drink was
like asking a constipated man whether he’d like a shit. ‘Err, aye, pint of
Steeltown, please. Very kind of you, Mr Bainbridge.’ The two men knew each
other; Edward had recruited Gowland’s services the previous summer to plant a
few shrubs and fruit bushes in his garden. Since then, he’d used him for a
couple of other odd-jobs: Gowland wasn’t the world’s most skilled handyman, or
come to think of it the most reliable, but he generally got the job done in the
end; and unless she was either mentally ill or desperate, or probably both,
there wasn’t a cat in hells chance of him being able to entice Charlotte into
bed with him. For a man like Edward, who spent most of the week in Newcastle,
this was an important consideration.

‘I have a job for you,’ Edward said. ‘The
guttering at the rear of the house is leaking in two places. The noise when I’m
lying in bed, the drip drip drip; it’s like Chinese torture. Can you come round
and sort it out? As soon as possible, eh?’

Gowland seethed inside at Edward’s
conceited, superior tone of voice, but the chance of earning some beer tokens
forced him to grin and bear it. He hadn’t always been such a pitiful slave to
the bottle; he’d once owned a reasonably successful painting and decorating
business, his reputation and talent ensuring that he was rarely without work.
That
Frank Gowland would not have been prepared to put up with Edward’s
self-importance;
that
Frank Gowland would have told him, under no
uncertain circumstances, exactly where he could stick his private education and
holier-than-thou attitude. But not
this
Frank Gowland:
this
Frank
Gowland, who had slipped further and further into the clutches of the bottle
like a fly into a pitcher plant, was prepared to swallow his pride and sell his
soul for the next drink. No questions asked.

‘Aye, I can sort it out, no problem Mr
Bainbridge,’ he replied. ‘I’ll take a look as soon as the snow has cleared.’

‘I don’t want you to just take a look,’
replied Edward. ‘I want you to fix the bloody thing.’

‘Of course, of course, that’s what I
meant. I was just saying that first I’d need to….’

‘Good,’ interrupted Edward. ‘Charlotte
will expect you next week then. I’ll leave the details to her.’ And with that,
he tried and failed to force a smile, collected his drink, and joined his wife
and some equally-overdressed friends at their table.

Tina stood opposite Gowland, having
characteristically listened into his conversation with Edward as she poured the
drinks. ‘What a pompous twat,’ she said. ‘Who in the hell does he think he is,
talking to you like you were nothing better than shit on his shoe? And you,
Frank Gowland, I’m surprised you let him get away with it.’

‘Oh aye, and what would you have me do?
Tell him to stuff his job and keep his money? He might be an arsehole, but so
what? The world’s full of them, especially them with more money than sense.
People like him have gotten away with talking like that to people like us since
time began. It’s the way of the world; you should know that as well as anyone.
Telling him to bugger off won’t help my situation one jot, will it?’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Tina replied. For
once, she was prepared to concede that Frank had a point: she’d worked for her
fair share of little-Hitlers in her time; insecure, power-hungry know-it-alls
who took every opportunity to abuse their positions of authority. But if you
needed the money, what other choice was there than to bend over and take
whatever they gave you?

There were those, however, who would
take great satisfaction in kicking the living daylight out of anyone who so
much as dared to look at them the wrong way, let alone a boss who tried to
assert his authority using bully-boy management tactics. Jed and Lee Carter
were two prime examples of such people, not that they had ever worked for
anyone in their entire lives, apart from maybe their good-for-nothing father,
Mick. Edward Bainbridge wouldn’t have dared speak to the Carter boys with the
same tone he had used for Frank; not unless he had fancied a couple of weeks
laid up in hospital drinking his lunch through a straw.

Aidan Carter had stayed at home with a
fever; otherwise he would have been standing in the back room playing darts and
drinking beer with his two brothers, their selfish two-hour monopolisation of
the board going uncontested by anyone else who may have wanted a game. Jed and
Lee, at eighteen and nineteen years old respectively, were already three sheets
to the wind, and their minds were beginning to wander away from the dart board
as they searched for the next source of entertainment.

‘Oi, Lee, have you seen that bird over
there? She’s got a right pair of tits on her. I bet you wouldn’t mind sticking
your cock between them, eh?’ asked Jed, as diplomatic as ever.

‘Too fuckin' right I wouldn’t,’ replied
Lee. ‘I bet she’s a right goer. I’d fuckin' love to shag that. Mind, you’d have
to have first crack at her.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Cause you wouldn’t be able to touch the
sides once I was done with her!’

‘Fuck off, you twat!’ came the
inevitably brash reply from Lee, promptly followed by a half-hearted attempt to
kick his brother’s backside.

Tina shouted at them from behind the bar:
‘Hey, you two; pack your swearing in or you’re out, do you hear?’ She was used
to dealing with the youngsters, especially the fledgling drinkers who seemed to
require no more than a sniff of a barmaid’s apron to cause them to start acting
like paralytic idiots. Jed looked at her and pretended to be frightened, but
her warning was sufficient to return them begrudgingly to their game of darts,
for the time being at least.

Laura Herne was doing her best to avoid
eye contact with the Carter brothers as they stared across the room at her; not
wishing to encourage their unwanted attention towards her ample breasts. ‘James,
those two idiots keep staring at me,’ she said to her boyfriend. ‘They’re
making me feel uncomfortable.’ She looked at James and subtly rolled her eyes
in Jed and Lee’s direction.

James smiled at her. ‘Who, those two
over there? I really wouldn’t worry about them, darling, they’re just a couple
of local halfwits. You don’t often find a gorgeous babe like you in a place
like this, you know?’ He winked at her and gently squeezed her knee beneath the
table. ‘Half of this lot will end up marrying their cousin or pet sheep;
honestly, you’d be surprised at the amount of interbreeding that goes on around
here. Anyway, you’ve got Captain Woody to protect you should the need arise.’

James Woodsman, or Captain Woody as he
was known to his beer-swilling rugby mates, had been reluctantly dragged to
Rowan Lane by his parents two years earlier, when his father’s firm had
relocated him to a job in Durham from their home in London. James hated The
Cross from the moment he arrived, so much so that his parents had stumped up
the extra cash to allow him to attend Boarding School in Durham rather than the
excellent local comprehensive ten miles away in Hexham. The fear of ending up
back in Shepherd’s Cross, or anywhere else in the North East for that matter, had
proven to be such a formidable deterrent that it had incentivised James to
study night and day for his A-Levels, which he had passed with flying colours.
His achievements had enabled him to attend the London School of Economics, from
where he had recently returned with his current girlfriend Laura, in order to
spend the Christmas break at home with his parents. The term ‘arrogance of youth’
was never more applicable than in the case of James Woodsman, whose love of
rugby and pretty girls was only outweighed by his love for himself.

‘Listen, darling, why don’t I buy you
another drink? I don’t fancy heading back just yet, especially not in this
weather. What do you reckon, same again?’

‘I’m not sure, James. I really don’t
like it here. And I don’t like being mentally undressed by a pair of drunken
apes. Can’t we just go back and watch a DVD or something? In bed perhaps…?’

 James didn’t need any more
encouragement. ‘Good idea,’ he replied, downing the remaining dregs from his
glass. ‘And I agree with you: this place is ghastly – it’s like a scene from
Deliverance
.’
He got up to go, but motioned to Laura to remain sitting. ‘Wait here – I just
need to pop to the gents. Won’t be long.’ He walked to the men’s toilet,
turning round to give Laura an ‘I can’t wait to shag you’ kind of smile,
completely oblivious to Jed and Lee as they watched his every step.

‘Right, Jed,’ said Lee. ‘Now’s our
chance. How about we ask that slag if she’s ever been with a
real
man,
eh?’

Jed smiled at his older brother. ‘I’m up
for it,’ he replied, nodding towards Laura’s table and setting his darts down
on a nearby bench. ‘After you.’

Laura noticed the two brothers making
their way towards her; as she watched them out of the corner of her eye, she
could tell that they were intent on hassling her while James was out of sight.
She felt confident that she wasn’t in danger - there were too many people in
the pub for that - nevertheless she froze to her chair like a startled rabbit
in the glare of an oncoming headlight. How she longed for the cold anonymity of
London, where nobody spoke to anybody anymore and where it was as socially
acceptable to stare into the soulless screen of a smartphone as the human face
of a stranger.