That Summer He Died (2 page)

‘You wanted to see me,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ Distracted, Norm ran his hand back through his greasy mop of hair, then focused. ‘Oh, yeah. How was LA?’

‘The same as ever. Insane people paying insane prices to indulge in insane activities.’

‘And Peter Headley?’

‘Peter Headley was too insane even for LA.’

‘Gonna make a good piece?’

‘Gonna make a sick piece.’

‘There’s a difference?’ Norm said. ‘Sick is good. Sick’s what our readers love. When can you have it on my desk?’

‘End of the week.’

‘Cool.’

Norm pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, flipped the lid and smelt inside, before thinking better of it and sucking on his electric cigarette instead.

James’s bed was still beckoning. ‘Marcus said you’ve got something for me,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ Norm was rubbing at his watering eyes.

‘Maybe a rise?’ James suggested.

‘No chance. Haven’t you heard? There’s a recession on. . . and. . . ’

James phased out as Norm’s chapped lips continued to move rapidly.

‘And magazines have been hit hardest of all. . . With so much content free online these days, it’s harder and harder to get people to subscribe to any mag’s print or electronic versions, leaving the future of fledgling publications like
Kudos
balanced on the edge of a knife. . .’

James had heard all of Norm’s arguments before.

‘. . . meaning that you and me, mate, we’re lucky to have bloody jobs at all right now,’ he finished.

‘So if it’s not a rise I’m here for, I’m guessing it’s an assignment?’ James suggested. ‘I mean, I know it’s unlikely, you considering doing anything other than rewarding me after I’ve spent the last fortnight sifting through data and photos on dismembered bodies. . . but it is possible, I suppose.’

Norm clicked his fingers. ‘Well deduced, Marple. It
is
an assignment.’ He rifled through the spread of magazines and photos and newspapers on his desk. ‘What d’you know about Grancombe?’

James hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Typical tourist town. Down on the coast. Buckets and spades. Overcrowded in the summer. Dead in the winter.’

‘That’s the one. Only not so typical. Not unless you fall for the Tourist Board line anyhow. Some murders there nine years ago. Serial stuff. Sick stuff. Like Headley, only a lower body count. You remember?’

No.

No.

James felt for a moment like he would fall. He walked over to Norm’s fridge and took out a can of Coke. He drank quickly, washing down the nausea that had risen in his throat.

‘Yeah,’ he said then, crossing to the window and staring out. ‘Long time ago. Old news.’

As James turned back, Normslid an iPad across his desk. ‘Not any more, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘This broke while you were away.’

A tabloid site filled the iPad’s screen. Its headline read
RETURN OF THE GRANCOMBE AXE KILLER,
like some crappy billboard advert for a fifties B-movie.

But it wasn’t these words James’s eyes settled on. It was the eyes of the victim in the photograph. It was the eyes of Daniel Thompson that bored into his own.

James’s mouth opened involuntarily, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, once more forming the word ‘No’. He watched the iPad shaking in his hands. The photograph looked like it was about to slide into animation. . . Daniel Thompson looked like he was moving. . . like he was rising up off the page, inflating from two dimensions into three.

His hand was reaching out for James.

No.

James closed his eyes.

Nothing.

He remembered nothing.

Daniel Thompson meant nothing to him. Grancombe meant nothing. None of that meant anything any more.

‘You all right?’

Norm’s words came at James like an alarm breaking into sleep. It took him whole seconds to open his eyes and remember where he was.

‘For someone who doesn’t do any gear, you’ve got the shakes pretty bad.’

‘Too many comp drinks on the flight,’ he mumbled. He forced his hands to be still as he looked back down at the iPad. He swiped across its screen, wiping Daniel Thompson’s face from existence.

He read the text of the article that took the photograph’s place:

Almost a decade after Kenneth Trader’s body was discovered in the woods above Grancombe’s South Beach, the Grancombe Axe Killer has struck again.

The body of Daniel Thompson, 27, was found yesterday morning by Tony Monckton, a tourist, while he was walking along the picturesque clifftop.

Thompson, who had been a known associate of Trader’s before he was murdered, was lying less than fifty feet from where Trader was found.

The print blurred. James felt his grip weakening on the iPad. Jesus, he thought. How can this be happening? After all this time?

‘I’m not doing it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’ He looked Norm in the eyes. ‘I’m not covering the story.’

‘Why the hell not?’ A combative sneer settled on Norm’s face.

But James didn’t care. He needed out now. He glanced over at the door handle, a childish part of him wanting to flee. But he wasn’t a child any more, was he? Instead he frantically groped for a reason to make his boss change his mind.

‘The Headley thing,’ he said. ‘I need some time away from that sort of story. I need something fresh. I need to clear my head.’

‘So get some fucking shampoo.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Look, I can relate, yeah?’ Norm said, trying to look serious now. ‘We’ve all covered nasty stuff and we’ve all got freaked out. But you get over it. You get over it and you get on with what comes next. And I’m not even asking you to profile the killer like you did with Headley, OK? I mean, they haven’t even caught this Grancombe creep, have they? So it’s not like there’s going to be any more psych shit that’s going to start messing with your head.’

‘I already told you: the answer’s no.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s bullshit.’ Norm’s sneer was back in place. ‘Because this is perfect. We can run the Headley piece alongside one on the Grancombe Axe Killer. You know, as in American versus British? Like who’s the sickest, right?’

James felt his in-flight breakfast preparing for take-off.

‘You make it sound like a sports fixture,’ he said. ‘People died. Real people.’

People like Daniel Thompson. . .

‘All I’m asking is for you to get your arse down to Grancombe and hang out there for a week. Talk to the pigs and the locals and the tourists, and find out what it’s like living with the knowledge that there’s a serial killer on the loose.’

‘I’m going home,’ James said

‘Sure, fine, I get it. You’re tired. So go and get some sleep. Then when you wake up, we can talk about this again. When you’re thinking more clearly. . .’

James didn’t answer. He was already out through the door, eyes focused on his feet as he marched down the corridor.

‘Just think about it,’ Norm barked after him. ‘That’s all I’m asking. Just think about it and––’

James didn’t hear any more. He was already in reception. He was opening the door and he was not looking back.

*

If James had had anything left in his stomach to throw up, he would have plastered it across his bed when he woke around eight that evening.

But since he’d got home and had only just made it to the kitchen sink, where he’d introduced a new kind of American fast food to Britain, he hadn’t been able to hold anything down. So, here in his bedroom, nothing but air came up now.

Forget it.

Don’t get drawn in by the undertow. Don’t think about it.

Bury it again.

Bury it deep.

That’s what he told himself, but that image of Daniel Thompson’s face staring into his own after all these years wouldn’t leave him, no matter how much James begged.

Ghosts. Ghosts return to haunt the people who could have made a difference. Ghosts come back for the people who could have kept them alive.

Only the guilty believe in ghosts.

Only the guilty can’t make them go away.

James stumbled through to the bathroom, shut himself behind the glass door of the shower, and took a beating from the water. He scrubbed at his skin with soap and brush. But, even as he did it, he knew that nothing was going to be strong enough to disinfect his mind, or leave him feeling clean again.

He dried off and dropped the towel on to the floor, walked naked from the bathroom back to the bedroom. He passed the windows overlooking the King’s Road, careless of what other people might think if they saw him.

This wasn’t about him any more. This was about who he once was. This was about an eighteen-year-old boy who’d left this very same flat nine years ago and moved to Grancombe for the summer, a boy who’d seen too much and had chosen to forget, a boy who hadn’t believed in the power of ghosts.

Not like he did now.

He rifled through the courier bag on the chair by the window and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d picked up after leaving the office, snapped the cap and drank.

The liquid yo-yo-ed in his throat for a few seconds, then settled, warming his stomach like a hot water bottle. His breathing slowed for the first time since he’d woken and he settled down by the radiator, rubbing his back against it. He drank again. And again. And then he rolled a spliff, closed his eyes and let the high carry him away.

Later, stoned, he found himself staring at his wardrobe. He got up and crossed the room and opened it, ripped the fallen clothes away from the base, uncovered a suitcase and jerked it out. It smelt musty inside when he flipped the catches. He stared for a twenty-four-hour minute at its contents.

He dug out the envelope full of photos from beside the discarded digital camera beneath the jumble of papers. The snaps weren’t in any particular order. But all were from that summer he’d spent in Grancombe.

There was one of him lying on a bench on the sea front. It was a sunny day. He looked at peace, midsummer-dreamy, even dead.

Next came a load from a party on South Beach. He checked the faces and remembered whose eighteenth it was.

Then there was Daniel Thompson, a snap of him knee-high in water, chucking up into the dusk-blooded sea, lager can in hand unrepentant.

James quickly slid the photo to the bottom of the pack, looked instead at one of some girl Dan had been seeing at the time, posing like a catwalk model on the rock plateau outside Surfers’ Turf.

James hadn’t seen her for years – he continued to flick through the deck of snapshots – hadn’t seen any of them for years, not since he’d caught that dawn train back to London nearly a decade ago.

He flicked over another photo and froze. Suzie. There she was, sitting next to the fire, feet buried in sand, dark-haired, even more beautiful than he’d remembered. She hadn’t been looking at him, hadn’t known he’d existed. He felt as if a sponge was expanding inside his throat. The photograph fell to the floor.

*

The next morning, the first thing James noticed was that his mouth and tongue felt furry. He peeled his lips off the carpet and the rest of his body, muscles protesting at every inch, followed. He wiped some stray carpet fibres from his tongue and backed up to the bed, sat down on it and held his head in his hands.

He looked round and couldn’t believe what a tip his room was. Rogue Rizlas, scratched and discarded iPods and broken cigarettes lay strewn across the floor, like debris from a rock-and-roll air crash.

The other thing James couldn’t believe was that he actually felt better. Spiritually, that was. Physically, things couldn’t have been much worse. But spiritually things were definitely looking up.

The ghost of Daniel Thompson, if not exorcised, had, at least for now, retreated back into the shadows. He was a memory again, nothing more. And with his departure, the ice had melted from James’s spine.

He went to the bathroom and showered and shaved. He studied himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth and pronounced himself fit to re-enter the human race, albeit as a rank outsider in the running.

He dressed, then collected up the photographs from where they still lay scattered on his bedroom floor and shut them back in the suitcase, returned it to the wardrobe and locked the door. He walked through to the kitchen and fixed himself breakfast.

He sat peering at the wall through the steam of his coffee, steeling himself for the rest of the day.

Forget.

Forget everything.

Right?

Because that’s what had worked for him right up until Norm had thrust the newspaper article about Dan’s murder into his hands. And that’s what would work for him now as well.

If the past was a foreign country, then James was determined to remain an unwavering xenophobe: he’d wear his Union Jack boxer shorts with pride, turn up his nose at the first whiff of garlic, and administer a good kicking to anyone who spoke a different language.

If that was what it took to remain an island, to reassert control over his memories, then that’s what he would do.

*

That was also what he’d told himself in the months following his departure from Grancombe, after he’d fled first back here to this flat in London, and then on to Edinburgh University, where he’d rented a flat in New Town and had registered for his fresher year in English Lit.

And denial had proved good for him.

It had let him move on.

It had worked.

Sure, not at first. For most of that first bitter Scottish winter his nightmares had persisted, half-drowning him in sweat-soaked sheets, trailing him to the bathroom in the middle of the night, lurking in the shadows in the morning for whole minutes after he’d awoken, leaving him gripped by the possibility that the past had the power to infiltrate the present, making him desperately question if he’d ever find peace.

But, with time, the morning hallucinations had ceased and had melted away with the winter snows, trickling down the gutters out of sight.

And then, as he’d increased his involvement in university and the here and now, his nightmares had started to lose their solidity in his mind and had turned watery too.