38
Shane
It is the silent hour of the night and Shane is walking. He walks swiftly, because the voices are loud inside his head tonight. They remind him about every mean and shameful thing he has ever done, every dirty thought that’s crossed his mind, everyone he’s hurt or thought about hurting. They tell him he is useless, that he will always be useless, and that everyone he meets turns away from him like toxic waste.
He strides down Portugal Street and has to curl both hands into fists to stop himself breaking into a run, because when he runs, the panic and the rage build and the voices rise from incessant whispers to screams in his ears.
Normally, the quiet of the city calms the voices. On most nights when he walks, the gentle sleeping noises the city makes – the distant hum of traffic, the musical chimes of the church clocks, the mew of a cat – lull the voices back to sleep. Nothing is working tonight and they keep on at him, voices that have plagued him for all of his life, and others that he hasn’t heard before. They tell him to cut. They tell him to stop wasting his time making ever more scars on the flesh of his lower back and make one final sweep across his throat. They tell him to cut the flesh of others. They tell him to kill.
He walks on, because the saner, better part of him knows that only the walking and the silence will keep him grounded. He turns into New Park Street and makes for the car park where the homeless hang out. Seeing their sleeping faces can help, but tonight he fears it might not. The voices are telling him to hurt and the homeless lie so quietly and so helplessly. He passes the old woman in the green coat dozing on a bench. Beside her is a shopping trolley that probably contains everything she owns.
A sound startles him. A harsh discordant humming. An image leaps into his head: that of a giant insect. He turns, and the insect is there, coming straight at him, low-flying, huge, humanoid in shape. Shane cries out in horror. His mind has finally parted company with sanity.
The insect is a girl on roller skates. She hurtles towards him, the wheels of her skates screaming over the rough tarmac of the road. At the last moment she swerves, avoiding him, hissing in his face. He catches a glimpse of a face, young but twisted with anger, and then she is gone. She skates like a professional. The bumps and holes in the road make no difference to her. She turns a corner and vanishes from sight.
The voices, shocked into silence by the girl, start up again. They are loud, insistent. Shane pulls his knife out and lifts his sweatshirt. He reaches up and back. The blade makes contact with his skin.
A siren sounds loud through the night and in the reflections of a nearby window, he sees the blue flashing lights. The car is almost on top of him.
Shane drops the knife and flees.
39
Felicity
Felicity is being pinned, face down. She cannot see the burning end of the cigarette, but she can smell it.
‘No, please don’t.’
A searing pain tears into the soft flesh of her left buttock.
‘No, please. I’ll do anything. Just stop.’
She is turned on the bed, and then the burning is replaced by a different pain, every bit as bad and when she opens her eyes, the face above her in the darkness has handsome, clean lines and golden hair.
She starts awake in the dark of her own bedroom and feels a cold breeze on her face. Her bedroom door is open and she knows she never leaves it like that. She cannot sleep with a bedroom door open.
Switching on the light, she gets up, as a church clock somewhere strikes the quarter-hour. The chill in her house increases as she steps into the hallway, and a door slams shut. She walks towards the kitchen, even though she knows she locked and bolted the back door before she went to bed. No one can have entered her house.
She moves down the hallway in a state of calm that feels beyond despair. She pushes open the kitchen door and is not remotely surprised to see the back door is wide open.
When she has checked her house from top to bottom, even the loft; when she has locked and bolted the doors and windows, she goes back to her bedroom and turns on every available light. She pulls off the T-shirt she sleeps in and stands naked with her back to the full-length mirror. Using a hand mirror, she angles it until she can see the cluster of burn scars around the creases where her buttocks meet the top of her thighs.
Not a dream then. A memory.
40
Joe
‘It’ll have to be quick, Mum. I’ve a patient on the way up.’
‘We’ve made some progress,’ Delilah says. ‘It might be good news.’
‘Always up for that,’ Joe replies.
‘Well, first up, I went to the Cambridge Flower Shop, where your secret admirer bought your floral tribute. Turns out she, or he, didn’t buy them. A bunch was stolen from the buckets outside the shop early on Monday morning. The owner was pretty pissed off about it. I think she thought I’d nicked them myself when I walked in with them.’
‘Is this the good news?’ Joe asks.
‘Just being thorough. So, that was a dead end. But then, last night, a patrol car pursued a white male down New Park Street. They only caught glimpses of him but he seemed to fit the description of this Shane we’ve been trying to track down. He got away, but he left a knife behind, and the fingerprints on it match those found in your flat.’
‘And this is good news?’ Joe is teasing. He knows exactly why this is good news. Fucking hell, it’s good news.
‘Well, all things are relative. If this guy Shane has been stalking you, we know it’s not that roller-skating psycho. We can breathe more easily on that one at least.’
‘We can.’ Joe feels his whole body relax. He starts to laugh. The relief is overwhelming.
‘But he’s still the prime suspect in a murder, Joe. Really not someone you want in your flat at night. Don’t suppose you can account for that?’
Joe waits for the fear to come back. It doesn’t. A disturbed homeless man called Shane. Bad enough, of course. But compared to what it could have been …
‘I get waylaid a lot,’ he says. ‘Some of these people are very wary of approaching me in anything like an official capacity. Maybe he just wanted to talk.’
He hears his mother let out a long, deliberate breath.
‘So did Shane leave me the flowers?’ he asks.
‘No prints other than yours and the florist’s on the cellophane wrapping, but probably. Joe, I’m not kidding. You need to watch yourself until we find him.’
‘Understood. Thanks, Mum.’
Joe is smiling, as Felicity walks in through the door.
41
Felicity
This time, Felicity is determined not to be hypnotised. ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ she says. ‘While I’m myself.’
‘Whatever you want,’ Joe agrees. ‘What would you like to talk about?’
She takes a deep breath. She has decided and she will not back out now. ‘That time on the common,’ she says. ‘When I ended up in hospital. It wasn’t the first.’
Several seconds of silence and then, ‘I’m listening.’