Something Wicked (19 page)

Andrew tried to sound as firm as he could. ‘We really shouldn’t do this.’

‘Pfft.’

‘Will you stop doing that?’

‘Doing what?’

‘Making that noise.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s really difficult to argue against.’

A troop of men dressed as nurses bounded along the end of the road, braying and laughing. Pairs of hairy legs were sticking out of short blue or white dresses, half of them in stockings, looking
like escorts for those on a budget. They must have been utterly frozen.

‘It’s up to you,’ Jenny said, in a distinctly ‘I-don’t-know-what-the-problem-is’ way.

Andrew sighed. This was going to be another one of her ideas that ended up with him in a brothel, or somewhere similar.

‘You’re absolutely sure there are no security cameras?’

‘I went for a wander around the back of the estate agent’s earlier. It’s a staff car park with a giant garage in the corner. There’s a bottle bank, overgrown trees, that
sort of thing. Everything’s in shadow.’

Another sigh. Andrew was beginning to annoy himself. ‘We can go and have a look. Just a look, mind.’

The car doors clunked open and closed, then the indicator lights plipped on and off. In the distance another couple hurried past hand in hand, with the male practically dragging his heel-shod
partner behind him.

Jenny led the way, almost skipping across the main road like a slightly giddy ninja wearing a backpack. Sirens were going off in Andrew’s mind – bad idea, bad idea – but Jenny
was right in the sense that if they wanted to trace Kristian Verity, this was where events had directed them.

She skirted around the side of Walker, Walker and Walkden, through a dodgy-looking archway and onto a crumbling patch of tarmac. Jenny was right about something else: the garage was in shadow,
as was everything else. Andrew gave his eyes a moment to adjust and then strained to see through the gloom in the direction she’d headed.

A giant oak tree towered overhead, swaying in the wind, its branches like a gangly teenager trying to cop a feel at a party. Hedges surrounded two sides of the car park, with the estate
agent’s on another and the back of an office on the fourth. Above, the moon was bright, wispy thin clouds skirting past, leaving a hazy blue glow.

‘Over here.’

Jenny was standing in front of a giant eyesore: speckled thick walls, a corrugated steel roof and a battered, well-scratched garage door. For breeze-block enthusiasts, this would be right up
their alley. Andrew joined her by a person-sized normal door next to the garage one.

‘Do you reckon it’s locked?’ she asked.

‘Obviously.’

‘Let’s try.’

Jenny reached for the door handle but Andrew grabbed her arm. He reached into his back pocket and passed her a pair of nitrile gloves. ‘Think about it.’

So much for just looking.

She slipped them on and then pulled down the handle and pushed. It didn’t budge a millimetre.

An overgrown hedge was covering the side of the garage: winding, scratchy vines wrapping themselves around the fabric of the building. Jenny peeped around the corner and then pressed her back
against the garage and started to sidestep along its length.

‘Where are you going?’

‘You said we were coming here to have a look, so I’m looking.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Pfft.’

Andrew watched her disappear behind a tree trunk, her slender frame arching and bending around the foliage. He leant against the side of the garage and checked his phone: 21.33. In a flash, he
remembered what he was doing this time the previous day with Courtney. His decision-making really wasn’t up to much at the moment.

‘Psst.’ Jenny’s stage whisper.

Andrew tried to gaze through the bracken around the edge of the garage but couldn’t see anything other than tight clumps of branches.

‘What?’

‘Come and look.’

Andrew had already squeezed himself past the first set of branches before he stopped to ask himself what he was doing. Who was supposed to be in charge?

A sharpened pincer of wood flashed through the darkness, narrowly missing Andrew’s face as he tried to force himself through a gap between the garage behind and the bushes in front. Jenny
had made her way silently, but he was snapping every twig going.

Andrew found Jenny in an unexpected clearing a metre or so in diameter. She was on her tiptoes, gloved hands pressed against the browning glass of an ancient single-paned window. To the right of
the centre, a tree branch had grown straight through the glass, creating a jagged hole.

She spoke in a whisper but there was mischief in everything she said. ‘Can you give me a piggyback?’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘You’re not breaking in.’

‘If the window’s already open, then it’s not breaking, is it? I’m only going to have a look – that’s what you wanted to do.’

‘I meant have a look at the outside.’

‘What’s the problem with having a look at the inside? That estate agent told us they were only storing a bunch of Kristian’s stuff that he’d left. They don’t want
it and neither does he.’

‘It’s still breaking and entering.’

‘I’ll give you entering but I’m not going to break anything.’

‘I don’t think that’s how the police are going to see things.’

‘How will they know? This is like the end of the earth – a dingy little car park hidden behind some office blocks.’ Andrew couldn’t argue that point. Jenny turned and
placed her hands on his shoulders. ‘Crouch down then.’

Andrew did as he was told, still tutting, but hoisting her onto his shoulders and then standing tall. He grunted, largely because he thought he should. Jenny weighed hardly anything. He angled
his head up, cricking his neck but watching as she eased the tree branch out of the hole in the window and snapped it in half. Carefully, she reached through the gap, straining downwards and
scrabbling on the inside.

‘What are you doing?’ Andrew hissed.

‘Trying to get hold of the latch. It’s all rusty. Hang on.’

She lifted herself slightly upwards, putting more pressure on Andrew’s shoulders, the heels of her trainers digging into his chest.

‘This actually hurts.’

‘I’ve almost got it.’

There was a clunk and then a joyous giggle of glee. Jenny carefully removed her arm from the hole, avoiding the rough edges of the glass, and then wedged her fingers in the gap in the window
frame and tugged it open.

‘Victory!’

Too late to go back now.

Jenny readjusted her backside, scooting backwards and forward and nearly making Andrew topple. He grumbled again, peering up as she clicked the latch into place, leaving a narrow gap.

‘You’re not going to fit through there.’

‘I’ll fit.’

Jenny wriggled again, dropping her backpack on the floor next to Andrew and then twisting, bending herself through the narrow space like a high jumper but with the grace of a gymnast. With one
final push, she was through with a clatter of wood and the sound of something metallic rolling across a hard floor.

‘Jenny.’

No answer.

Andrew pushed himself onto tiptoes, trying to peer through the latched window. He whispered her name a second time but there was still no reply. From the clatter as Jenny flopped inside, she
could have landed on anything. He tried calling her name again, slightly louder this time, but she still didn’t reply. Andrew peered up at the gap. When he was a teenager and could eat
whatever he wanted without it instantly appearing on his waist, he might have been able to squeeze through if he held in his stomach and didn’t mind his clothes getting torn. Now he had no
chance.

He picked up the rucksack and pressed his back against the breeze-block wall again, sliding his way towards the front of the garage, grumbling as he moved, cracking more twigs and generally
scratching his hands to pieces. The coat wasn’t helping either. It might be warm but it was also adding a few pounds to his weight and centimetres to his size.

After a final slash of branch on flesh, Andrew emerged back into the car park, rubbing his cheek. He squinted towards the arch but there was no one there, or in the vicinity. Andrew edged along
the front of the garage watching his feet before jumping back with a high-pitched shriek as the door opened in front of him.

Jenny emerged, eyebrows pulled down. ‘I thought you wanted us to stay quiet.’

Andrew’s heart was pounding irrationally. He breathed out heavily. ‘You scared the shite out of me.’

‘All I did was open the door.’

‘When I was right next to it!’

‘How was I supposed to know? Are you coming in?’

Andrew had a final glance around, figured he was already on unsteady ground legally speaking, and so followed her in. He slipped on his own pair of gloves and then closed the door behind
them.

The inside was dark; vague, barely visible shapes cluttered around the edges of the room. From nowhere there was a flash of light and Jenny was using her mobile phone as a torch. Andrew reached
for his, realising his chest felt tight from the claustrophobic clamminess of the space. The air was thick with damp, sticking to his tongue and making it hard to swallow. As the light from
Andrew’s phone joined Jenny’s, he gulped back a phlegm-filled cough.

The corner of the garage was flooded with a pooling puddle of water, drips plopping from the ceiling despite the lack of rain. Piled close to the door were stacks of brochures and magazines, the
corners curled and floppy. Andrew scanned across the top one: ‘Boom shack a lack: How the days of recession are over’.

The piles continued to the far wall, as if someone had emptied a skip-f and bundled it into nearly neat stacks. The cover date on the closest one to Andrew was from eighteen years previously.
Jenny had lifted a plastic sheet and was looking underneath, pulling items out of boxes and returning them.

‘See anything?’ Andrew hissed.

‘Junk.’

Against the next wall, there were towers of boxes that weren’t as damp as everything else around and weren’t covered in dust. Andrew held his phone between his teeth and then reached
up to lift down the first. He nudged an office chair that had no back with his knee, sending it spinning until he dropped onto it. The damp immediately soaked through his trousers.

Inside the box was an assortment of tat, but Andrew knew instantly it was Kristian Verity’s. Sitting on the top was a leather-bound book with a large pentagram on the front.

‘Jenny.’

She splish-splashed her way across the sodden ground, the light from her phone zipping across the space. Andrew put the box on a dryish patch of floor and reached up for the next one. In all,
there were seven boxes, drier and less dust-covered than everything else around them. One box at a time they began hunting through the assortment of items Kristian Verity had left behind.

Jenny held up a rubber-stopped vial of sand but Andrew could only shrug as he pulled out a silver cross hanging upside down from a chain. He rummaged down to the bottom of the same box, removing
what looked like three chicken bones tied together with a neat red bow.

‘Is this magic stuff?’ Jenny asked.

Andrew assumed so but didn’t know enough about it. Then he shuddered, thinking that the bow could be holding together any sort of bones, not just from a chicken.

One of the boxes contained nothing but candles and an incense burner. As Andrew delved deeper to make sure they weren’t missing anything, Jenny opened the next one, immediately holding up
a pair of hedge clippers with a vicious curved blade. The light from her phone glinted ominously from the sharpened edge.

‘Did he even have a garden?’ she asked.

Andrew shook his head. He didn’t but three of Nicholas Carr’s severed fingers had been found in the woods. Next to the clippers was a serrated knife in a leather sheath, piled on top
of a damp laptop that definitely wouldn’t work and a dark silky gown.

From the next box, Andrew pulled out a couple more magic books; a type of doll made from straw, with fine strands of wool holding it together; and then a collection of thin twigs bent and tied
into a circle with three more attached in the shape of a triangle within it. Andrew held it up for Jenny to see: first Nicholas, then Lara, the natural bowl of the woods, his office door, and now
Kristian Verity.

Jenny responded by holding up a framed photograph. Andrew put the symbol back in the box and used his phone to illuminate the picture. Water must have seeped into the box, getting into the space
between the glass and the photo, because the ink had started to run. Instead of a normal photograph, there was a greenish-brown smudge across the lower half, with the top part smeared except for a
face.

‘Do you think that’s Kristian?’ Jenny asked.

Andrew peered at the figure: curly dark hair, with a narrow face and a single spindly arm next to the water stain. Clearly visible on his wrist was a dark circle with an out-of-focus shape that
was almost certainly a triangle. He was only seventeen or eighteen.

‘Maybe. How old is he now?’

‘Thirty-six.’

Because of the way the ink had run, it looked as if there were two Kristians, frizzy black mops of hair running into one another before the water had seeped across the rest of the picture. Jenny
put it into her backpack and then picked up the symbol made from twigs and dropped that in too. Andrew didn’t object.

With two boxes remaining, they took one each. Inside Andrew’s were more magic books, the pages damp and sagging. Jenny pulled out a smaller fake leather-bound book and started fingering
through it.

‘It’s his address book,’ she said. ‘I guess he didn’t like using his phone for that.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘You can hardly read it – it’s really wet and the ink has run.’

Andrew took out the next book from his box but it was even wetter than the first. It was hard to breathe again, his throat sore from the clogged atmosphere.

All of a sudden, Jenny sat up straighter, her eyes meeting Andrew’s through the dusk. ‘What was Lara’s last name?’