Authors: Sam Baker
And the secretary, a quiet girl who ordinarily wouldn’t have said boo to a goose, rounded on the department boss and said, ‘Of course you do. That’s precisely the kind of man you marry, because how on earth would you say no?’
A teenage typist, flattered by an ad salesman three or four years older … Possibly. But someone like Helen?
It seemed unlikely.
Gil thought of that as he drained his coffee. He didn’t like where the thought was taking him. If you couldn’t walk away, might you … Might someone that desperate resort to extreme means? And, if they did, would that make them a murderer? Or something else?
Gil knew he had four choices: sell her story, call the police, help her, or do nothing. Sit back and watch and wait and hope no one else died. Like that was going to happen. Gil had never done
nothing
in his life. So he had three choices, and he had already, in the back of his mind, discounted the first two.
So, you’re going to help a murderer?
Helen leaned her forehead against the upstairs window and watched him go through the gap in the curtains. The leading was cool against her skin, a chill draught lifting the wisps of hair on her forehead. Through the warp and weft of the centuries-old glass, she watched Gil’s loping strides make short work of the large forecourt, his body slightly distorted like a fairground mirror. To her surprise, he didn’t turn round. Didn’t look back. Didn’t even pause as he reached the gate and turned on to the road. She would have put money on him being a looker-backer. Just went to show what a good judge of character she was.
Fatigue closed in the moment he vanished from sight. Allowing her eyes to droop she breathed slowly through her nose, condensation fogging her view as she tried to clear her brain.
Thank God that was over.
She laughed, a hard bark of a laugh, and opened her eyes.
But it wasn’t, was it? It would never be over. Not now.
Art was dead. And Gilbert Markham knew. He knew almost as much as she did. More, possibly. How much more there was to know Helen hardly dared think.
The thought brought her up short. What if Gil
did
have more information than he was letting on? What if he’d already spoken to the police? What if he was toying with her, the way Ghost toyed with tiny rodents in the middle of the night?
No. Helen shook the thought from her head. That wasn’t Gil’s style. She was sure of it. That was Art’s MO. She was transferring.
Helen knew she should try to get some sleep, but adrenalin surged through her. The idea of putting on her pyjamas, closing her eyes and getting seven blissful hours’ rest was laughable. It had been laughable for as long as she could remember.
Slumping on the settee, she looked around the drawing room. It reeked of Gil, she realised. She’d got so used to the constant fug of B&H that accompanied him that she hardly noticed. The miasma of smoke that hung in the air wasn’t the only evidence of their long night. Empty mugs, vodka bottle three-quarters drained lay to one side on the floor, a saucer overflowing with cigarette butts perched precariously on the arm of the chair where he had spent the last six hours, hardly moving except to light another cigarette or take another shot of vodka. The carpet around his chair was confettied with cardboard. The B&H packet, Helen realised, noticing shards of gold in amongst the white. Shredded into tiny pieces and then shredded again. She could still make out the clear spot on the carpet, where his feet had blocked their landing.
And she was meant to be the anxious one.
As inquisitors went, Gil Markham seemed strangely benign. Even Ghost seemed to think so. Sometime during the night he’d slunk into the room and settled beside Gil’s chair, a puddle of black fur barely visible against the dark red of the rug. His presence was strangely comforting.
But Gil wasn’t benign. You were either an inquisitor or you weren’t. Gil was a journalist. He fell firmly into the former camp. And he would be back, she knew that. And with him would come more questions. Questions that right now she didn’t know how to answer.
Dragging the old settee closer to the three-bar fire, Helen lay down and curled her legs up beneath her. Tucking her arm under her head, she waited for sleep to come. Her head throbbed – vodka, smoke, anxiety, exertion – all four, but the headache didn’t bear the hallmarks of a migraine. This was a good old-fashioned tension headache.
Gingerly she closed her eyes. The second she did, images crowded in. A small boy, maybe five or six, sitting on a filthy doorstep, surrounded with rubble. Brown eyes huge. Bare legs skinny and bruised, ending in lace-less, too-big plimsolls. In his hand was a red Power Ranger. She squeezed her eyes tight in an attempt to banish him and was rewarded with an orange haze and the over-powering stench of smoke. She could have sworn she heard something crack.
Her eyes shot open.
Just an overflowing saucer of B&H stubs, a three-bar fire and a snoring cat. Nothing more. She rolled over and lay on her back, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling. It had been white once, but now it was cream, faded with age and stained yellow with nicotine. The coving engrained with dust where it met the ceiling.
Now she’d let them in, they’d taken root. Art and the boy. Not that either of them had ever gone away.
A montage of images she’d studiously pushed to some distant corner of her brain began replaying over and over.
Art in the bar in Baghdad, half-empty Bud in his hand, twinkling like he knew how to twinkle when it suited him.
Art looming over her in a concrete stairwell, his breath hot on her face.
Art gazing at her earnestly over a café table in Soho. ‘Marry me.’
Art, thin-lipped with rage at something or other she’d done. Got pregnant. Lost it. Got a job. Got a front page. Got an award. Talked to someone he didn’t like the look of. Someone like Carl.
Art, holding her close in the debris of her exhibition, stroking.
Outside the window, a crow took flight, wing batting the pane as it did so. Helen jumped, leg shooting out and kicking the vodka bottle. In the corner, Ghost stretched, arching his back and then effortlessly inverting his spine in a way Helen could never have achieved in a million yoga lessons. Yellow eyes stared at her.
‘Not yet, cat, I’m sleeping.’
Ghost gave her a look of pure contempt and padded closer, fixing her with his yellow glare.
She closed her eyes, couldn’t bear what she saw there and opened them again.
Ghost started up a low-level purr. The frequency went right through her.
‘All right!’ Helen knew when she was beaten.
The cat allowed her a two-minute detour to her bedroom to put on her running kit and then followed her into the bathroom, where he worked a figure of eight around her legs as she sat on the toilet and then moved with her to the basin while she cleaned her teeth. Like Gil, he had no plans to let her out of his sight until she’d given him what he wanted. At least in this case it was just breakfast.
Too lazy to go via the road, she slipped out through the back door, locking it behind her, and crossed the courtyard, unbolting the gate that led into the gardens beyond and down to the copse. The sun was rising, still low, but unmistakably there, and for a moment or two she allowed herself to wonder if it was a sign of better things to come.
Maybe everything
would
be all right. Maybe talking to Gil would bring her memories back. If she could remember what had happened that night, maybe she wouldn’t have to leave after all?
Maybe she would.
‘Don’t be stupid, Helen,’ she muttered, as she slipped through the lychgate and picked up her pace through the shadowy cover of the copse. ‘He’s a journalist, not a priest.’
The Dales were quiet this time of the morning, like the day she’d arrived. Just sheep, crows and a couple of early morning birdwatchers. Helen gave the twitchers a wide berth and ran in the direction of the Scar, picking up pace and letting the movement of her body, muscles pumping, blood pulsing, push all thoughts from her mind.
Although she didn’t usually come at it from this direction, she was starting to know this part of the Dales like the back of her hand. So well, she could almost run it with her eyes closed. To test herself, she did, and immediately stumbled on a crop of boulders that came from nowhere.
‘Idiot,’ she muttered, catching herself before she hit the ground, and moving off again.
At the bottom of the slope, Helen stopped and looked around. She hadn’t been far from here when she’d seen him that time, the small boy, the one with big brown eyes and no coat. It was him, she’d known the second she saw him. If she’d been able to get closer she’d have been able to see the red Power Ranger he always carried in his hand. She’d wanted to tell Gil last night, but she wasn’t sure he’d believe her. Silly, considering everything else she’d entrusted him with, but he didn’t seem the superstitious type. Mind you, neither was she.
In some cultures, they believe that taking someone’s photograph steals a bit of their soul. Helen had always felt that with the boy, that she’d taken a little bit of him with her when she snapped that first shot, a bit that was never meant to be hers … A bit that remained with her.
She looked up, half-expecting to see him standing next to her now. Instead, one of the birdwatchers had moved closer, binoculars raised in her direction. Helen looked upwards, following the angle of his gaze, expecting to see a hawk wheeling above. But the sky was empty. Not even a bunch of crows. When she glanced back the birdwatcher in the dark cagoule was still staring.
She looked up again, thinking she must have missed something. But no.
The fine downy hairs on her arms prickled and Helen felt the ground beneath her give.
Steadying herself, she turned and started down the slope, zig-zagging too hastily between boulders, almost tripping. At the fork in the path that would take her back the way she’d come she jinked left towards the road instead. In the distance a jogger, small, probably female, was coming towards her.
Don’t be so paranoid, she told herself, slowing as she reached the drystone wall that bordered the road. Lack of sleep, too much vodka, too much thinking about Art … They were messing with her head. Nevertheless, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the man with the binoculars hadn’t been watching birds at all. He’d been watching her.
Gil was obsessed, he knew it. He recognised the signs. Had seen them before. He could tell himself it was the story, the thrill of the chase. But it wasn’t. It was the woman. He wanted to believe her. More than that, he wanted to
understand
her. And to do that, he would have to get under the skin of Huntingdon.
He started with his Facebook account, unused since the fire, and his Twitter account: 7,500 followers. Somehow Gil had expected more.
Huntingdon’s feed was a slow boil of outrage and dislike. Protests that the truly talented were ignored. Sweeping political generalisations. Insults to politicians followed by sycophantic climb-downs to any who bothered to reply. He introduced himself, on Twitter, to Rupert Murdoch as a man with skills to offer. He tweeted a critique of the Royal Family’s news handling to a palace account.
Hire me
was his endless unsaid plea. When no offers materialised, his position changed. It was a conspiracy. What society needed was genuine meritocracy.
As someone who started his first job at fourteen and worked his way up only to meet others coming down from university into jobs above him, Gil could sympathise. But Huntingdon came from the generation that went to university almost as a matter of course. From what Gil could discover, the milk round had given him a traineeship on one of the top newspapers. He
started
in Fleet Street. What did Huntingdon think meritocracy could offer that this hadn’t already handed him? The tweets stopped, obviously enough, with the man’s death. Shutting down the twitter feed, Gil moved on to Google Translate.
The few French news reports focused on the damage to a historic building in one of the city’s oldest squares. The fire had been so fierce the whole floor had been cordoned off, and the floor below. When it had finally been declared safe, one body was found. Well, the remains of one, carbonised and twisted and almost beyond identification. Dental records proved inconclusive, DNA tests were to be carried out, assuming DNA could be extracted from a body so burnt. All evidence pointed to it being Art Huntingdon.
When the reports became repetitive, Gil returned his attention to Huntingdon. The man also had a LinkedIn account. After opening one for himself, Gil took a look. Nothing he wouldn’t expect. Although, one thing struck him. Huntingdon had begun well, taken in for training by a big organisation, and had changed jobs on the dot of two years. His next job was a putative promotion but meant going down a level in the quality of paper he represented. Two years was when training ended. Gil wondered if he’d jumped ship or been advised to look elsewhere. Clearly 9/11 raised his profile for a while. But the overall pattern was repeated: grander jobs, but at slightly less impressive places each time.
Then the bylines began to dry up.
After the last of the staff jobs came the news agency Helen mentioned: small, unimpressive; Huntingdon had been made head of bureau. Trawling through the
about us
pages of the agency’s Paris office suggested Helen had been kind in her description; it appeared to have a senior staff of one.
A trawl of electoral registers showed Art Huntingdon’s first wife reverting to her maiden name the moment they separated; despite living alone at the family home, and remaining ostensibly single for the next five years. Reverting to your surname that quickly was never a good sign. Interestingly, his children’s surnames changed too. Albeit briefly. If there was a legal battle, the mother lost. The roll gave the children their mother’s surname for the year of the divorce. The following year they were back to Huntingdon.