chapter FOUR
ROYLE SAT IN his car and watched the estate, hoping that he didn’t see anything nefarious go down. He was off-duty, half-drunk, and incapable of acting professionally if anything did happen. He watched as a couple of young boys made their way towards Grove Alley, laughing. They walked with the stylised gait of chimpanzees: bow-legged and with their arms bent and swinging as if they were carrying rolls of carpet under their arms.
Wannabe hard men; trainee gangsters. This place was full of the f*ckers.
Royle switched on the police radio and listened to random call-ins: a possible burglary in Cramlington, a domestic in Near Grove... all the usual night-time scenarios. He switched it off again and stared through the windscreen. The boys had gone. The street was quiet and empty. It was late. Some of the lights in the houses were still on but others lay in darkness. He could hear the steady rhythmic thud of bass-heavy dance music coming from somewhere across the estate.
He got out of the car and nipped along Grove Street, then followed the Roundpath until he came to the gate in the hoardings that surrounded the old concrete tower block. He stood outside and stared in at the Needle, at its cruel walls and its boarded windows. There was a light on in the security cabin that squatted in the building’s shadow. He turned and walked a few paces along the Roundpath, stopped and bent low to the ground. He reached down and ran his hands over the loose gravel; small stones and wood chippings passed beneath the tips of his fingers.
This was where it happened. The man, Simon Ridley, had been stabbed to death by a person or persons unknown. His two friends had been standing with him when it happened, but they were unable to identify the assailant. Ridley had died almost instantly. Royle remembered coming out here to see the body. A young constable had already been on the scene, making the area secure with police tape. The body had been covered by a white sheet that was too small to hide everything and Ridley’s legs from the knee down had been visible. There had been a lot of blood on the ground; it had stained the sheet.
He’d lifted the sheet to look at the man’s face. The victim had been smiling.
Even now, over three months later, he could not forget that smile. He dreamed about it regularly; it followed him through the darkness. At the time he couldn’t be sure what it was about the corpse’s facial expression that had disturbed him so badly. Only afterwards had he realised that it was because it was a smile of pure irony.
Royle didn’t usually become emotionally involved with cases, and his level of obsession in his work was manageable – at least most of the time, and apart from one special case. But this one was different; he wanted to know the real reason behind that smile. He needed to find out who had stabbed Simon Ridley, and why they’d done it. Royle knew that his thought process was flawed, but for some reason he couldn’t help thinking that if he answered these questions he might be able to understand more about his own life, and about the ghosts that haunted him.
He rose to a standing position and took one final look at the Needle. The place had always made him feel uncomfortable, as if the cold, grey structure hid something that wasn’t quite ready to be seen. He’d worked this patch long enough to know that strange things happened in the Grove. The estate was like some kind of locus for negative energy; in Medieval times it would have been considered cursed. Once he had read an article in a magazine about something called the Hum – low level electro-magnetic waves that some people were able to hear in the form of a low-frequency humming noise. These people heard it all the time; whenever they were close to electricity pylons, the sound became more apparent. One theory was that the Hum originated from all the electrical goods people pack into their homes. It had even driven one or two people insane.
There was something like that operating here, in the Grove. But it wasn’t a discernable sound. More like a feeling, a sensation; like the slow, burning sensation at the nape of the neck when you feel like you’re being watched. He felt that all the time. It only ever went away when he left the estate.
Royle had a name for it: he called it the Crawl. Because that’s how it felt: as if invisible insects were crawling across his skin, wandering around all over his body. The sensation wasn’t exactly invasive, but it was persistent. Sometimes he wanted to rip off his clothes and leap into a river to wash it off – anything to be rid of the terrible feeling that things were crawling all over his body, treating him like a patch of ground.
The Crawl.
He could feel it now; he could always feel it, when he was here, on these streets. Thinking about the Crawl made it seem worse, because it drew his attention to the sensation.
He turned away from the hoardings and walked back to his car, head down, skin crawling, shoulders hunched, and with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his coat.
Royle drove out of the estate towards Grove End. He passed very few people, apart from a couple making their way along the street from the direction of the Unicorn pub. The woman was tottering on her high heels and the man looked pensive, slightly out of place in his surroundings. He thought he recognised the woman, but he couldn’t be sure.
The farther Royle travelled from the source, the less bothered he was by the Crawl. Eventually, when he was roughly a mile away from the Needle, the feeling stopped completely and he was able to relax. The three whiskies he’d enjoyed earlier that evening no longer warmed him. He reached out and turned on the car’s heating system, listening to the slow suction of air into the interior of the vehicle.
When he arrived at his flat he sat there still waiting for the car to heat up. After a couple of minutes he got out and walked to his door, fishing his keys out of his pocket. He let himself in, climbed the stairs, and went straight to the drinks shelf. He took a sip of whisky before taking off his coat. It felt good, like an old friend.
The off-license downstairs was still open but he had enough supplies to see him through most of the following week.
He supposed that it had been stupid to rent a flat situated directly above so much temptation, but he’d long ago realised that it was impossible to fight his cravings. He could manage the problem, but would never defeat his addictive nature. Vanessa wanted to arrange for him to attend AA meetings, or see a counsellor, but he wouldn’t accede to her demands. He knew that he was drink-dependent – he wasn’t an idiot, locked into a cycle of self-denial – but the basic fact was that the dependency sustained him. If he didn’t have the drink, he’d lose his ability to cope with the job he did. Almost everyone he knew on the force had a drink problem. Nobody talked about it out in the open, and as long as it didn’t affect the way you did your job, it was simply accepted as part of the territory.
He walked across to his tiny stereo and flicked on the radio. There was a late-night phone-in programme about street crime. He changed the station to a sports discussion show and sat down in his chair by the window. He liked to watch the streets at night. It gave him a sense of the mechanics of how society worked. There were phases of activity after nightfall: the early evening crowd of street kids marking out their territory, then the after-pub crowd staggering home, followed by an emptiness that seemed almost holy.
Sometimes, when he sat and stared out of the window, he saw signs of something bigger than himself, a vast conscious energy that stirred the litter in the gutters, the leaves on the trees, the swings in the playground opposite his flat.
Royle had never been a religious man, but as he got older he became more aware of his burgeoning spirituality. He wasn’t sure what he believed in, but he knew that he believed in something – or that he wanted to believe.
In his trouser pocket, his mobile phone began to vibrate. He took it out and opened the text message. It was from Vanessa.
Are you awake?
It was a system they’d worked out between them. He struggled with insomnia and the pregnancy was causing her to sit up late at night, unable to sleep. So if one of them wanted to talk, or simply to listen to another voice on the phone whatever the time of day or night, they’d send a quick text to see if the other was amenable to a chat.
He reached over and retrieved the landline phone from its spot on the windowsill and dialled her number. She answered on the second ring.
“How are you?” she said, without preamble.
“The usual. Can’t sleep, mind refuses to shut down. You know...”
He pictured her smile and the way she always ducked her head slightly, as if to try and hide her chin.
“What about you? Baby keeping you awake?”
“Yeah. Baby’s been restless tonight. I don’t think it enjoyed the mushroom sandwich I had earlier. Maybe Baby’s getting a bit sick of mushrooms.”
“The way it got sick of cooked meat?”
“Yes.” She paused, and he sensed some minor apprehension on her behalf. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m missing you tonight. Sorry. No... I definitely shouldn’t have said that.”
He adjusted his position in the chair and rested his fingertips on the edge of the whisky glass. “No, it’s okay. I know what you mean. I’m feeling a bit down myself, and kind of wish that I had someone here in the flat. Just another presence around the place.”
“Uh-hum. That’s it. That’s exactly it. I wouldn’t want you to speak to me, or do anything. Just be here. Be around, to make it less lonely.”
He felt an ache in his chest. Nothing major, a slight twinge that was gone just as quickly as it had arrived. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
They both stopped speaking, then. It was a comfortable, companionable silence. If they’d been sitting in the same room, one of them perhaps reading a book, it would have felt natural. But on the phone it was slightly strained. Royle listened to the static on the line and thought about the Hum. This thought led on to the Crawl, and he shut his eyes to try and disperse the negativity it brought. He was out of its range here; the Crawl could not reach him.
There was a crackling noise in his ear – or was it more of a clicking sound? Then the low-grade white noise surged back in and drowned out the other sound he thought he’d heard.
“This is awkward, isn’t it?”
He nodded and then remembered that she couldn’t see him. “It isn’t usually like this,” he said. “It’s probably me. I’m tired and frustrated.”
“Is it that young man, the one who was stabbed?”
“Yes... it’s always about him, lately. I can’t seem to shake it. I need to find out who did it, bring them in, and file it all away neatly.”
“Life isn’t like that. You know it isn’t. How many unsolved cases have you been involved with? How many dead people were buried without the answers to why they ended up that way? You know better than anyone that these things can’t be tied up in a bow and put away on a shelf somewhere, all neatly packaged. It doesn’t work like that.”
She was right. She was always right. About this, and about everything else. About them, their relationship, the way they had to live apart if they were to stand any chance of getting back together.
“How’s the drinking?”
He knew she’d ask. She always did.
“The same.” He waited for the sigh but it didn’t come.
“But are you working on it?”
He looked at the whisky glass perched on the arm of the chair. The amber fluid glimmered with light reflected from the window.
“Yes,” he said. “Slowly. I’m working on it slowly.”
He heard a soft smacking sound as she pursed her lips or sucked her teeth. He imagined her small, pink tongue poking between her lips.
“We’ll get there,” she said, and for a moment he wasn’t quite sure what she meant. “You and I, we’ll get there in the end.”
“I hope so. This can’t go on – not once Baby’s born. We tried so hard, we were so desperate for a family, and now that it’s happened we have to make sure that we are a family.” He felt like crying. The force of emotion was staggering; it made his body ache, filled up his head with acid.
“We’re getting closer, Craig. I can feel it. Things are changing and that can only be a good thing. The fact that we both want to be together makes me confident that we will be.”
His hand clenched around the glass. He stared at the hand, as if it belonged to someone else. He had no sense of trying to make a fist; he could barely even feel the hand as the fingers tightened around the glass. He wondered if it would break, and he’d cut himself on a shard, bleeding onto the chair.
“I’ll let you go now.” Her voice sounded so incredibly far away, a distance that could not be measured by common means. The words meant so much more than she intended, and for a moment he wished that he could explain to her exactly how he felt. Then he realised that he couldn’t do that, because he didn’t understand it either. There were no rules of engagement in the war he was waging against himself. He was making it all up as he went along, hoping that the casualties would be slight. He felt like the walking wounded, travelling along a road towards a salvation that might not even be there when he got to the end.
“I love you,” he said, his voice trembling with emotions that were so new to him they didn’t even have a name.
“I know.” She hung up the phone.
Royle returned the handset to its home on the sill and once again stared out of the window. The empty play park opposite looked different, as if subtle changes had occurred. The swings rocked slowly, the roundabout turned as if it had been pushed gently by an invisible hand; the climbing frame seemed as if it were tensed for movement, like a large spider waiting to pounce.
Five years ago, on this day, a seven year-old girl called Connie Millstone had disappeared from that park. Royle was in charge of the case – his first high-profile assignment after he’d been promoted to Detective. There was a big fuss made in the press at the time, articles in the red-top papers about predatory paedophiles, low-rent journalists calling for citizens to unite against a perceived societal threat. It had been absurd; a witch-hunt.
Despite the case having never been solved, Royle had been praised by his superiors for the way he’d handled the media-created outrage.
But little Connie Millstone was only the first of what soon became a spate of disappearances. The press began to call them The Gone-Away Girls.
Over the next year, three other kids went missing, all young girls. The disappearances were linked by a similar M.O. and the demographic of the victims. The only child to be linked directly to the Grove estate was a girl called Tessa Hansen; the rest had lived outside the area.
These were all children aged between seven and ten. Each one went missing from a supposed safe place (if anywhere in the Concrete Grove could be called that). A playground, a supermarket car park, the Far Grove skateboarding park, and in Tessa Hansen’s case a corner sweetshop on Far Grove Way – a street which formed part of the unofficial boundary between the estate and the district of Far Grove. There were never any witnesses, and no reports of anyone suspicious hanging around. The kids just... went away.
Connie Millstone, aged seven.
Alice Jacobs, aged eight.
Fiona Warren, aged nine.
Tessa Hansen, aged ten.
They were all in the same approximate age group. Each of them had fair blonde hair, a slight build, and was said by relatives to have a certain dreamy aspect to their personality and a loner’s ability to enjoy their own company. There was a link between them, but Royle had never discovered what it was. Other than the superficial similarities in their appearance and the fact that they each lived within a two or three mile radius of the Concrete Grove, there didn’t seem to be anything that connected the girls. They didn’t even know each other; they all went to different schools and moved in separate social circles. The fact that each subsequent girl was a year older than the last might be relevant – some kind of pattern – but he couldn’t see how or why. It was simply another part of the puzzle whose meaning eluded him.
It was maddening.
Like Simon Ridley’s smile, those disappearances still haunted Royle, and with this being the five-year anniversary of the first incident he was unable to rid his mind of the memories. He saw the places where those children had been, the holes they’d left in the fabric of existence, wherever he looked. Child-shaped gaps in the world. The Gone-Away Girls didn’t seem to be coming back, and every drink he took was a reminder that he’d failed them, failed their families, failed everyone, including himself.
Peering out into the darkness, he spotted something in the playground. There was something perched on the bottom of the slide. From this distance, it looked like it might be a bundle of clothing someone had dumped there, or a particularly small vagrant sleeping on the slide. He stood, leaning closer to the window, and tried to make out further details.
The bundle was about two-feet long. It could be a child, lying there on the end of the slide. Was it happening again, or could this be one of those missing children returning?
No, that was impossible. They’d be teenagers by now, if they were even still alive.
He blinked and then refocused his vision, hoping that the image would be gone. But it wasn’t. There was somebody on the slide.
Somebody.
Some body.
A body.
He moved quickly across the room, grabbing his coat, and was out the door, down the stairs, and in the street before he realised that he had not brought along his mobile phone. He’d left it by the chair after reading Vanessa’s text. There was no way to contact the station if this was in fact a dead body, or if he got into any kind of trouble investigating the scene. He could have run back up to the flat and grabbed the phone, but he experienced a sense of urgency that would not let him turn back.
He ran across the road, stepped over the short fence that surrounded the playground, and moved towards the slide. As he watched, the bundle began to move. It twitched several times, rolled over, and slipped off the edge of the slide, out of view. He felt the Crawl upon him – on his skin, like beetles.
Royle slowed his pace. The situation was so strange, so unlike anything that he could think of, that he was suddenly too afraid to move. So he stood there in the centre of the playground, wishing that he’d paused to pick up the phone.
The air was cold. The night was quiet. He couldn’t even hear a distant siren or an alarm. Not even the noise from a car or motorcycle. He stared at the slide, but the bundle was still out of sight. It had fallen to the side furthest away from him, and the darkness prevented him from seeing underneath the slide.
Slowly, he moved forward, ready to run or defend himself if something were to occur.
When he reached the slide there was no sign of the bundle – or the body, as he’d first imagined it was – so he made a quick inspection of the area. There was nothing on the ground nearby. The breeze had dropped so there was no movement from the swings or the roundabout.
He heard a rustling sound behind him, followed by a soft clicking noise. He turned around and looked at the trees bordering the northern edge of the playground, forming a boundary between the area where kids played and the tiny pavilion where old ladies and workers from the office a few streets away liked to eat their packed lunches. The leaves nearest the ground were moving, as if something had just crawled under there.
The Crawl, he thought. It’s the Crawl, and it’s come to get me.
His skin tingled.
He walked over to the spot and waited, trying to hear another sound. There was only silence – a silence so intense that it was almost like a new form of sound. He bent his knees and lowered himself into a squatting position, looking intently into the shadows under the trees. The leaves were no longer moving, but from deeper inside the undergrowth he heard a soft rustling, as of something moving away from him in the direction of the pavilion.
He spotted a fallen branch nearby and picked it up. Shuffling forward, he used the stick to prod at the area where whatever he had seen must have scuttled through and into the bushes. He lifted the hanging leaves and peered into the darkness. Nothing moved. There were no more sounds to indicate that anything might be in there, hiding from him and watching his every move.
The Crawl.
He stood and threw away the branch. Walking backwards, he moved away from the trees but kept watching them, looking for signs of movement. When he was satisfied that there was no longer anything there, he turned and headed back towards the road.
Behind him, something made a single clicking sound. He stopped, didn’t turn around. Waited.
The sound was not repeated.
This time, when he started walking, he had to fight the urge to run. If there was something (why did it have to be a thing, rather than a person, that he imagined back there?), he would not show it that he was afraid.
Because if the Crawl smelled his fear, it might come after him.