Beyond Here Lies Nothing

like a brand.

He turned around. “The photo… Is it one of yours?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t been too close, but I was close enough to know that I didn’t recognise it. Why would we have a photo with scribbles on her eyelids, anyway? It’s… it’s awful, like something out of a horror movie.”

“I’m sorry, but I had to check.”

She nodded. “Can we go inside now?” She turned away without waiting for an answer. “I’ll make another cup of tea.” Her voice was tiny, like that of a child. She was clinging to the everyday rituals of making tea, offering her guest refreshments, and in truth she was clinging to her sanity.

Royle followed Mrs Millstone along the uneven cement path, resisting the urge to look behind him to check if the scarecrow had moved.

He knew it hadn’t. That was silly. It would be impossible.

But still he couldn’t bring himself to look and see.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“OKAY, MARRA. JUST keep me posted. You know you’re always welcome back here.” Erik Best stared at the wall, distracted, as he spoke on the phone. There was a crack there, in the plaster. He’d never noticed it before, but it started at the corner of the double door frame and made a rough diagonal line up towards the ceiling. There were ragged cobwebs around it, but there was no sign of any spider.

He said goodbye to his friend Marty Rivers, who was now living in London for the foreseeable future, and walked across to the doorway. He peered at the crack, wondering how it might have formed. The house wasn’t new, but it was in good repair. He’d spent a fortune on having that doorway widened and glass doors installed, about six years ago, when he decided to invest some money in the property. It shouldn’t be damaged. The workmanship had been top notch. He’d handpicked and supervised the workmen himself.

He stood on his tiptoes but was still too short to reach the top of the door frame. He shook his head and turned away, pacing across the room to the front window.

“Marty, Marty, Marty…” The guy had been his best bare-knuckle fighter and one of the most reliable men on his payroll. Something had happened a few months ago, up at the Needle — one of Marty’s old school friends had been stabbed by a piece of shit kid from the estate. He’d died on the spot. Marty had gone down to London to speak to the friend’s pregnant missus, and now he’d decided to stay there, to become some kind of surrogate dad to the imminent arrival. Erik had put out feelers to see if any names came up regarding the stabbing, but so far nobody was talking.

He looked out at his garden and tried to gain pleasure from what he saw. The plot was huge; the boundary fence adjoined a small wooded area, beyond which was a private field. Erik had made a lot of money over the years and this place was his haven from the stress of his business world. He knew a lot of dodgy people, consorted with all kinds of low-life criminals and high-class scumbags, but he’d not once invited any of them into his home. It was out of bounds, and hopefully out of reach. A man like Erik Best tended to make enemies, and the less those enemies (or even friends) knew about his private life the better.

Private life… now there was a phrase. These days, the only private life he had time for consisted of sex with the kind of slappers who worked in the low-rent pubs and clubs where he arranged security, or the occasional orgy with some punters from the fights. The middle classes; they always got horny after watching bloodshed. In the past, he’d enjoyed a lot of action that way, but these days all he wanted was safety and security, someone to hold in the night.

Abby Hansen had once offered him the kind of lifestyle he now craved. When she’d been raising Erik’s daughter, little Tessa, he’d kept his distance, but as soon as the kid went missing he wanted to be part of their lives. It was just like him to want everything after the offer had been withdrawn. His timing had always been off in matters of the heart.

We never know what we’ve got until some fucker takes it away, he though, watching a small grey squirrel run across his lawn. He wished he had a gun in his hand, just to shoot something that was alive. Make it dead. It was a primal urge; a deep-rooted instinct. To kill. To destroy.

Few people had known that little Tessa Hansen had been Erik’s child until she went missing. Even the bloke Abby had been living with at the time of her disappearance — his name eluded Erik, like so many other things lately — didn’t have a clue. He thought the girl was his own. The truth had only been let out into the open because of a traumatic event. They’d only fucked a few times, and she’d fallen pregnant easily. One drunken night when she puked up her pill; a tiny life conceived during a booze-inspired grapple. More of that bad timing, he supposed… what he would give to be able to be her father now, to raise her and teach her about the world. But it was not to be.

He turned away from the window and sat down in his favourite armchair, craving a few grams of coke. He was trying to cut down on the drugs, but the opposite seemed to be happening: he wanted more and more, relying on pills and powders to give him succour from the shitstorm around him. He knew it was bad form, and that his body would be suffering, but somehow he just couldn’t manage to kick those bad habits. Indeed, ones he thought he’d overcome years ago were returning with a vengeance.

When his mobile started to ring, he almost ignored it. But it was one of the business phones, and he tried to make it a rule that business always came first — even before his so-called fucking private life.

He took the phone from his shirt pocket and thumbed the answer button. “What is it?” No pleasantries for Erik Best; no pleases and thank yous. Just straight business talk.

“Erik… I mean, Mr Best. It’s Hacky.”

One of his little lapdogs; a scruffy kid on the Grove estate he sometimes paid to keep an eye on things. One of the many; just another small cog in the mighty Best machine, each one oblivious of the rest yet working in harmony to protect him and to keep the wheels of commerce nicely greased.

“What is it, Hacky? I’m busy, so this had better be fucking good.”

A pause; then someone whispering in the background, rushed and excited. “Aye, it’s good. I think it is, anyway. For you, like. The thing is, I’m not even fucking sure what it is…” Another pause, this one longer.

“Go on, Hacky. Tell me about it.” He settled back into the chair and closed his eyes, still thinking of Abby Hansen. But not as she was now, all thin and haggard and defeated; no, Abby as she had been a few years ago, before grief got hold of her and turned her into a listless punch bag. The Abby who had always been the boss in bed and who’d never put up with any of his shit.

“You know you always tell me to ring you if I see something weird?”

“What do you mean by weird, Hacky?”

“You know. Weird. Dead strange, like. Anything out of the ordinary on the estate… you always tell us that however small it might seem, a weird growth can sometimes have long roots. That’s what you say, innit?”

Erik sighed. “Yes, son. More or less.”

“Okay, then. I got summat weird. One of them things… the things you want to know about.”

Erik opened his eyes. He glanced again at the crack in the wall. It was just the same; it hadn’t grown, or moved.

Moved? How the hell could it do that?

His mind wasn’t straight. He was drifting off into irrelevant areas, focusing on stupid, pointless concerns. He needed to concentrate, to live in the now and not the back then. “Come on, marra, spit it out, will you? I have better things to do.” But did he? Did he really?

“The thing is… the thing… oh, fuck, man. Listen, if I tried to describe it you’d think I was tripping or summat.”

“And are you?” Erik leaned forward, ready to end the call and organise a little beating for Hacky, just to warn him not to waste Erik’s time. “Were you laying it on a bit heavy last night, you and the boys? Did one of you cook up a batch of cheap smack?”