Black Cathedral

what it is we’re investigating?’

He finally turned to look at her. ‘I’ve a feeling you’re going to tell me.’ He smiled at her for the first time and she was pleased.

She briefed him quickly. Kulsay, the disappearances, the mystery. ‘Still not interested?’

‘No, Jane, I’m not.’ He pointed to the keep net. ‘Look there.’

Jane looked. ‘What am I supposed to see, apart from a few poor fish that’ve been dragged away from their simple lives by a hook and line.’

He smiled at the implied criticism. ‘Watch them swimming round and around. You’d think they were quite content. Then occasionally one of them will swim deliberately into the net. Do you know why?’

Jane shrugged, not sure where this was going.

‘They’re looking for a way out, for a gap in the mesh. Well, after all this time, I’ve found my gap and now I’m in open water, swimming free, and I have no desire to jump back into the net again.’

She nodded her head slowly and ground out her cigarette on the jetty. ‘A bit dramatic for you, but I get the point. I think I’m wasting my time here. I’d better go.’

He laid a hand on her arm as she began to stand up. ‘Stay a while,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time since we talked. How are David and the girls?’

She sat back down, pulled a stem from one of the reeds growing at the side of the jetty and twisted it in her fingers. ‘The girls are fine. Becoming more beautiful and more of a handful every day.’ She lapsed into silence, staring down at the reed stem twined through her fingers. She’d twisted it around her wedding ring, hiding it from view.

‘And David?’

‘I really don’t know,’ she said, very quietly. ‘He’s left me.’

He looked at her sharply. ‘That’s very sad. I thought you two would be together forever.’

She laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, don’t write us off yet. It’s early days. He only left last night and, to be honest, it’s knocked me sideways. I really wasn’t expecting it. I knew things had been a little sticky lately, but…’

Carter said nothing but slid an arm around her shoulder. She shrugged it off brusquely. ‘Don’t!’

He let his arm drop. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, I’m sorry. That was very rude of me. It’s just that I’m a bit raw at the moment and very edgy. I cried three times on the way up here, and I don’t have to tell you how out of character that is for me.’

‘Hard as nails, you,’ he said with a smile.

‘It’s a facade. Inside I’m marshmallow.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. Do you want to talk about it?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really, it’s one of those things we have to work out for ourselves.’

He stood. ‘Come on; let’s go back to the house. I’ll make you a coffee.’ He reached down and released the cord tying the keep net to the jetty, letting the fish swim free. Then they walked back through the wood that surrounded Carter’s small picturesque cottage. The path was well used.

In the kitchen he boiled the kettle while Jane sat at the long pine table. ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself, you know,’ she said as she watched him move from the sink to the range cooker.

‘For what?’

‘For what happened to Sian.’

He joined her at the table, pulling out a wheel-backed chair and sitting down heavily.

‘I don’t know what happened to Sian,’ he said. ‘Nobody does.’

‘She might have just taken off. If the manifestations in the house were as frightening as you described in your report, no one would have blamed her for making herself scarce.’

‘True, but I don’t think that’s what happened. According to the official version, don’t forget, there were no manifestations. No one’s had any contact from her since that day. Not her family, not her friends.’

‘What’s your theory?’

‘I haven’t got one.’ He sounded as if he had exhausted every possible avenue.

‘No one’s heard anything from her at all?’ Jane knew people disappeared all the time. It was a recurring nightmare that one of her children went missing and she spent the rest of her life searching for them. She would never be able to accept a loss like that.

He shook his head. ‘Besides, the car was locked. She couldn’t have left the car and locked it after her. I had the key.’

The kettle started to whistle.

‘What really happened the day Sian disappeared?’ she said as he put two steaming mugs of coffee down on the table.

‘You know what I know. You read my report,’ he said defensively.

‘Yes, that’s right, I did. Now I’d like you to fill in the gaps. In the report you said you blacked out for a “considerable length of time.” ’

‘I did. Over four hours.’ He took a mouthful of coffee and swallowed.

‘And nothing happened in that time?’ She tried not to sound doubtful.

‘How would I know? I was unconscious.’ He made no attempt not to sound defensive.

Her eyes narrowed. She looked at him closely. Okay, she knew he had been suspended, but his reaction to Sian disappearing seemed out of proportion to her. He and Sian had worked together a while but there was no logical reason why Carter should seem so devastated. He avoided her gaze by staring down into his mug, swilling the liquid around the cup and watching the light reflecting on its surface.

‘No. You’re bullshitting me, and I’ve known you too long to be taken in by it,’ Jane said.

This was the Jane Talbot of old; perceptive, intuitive and dogged. It’s what made her such a damned good investigator. She wasn’t going to let him off the hook.

He sighed. ‘Okay,’ he said, finally meeting her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you everything I remember.’

By the time he’d finished, the coffee had grown cold. Jane went across to the sink to fill the kettle again.

‘I think I can understand the symbol of the operating theatre in your vision.’ Jane said. ‘It’s a place of uncertainty, of the unknown, of possible danger. But why should your subconscious be placing such significance on something as mundane as having your tonsils out?’ she said, putting the kettle on the range to boil.

He looked at her bleakly. ‘It’s quite simple really. That was the day I died.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’ Jane said.

Carter took a breath. ‘I’ve had this power, gift, what ever you want to call it, for as long as I can remember. Up to the age of seven it was undefined and fairly random, just the odd flash of precognition, nothing very clear. I was a fairly sickly child; all the usual ailments — measles, chickenpox, mumps — but I suffered quite badly from throat infections. So much so that our doctor recommended I have my tonsils out.

‘I was too young to realize what was really happening, but a few days before the operation I started getting very clear visions. I knew with absolute clarity that if I went in for surgery there was a good chance I wouldn’t survive it. As I said, the odd flash of precognition. I told my parents, but of course they didn’t understand. I was only seven years old after all. They knew I was prone to flights of fancy, as my mother liked to call them. So the operation went ahead.

‘The procedure was routine. The surgeon operating had performed hundreds of tonsillectomies; he could have probably operated them with his eyes closed. But this time it went wrong. In the final stage of the operation, complications developed with the anesthetic. My heart failed and for several minutes they had to fight to revive me. For those minutes I was clinically dead. They brought me round, of course, but things were never quite the same again.’

‘In what way?’ Jane said. He had never told her this before.

‘It was as if my powers shifted up a notch. The precognition intensified; I started displaying signs of telekinesis, and I also started to see and hear people who were supposed to be dead. The visions were very clear, and sometimes very frightening.’ As he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, Jane noticed his hands were shaking. He blew a plume of smoke up at the ceiling. ‘My mother was something of a crank. She belonged to a Spiritualist