1974

“I’m sorry,” I said, my stomach hollowed out at each thought of Mrs Garland.

“You smell of alcohol to me, Mr Dunford. I think I’d prefer to meet with that nice Mr Whitehead of yours. And not on a Sabbath, mind.”

“You spoke to Jack Whitehead?”

She smiled with thin lips. “I spoke to a Mr Whitehead. He never told me his Christian name and I never asked.”

I was suddenly hot inside her cold black hole of a room. “What did he say?”

“He said I should speak to you, Mr Dunford. That it wasn’t his story.”

“What else? What else did he say?” I was struggling for air.

“If you’d let me finish…”

I moved along the sofa towards the Widow’s chair. “What else?”

“Really Mr Dunford. He said I should let you have the key. But I said…”

“Key? What key?” I was almost off the sofa and in the Widow’s lap.

“The key to next door,” she proudly announced.

Suddenly the kitchen door flew open with a crash and a thunder of barking as Hamlet the Alsatian charged into the room and jumped between us, his tongue hot, loose, and wet on both our faces.

“Really Hamlet, that’s quite enough.”

It was night outside and Mrs Enid Sheard was fumbling with the back door key to the Goldthorpes’ bungalow. She turned the lock and in I went.

A month ago the police had point blank refused all requests to view the scene of the tragedy and Enid Sheard had not even so much as intimated that she might have had any means of access, but here I stood in the Goldthorpes’ kitchen, in the Lair of the Ratcatcher.

I tried the kitchen light.

“They’ll have disconnected them, won’t they?” whispered Mrs Sheard from the doorstep.

I gave the switch another flick. “Looks that way.”

“Wouldn’t fancy going in there without any light. Gives me the willies just standing here.”

I peered into the kitchen, wondering when Enid Sheard last had any willy. The place smelt stale, like we’d just got back from a week at the caravan.

“You’ll have to come back when it’s light, won’t you? I did tell you you shouldn’t work on a Sunday, didn’t I?”

“You did indeed,” I mumbled from under the kitchen sink, wondering if Enid Sheard had enjoyed her last willy and if she missed it and how that would explain quite a bit.

“What are you doing down there, Mr Dunford?”

“Hallelujah!” I shouted, coming up from under the sink with a candle, thinking thank fucking Christ for that and the Three Day Week.

Enid Sheard said, “Well if you will insist on looking around in the pitch dark, I’ll see if I can’t find you one of Mr Sheard’s old torches. He was always a great one for his torches and his candles was Mr Sheard. Be prepared, he always said. And what with all these strikes and what have you.” She was still chund-ering on as she walked back to her own bungalow.

I closed the back door and took a saucer from a cupboard. I lit the candle and dripped the melting wax on to the saucer, securing the candle to the base with a few drops.

Alone at last in the Lair of the Ratcatcher.

The blood in my feet had run cold.

The candle lit up the walls of the kitchen in reds and yellows, reds and yellows that plucked me up and dropped me back on a hill above a burning gypsy camp, the face of a young girl with brown curls crying out into the night while another little girl lay on a mortuary slab with wings in her back. I swallowed hard, wondered what the fuck I was doing here and pushed open the glass kitchen door.

The bungalow was laid out exactly the same as Mrs Sheard’s. A little light coming through the glass front door at the other end of the hall added to the candle, illuminating a thin hall with a couple of drab Scottish landscapes and an etching of a bird. The five other doors off the hall were all closed. I set the candle on the telephone table, rummaging through my pockets for scraps of paper.

In the Lair of the Ratcatcher…

I’d have no trouble selling it to the nationals. A few photo graphs and I’d be set. Maybe a quick paperback after all. Like Kathryn had said, it practically wrote itself:

6 Willman Close, home to Graham and Mary Goldthorpe, brother and sister, killer and prey.

Inside the hall of the Ratcatcher, I took out my pen and picked a door.

The back bedroom had been Mary’s. Enid Sheard had said before that Graham had been particular about this, insisting that his big sister have the big bedroom for privacy’s sake. The police had also confirmed that Graham had telephoned twice in the twelve months prior to the events of 4 November, complaining of a Peeping Tom at his sister’s window. The police had never been able to substantiate his claims, or had never tried. I felt the heavy dark curtains and wondered if they were new, if Graham had bought them for Mary, to keep out Tom and save her from the eyes he saw.

Whose were those eyes that moved across his sister’s body? The eyes of a stranger, or the same eyes that now stared back at him in the mirror.

The curtains and all the other furniture seemed too heavy for the room, but the same was true of Enid Sheard’s next door and my mother’s. There was a single bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with a mirror on top, all of them big and wooden. I set the candle down by the mirror beside two hair brushes, a clothes brush, a comb, and a photograph of the Goldthorpes’ mother.

Did Graham come into this room while she slept, taking strands of yellow hair from her brush, hair like their mother’s, to treasure and to keep?

In the top left-hand drawer was some make-up and some skin creams. In the top right-hand drawer I found Mary Gold-thorpe’s underwear. It was silk and had been disturbed by the police. I touched a white pair of knickers, remembering the photographs we’d published of a plain but not unattractive woman. She had been forty when she died and neither the police or myself had turned up any boyfriends. It was expensive underwear for a woman with no lover. And a waste.

Graham watched her as she slept, her hair upon the pillow. Quietly he slipped open the top right- hand drawer, burying his hands deep in the silk contents of her most private drawer. Suddenly Mary sat up in bed.

The bathroom and the toilet were together in the one room and smelt of cold pine. I stood on a pink mat and took a quick piss in Graham Goldthorpe’s toilet, still thinking of his sister. The sound of the flush filled the bungalow.

“Graham? What are you doing?” she whispered.

Graham’s bedroom was next to the bathroom at the front of the house, small and filled with more heavy inherited furniture. On the wall above the head of his single bed were three framed pictures. I rested a knee on Graham’s bed and brought the candle up close to three more etchings of birds, similar to the one in the hall. Graham’s pyjamas were still under his pillow.

Graham froze, his pyjamas stuck to his body with sweat.

Beside the bed were stacks of magazines and files. I put the candle down on a bedside table and picked up a bunch of magazines. They were all transport magazines, about either trains or buses. I left them on the bedspread and went over to the desk, on top of which was a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. There was a space on the bookcase where the police had removed the spools.

Fuck.

The Ratcatcher Tapes, gone and not for good.

“Tonight she caught me in her room as I watched over her,” whis pered Graham underneath the bedcovers as the spools span silently round. “Tomorrow is Mischief Night and tomorrow they will come.”

I pulled a thick book of old railway timetables from the bookcase, marvelling at the uselessness of the thing. On