Chasing the Dark Read online

  I pulled on a pair of track pants and a T-shirt, listening to Doreen having a go at George about money. He had his own engineering works but it sounded like business had taken a nose-dive and Doreen wasn’t happy about it, ’specially now they had ‘that slum kid sucking them dry’. I switched channels – back to the horror show playing in that abandoned house – and tried to stop panicking about what I should do. It was a no-brainer. Keep my mouth shut, get the tramp the stuff he wanted and save Oz. I ran through the things he’d asked for. Bandages and medicine – there was sure to be something in the house. Food – Doreen might not miss that, she had cupboards full of it. Cash – not so easy. This was a nightmare. The minute Doreen found out I was a thief she’d chuck me out. But I couldn’t let Oz down. Not now, not ever. He was all I’d got.

  When George called me down to eat I mumbled something about cutting myself on some barbed wire and asked if they’d got a first-aid kit. Doreen pointed to the cupboard under the sink. I sorted myself a plaster and gave a mental thumbs-up when I saw all the bandages, antiseptic creams and packets of gauze.

  Weighed down by what I was planning, I sat at the table watching Doreen dish up some strange-looking stew that had dark slimy things floating round with the meat. When I asked what they were she said they were prunes. Weird. She’d got her own catering company, making dinners for people who wanted to impress their bosses without getting their hands dirty, and it looked like we were getting the leftovers from some client’s party. Still, anything was better than cold baked beans out of the tin, which is what I’d been living on since Mum died. My eyes flicked to the extension off the kitchen which was fitted out with fridges, freezers and stainless steel units stacked with all Doreen’s catering stuff. I wasn’t supposed to go in there and as for Oz . . . well, I won’t mention what Doreen said she’d do to him if he even took a sniff in that direction.

  Mum said her relationship with Doreen had always been tricky but it crashed and burned when Mum went and called her a neurotic, stuck-up, pain in the neck. Spot on, if you ask me. But if you’re singing at your sister’s wedding there’s probably some musicians’ law that says you’re s’posed to turn the microphone off before you start slagging off the bride. Mum was sorry afterwards and said she’d only done it because she’d had a bit too much to drink. Trouble was, Mum had done a lot of stupid things because she’d had a bit too much to drink, like cadging that lift home from the Trafalgar Arms with some bloke she didn’t even know and getting smashed up in a car crash. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mum and she loved me, and just thinking about her is like getting tasered and thrown against an electric fence. But what with the problems with Eddy, the money worries and her getting so depressed all the time, I’d been scared for a while that something bad might happen to her. And then it did.

  George was doing his best, piling veg on my plate and asking if I was musical like Mum and what my favourite subjects were at school. But Doreen tapping her nails on her wine glass and giving me the evil eye didn’t exactly help to keep the chit-chat flowing. You’d never think she was Mum’s sister, not in a million years. I mean, Doreen was fair where Mum had been dark and she was bony where Mum had been what she called ‘curvy’, and she had a hard pointy face and small blue-ish eyes, whereas Mum’s face had been soft and pretty and her big dark eyes had been her best feature. Doreen also had tiny lines round her mouth that got deeper whenever she looked at me.

  George was a big bloke, ex-Royal Engineers, but one squawk from Doreen and he turned into a total wuss. He even called her Dilly – which made me want to puke. Though to be fair, I didn’t rate his chances if he ever crossed her. He didn’t seem to notice he’d married a harpy and he spent most of his time gazing at her as if he couldn’t believe his luck. But he was looking at me now, telling me he’d be going to Germany soon to pitch for some big contract and he was glad Doreen would have me for company while he was away. You should have seen the look she gave him.

  Guess what, Doreen? Being stuck with you isn’t top of my wish list either.

  Still, at least while I was here no one was going to be asking me if I wanted to ‘talk about it’. ’Course I didn’t. What was there to say? Mum was dead. End of.

  I offered to wash up. Doreen wasn’t keen; she said she liked things done properly. I went upstairs, wondering how I was going to kill the time till she and George went to bed. I didn’t have a computer – or even a phone now the tramp had taken mine. Not that I was in the mood for playing games, what with Oz staring death in the eye and Mum . . . well, you know.

  I was sitting on the bed picking at a hole in my sock when George tapped on the door and came in with a box of books.

  ‘I found a few of my old favourites in the attic,’ he said, dumping the box on the duvet. ‘I think there’s some of your aunt’s in here, too.’ He sat down awkwardly. ‘She doesn’t mean it, you know. She’s just highly strung. Underneath she’s got a heart of gold.’

  Whatever hard metallic substance Doreen’s heart was made of, it definitely wasn’t gold.

  ‘She’s just taking a while to adjust to having a youngster around the place.’

  I nodded and started checking out the books: Biggles Learns to Fly, the Guinness Book of Records for 1972, a torn copy of something called Kidnapped and a load of Jackie annuals with dorky-looking girls on the front. I gave up when I got to a layer of recipe books and knitting patterns and flipped open Kidnapped. Under the Park Hill School crest someone had written ‘Awarded to Sadie Slattery for punctual attendance at choir practice’. My eyes blurred up. George looked embarrassed, gave me this awkward pat with his big, sausagey fingers, and made for the door. ‘You’ll be OK, Joe. Just give it time.’

  Yeah, right.

  I gave it twenty minutes after George had gone before slipping out to the shed pretending I was going to see Oz. Edging round his empty bed, I stuffed my pockets with dog biscuits and hunted round for a torch. George caught me coming back indoors and looked dead guilty when I headed straight for my room, though he cheered up when I told him I was getting stuck into Kidnapped.

  Actually, it was pretty good – all about this orphan, David Balfour, who gets abducted by his evil Uncle Ebenezer. But I was too terrified to concentrate on David Balfour’s problems; terrified of what that old tramp might do to Oz and terrified that Doreen was going to catch me nicking her stuff. I was quaking so much I waited another hour after she and George had gone to bed before I even dared open my door.

  Every step creaked, every hinge screeched. I couldn’t believe she didn’t come running. I grabbed what I needed from the first-aid kit plus a couple of apples, a packet of biscuits and half a loaf from the kitchen before I went for Doreen’s catering supplies, reckoning she’d take longer to notice they’d been raided. I stuffed a whole salami and a jar of olives into a plastic carrier, sliced a lump off a big pink ham covered in herbs and another from a crumbly wedge of cheese, and added them to my stash. I hesitated, not sure how much stuff I’d need to buy Oz’s freedom. Just to be on the safe side I snatched a bottle of brandy, a bar of dark chocolate and a box of macaroons, and shoved the lot in my backpack. George’s jacket was hanging in the hall. Feeling sick, I felt around for his wallet. There was seventy quid in there. I took forty. Sorry, George. Really, really I am.

  The track through the woods had been tough going in daylight, but it was a million times worse at night and a feeble torch beam wasn’t much help against a mass of foot-grabbing, eye-gouging trees. As for the noises, I don’t know which were scarier – the twigs that kept snapping like someone was following me, or the sudden bursts of rustling that turned into muttering as I blundered past. I kept close to the brick wall, following it round. Even then I nearly missed the door. I was juggling the torch and the keys, looking for the right one, when I noticed the key ring had a crest on it. It was two bears standing on their back legs holding up a shield. Something creaked in the trees, stirring the leaves. Checking over my shoulder, I unlocked the door, and stumbled into t
he garden.

  The tramp was waiting as I crawled in through the hole in the French windows. He didn’t look any friendlier by torchlight and neither did his knife. He snatched the torch, switched it off and shoved it in my back, nudging me across the dining room, through the moonlit hall and down a pitch-black corridor. I heard a scrape of wood, and the darkness took on a flickery tinge of gold. I took a step nearer and looked down a rickety staircase into a brick-walled cellar.

  I‘d seen enough detective shows to know that a cellar, a kid and a crazy old tramp were a bad combination and that sometimes it could take the rest of the world ten or twenty years to find out just how bad. I heard a yelp. It was Oz. At least we were going to die together.

  ‘Move,’ ordered the tramp.

  I wasn’t going to argue.

  It was cold and smelly down there but he’d got candles going, and brought down a mattress and blankets. Although Oz was tied up, the rope was long and, judging by the white hairs all over the blankets, he’d been making himself comfortable. He jumped up at me and I held him tight, letting him lick my face while the tramp tipped up my backpack and started prodding everything I’d brought him with his knife. Oz leapt out of my arms and made a dash for the ham. The tramp snarled. I grabbed Oz back and shoved a handful of dog biscuits under his nose.

  ‘You are good boy,’ the tramp said, raising the bottle of brandy at me and biting a lump of salami off the end of his knife.

  You are crazy maniac, I thought.

  He tossed Oz a bit of salami. My eyes were getting used to the gloom and I had a look around, taking in a huge boiler, lines of pipes and cables running everywhere, and a rack of dusty tools hung above a workbench. The tramp had been busy. He’d cleaned up a hammer, a wrench and a screwdriver, and laid them out on the bench next to a rusty tin box roughly the size of a brick. Through smears of mud I made out the word OXO printed on the lid in fat white letters. He caught me staring at it. I turned away quick. When I looked back he’d slipped it out of sight.

  ‘You help me,’ he said, pulling his ripped trouser leg up to his thigh. Just looking at that pus-crusted scab and the blue-white bone made me want to throw up.

  ‘I . . . I can’t. I don’t know how.’

  ‘Kitchen. Hot water.’ He tossed me a cigarette lighter and started gulping down the brandy like it was Coke.

  I fumbled my way upstairs, waving the tiny flame through the dark till I found the kitchen. The slatted blind was throwing lines of watery moonlight across a sink, a cooker, miles of black and white floor, a long breakfast bar and walls of cupboards. Everything in there was draped in cobwebs, right down to the withered piece of soap on the draining board.

  I filled the kettle and put it on to boil. The tramp had obviously been using those tools in the cellar to turn on the gas and water. Maybe tricks like that came easy if you spent your life breaking into empty houses. I turned the lighter over in my hand. It looked like it was gold and the shimmering gas flame lit up a swirly engraving on the side. Classy. Where’d he nicked that from?

  Leaving the water to heat up, I searched for a bowl, flickering the lighter into drawers and cupboards full of pots, pans, knives, forks, tin openers, fancy china – everything you could think of. It was like the owner had just nipped out, meaning to come back. That’s how our flat had looked after Mum died. All her stuff still sitting there, just the way she’d left it. I grabbed a mixing bowl, picked up the kettle and stumbled back to the cellar.

  Most of the brandy had gone but this guy wasn’t even tipsy. He took off his belt, bit down on the leather, and growled at me to get on with it. I pulled off his boot and felt the puke rise. It wasn’t just the stink making me retch. His foot was like something out of a joke shop: three cracked yellow claws sticking out of a rubbery lump of grey flesh, scabbed all over with red puffy sores. I didn’t want to know what had happened to the rest of his toes and I don’t even want to think about what I did next.

  But after about half an hour there was an oily black scum speckled with bits of gravel and grass floating in the bowl and I’d squeezed half a tube of antiseptic on to his leg, bandaging it up as tight as I could. It must have hurt like hell, though he never flinched once. I handed him a couple of aspirin, which he washed down with the last of the brandy.

  ‘You come tomorrow night,’ he said.

  If Doreen found out I’d been stealing I probably wouldn’t even be in Saxted by tomorrow night, and no way was I leaving without Oz.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But I want my dog.’

  He shook his head and patted Oz’s head.

  ‘You come back, Joe Slattery. Or I eat him.’ A black hole fringed with stumpy brown teeth opened in his face.

  The effect was so horrible it took me a while to realise he was smiling.

  CHAPTER 3

  The gut-twisting crunch of the 4x4 slamming into Lincoln’s car was getting to be my morning wake-up call. As usual, the nightmare left me sweaty and trembling.

  Slowly I pulled on some clothes and looked out the window. Doreen’s car had gone and I knew George would be at work. Relieved to be on my own, I went downstairs. I wasn’t hungry but I wandered round the kitchen like a broken robot, burning toast, spilling juice, dropping knives. As soon as I stopped the house went completely silent, unlike the inside of my head, which was about as quiet as the time they let a student teacher take our maths class. Thoughts whizzed about like paper aeroplanes and just about everyone I wanted to forget was in there, getting rowdier by the minute: Doreen calling me a slum kid; Eddy accusing Mum of having an affair; the vicar droning on and on about dust and ashes; the cops telling me they still hadn’t found the driver who’d killed Mum. What were they playing at? The CCTV had caught the black 4x4 swerving on to the wrong side of the road, smashing straight into Lincoln’s car then rocketing away, but they said the cameras had lost track of it somewhere round Dalston. OK, so the number plate had been too muddy to make out but huge, great 4x4s with bashed-up bonnets don’t just disappear, even in Dalston.

  I dragged my thoughts away from the crash and tried to focus on the wounded tramp rotting away in that abandoned house. It was like both of us were hanging on to our rubbish lives by a couple of threads, and any second now they’d snap and we’d both go plunging over the edge. What I needed was Mum back. What he needed was antibiotics.

  I rushed up to George and Doreen’s gleaming bathroom and poked around their medicine cabinet, pouncing on a packet of tablets that said antibiotic on the label. Just as I grabbed a bottle of extra-strength painkillers I heard Doreen’s car pulling into the drive. I’ve never moved so fast in my life, shoving the rest of the stuff back, straightening the towels, rubbing greasy finger marks off the mirror. I just made it down to the hall as she came in, lugging a bag of shopping.

  She looked at me suspiciously. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I was . . . just going to clear my breakfast away. Then I’m going to take Oz for a walk.’

  She sniffed. ‘You and I need to get a couple of things straight, young man. I’ve got a business to run. I’m in and out the whole time sourcing ingredients, making deliveries, meeting clients. You can’t expect me to keep running back to the house to let you in every time you take that dog out.’

  ‘I know, it’s just that he needs . . .’

  ‘Quite against my better judgement, George has persuaded me to give you this.’ She got a key out of her bag and handed it to me. ‘It’s for the back door. Use it. If you ever go out and forget to lock up there’ll be trouble. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’ I slipped the key in my pocket. ‘I won’t forget, I promise.’

  I could see she wasn’t convinced but actually my memory is pretty good, which is tough considering the amount of stuff I’d rather forget. I don’t know where I get it from. Not Mum, that’s for sure, and certainly not my dad. His memory was so bad he went home to see them and forgot to come back.

  Doreen shrugged off her coat, tutting when the doorbell chimed. She pulled it open
.

  There were two cops on the doorstep asking for me. Doreen chivvied them inside, probably hoping I’d been seen vandalising the bus stop. But I could tell it was something to do with Mum. They were both doing the same twitchy, puffed-up thing with their cheeks that WPC please call me Lauren Burnett had been doing when she sat on our couch and broke the news about Mum being in a car crash. Too numb to speak I’d just kept looking into Lauren’s round blue eyes, wishing she’d start blinking and stop squeezing my arm. The young cop who came with her had stood there staring at the floor all pink in the face, edging his cap round and round in his hands while Eddy ranted and raved about Mum being in another man’s car.

  ‘You all right, lad?’ The taller cop was leaning forward, peering at me.

  My heart was pumping. ‘Have you caught the hit-and-run driver who killed my mother?’

  His cheeks got twitchier. ‘You’ll have to talk to the Met about the investigation. We’re Kent victim support.’ He handed me a leaflet.

  ‘So what is this about, officer?’ Doreen said.

  ‘Forensics have finished with the vehicle and released Miss Slattery’s effects.’ He tipped his head towards the cardboard box his partner was holding and handed me an electronic message pad. ‘We . . . need a signature. Just a formality.’

  I scribbled on the screen and reached for the box. Surprised by the weight, I nearly dropped it.

  They turned to go. ‘Any questions, give the number on that leaflet a call,’ said the shorter cop.