Still Bleeding Read online

  Still Bleeding

  Steve Mosby

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  * * *

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Orion Books,

  an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane

  London wc2h 9ea

  An Hachette UK Company

  13 579 10 8642

  Copyright © Steve Mosby 2009

  The moral right of Steve Mosby to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

  prior permission of both the copyright owner and the

  above publisher of this book.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance

  to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 4091 0108 6

  ISBN (Trade Paperback) 978 1 4091 1009 5

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Mackays,

  Chatham ME5 8TD

  The Orion Publishing Group's policy is to use papers that

  are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made

  from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging

  and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to

  the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  * * *

  For Lynn

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, as usual, go to my agent, Carolyn Whitaker, and all the people at Orion who have contributed to this book with their insights, advice and, most of all, patience. Especially Genevieve, Jon and Jade, and all the people - genuinely too numerous to name, but you all know who you are - who helped make the previous books such a success. I really can't thank you enough.

  In addition, thanks to a few people I forgot last time around: Sophie Hannah, James Nash and Tom Palmer. And Val McDermid for kind words and support.

  More personal thanks for general support and friendship go to the usual crowd: Neil and Helen; Keleigh and Rich; J and Aug; Gill and Roger; Ben and Megan; Cass and Mark; Emma Undley; the Sociology lot; Mum, Dad and John; and everyone who wrote to me over the last year to say they liked the other ones and were looking forward to this.

  Most of all - as always - thanks to Lynn, for your love and encouragement.

  Residents of Leeds will notice a few key locations have been mangled to fit the entirely fictional geography of the city in the book, and one conversation within refers very loosely to the activities of a real Art collective, the 'Leeds 13'.

  On a much darker note, aside from key plot elements, it should be recorded that the videos and images Alex encounters in the book are based on actual footage freely available online. It can be a scary world out there.

  * * *

  Prologue

  The last time I saw my wife was one evening in January, two and a half years ago. Marie was twenty-six years old, wearing a black jacket and dark-blue jeans, and she was on her way to buy a bottle of wine to go with the dinner I was stirring. She walked through the kitchen and opened the front door, casually swinging her car keys, but then hung back and said:

  'Do you need anything else while I'm out?'

  I shook my head. 'Just you to come back to me.'

  She didn't reply, but I could hear it in the silence:

  Are you sure that's what you need?

  We'd had a difficult couple of weeks. For as long as I'd known her, Marie had been prone to bouts of depression: periods of time where everything I said or did was wrong, followed by periods where all she'd do was apologise, hate herself and wonder what I saw in her and why I stayed. I wasn't sure which of the two I found hardest, but we were between stages right now. Everything seemed much better than it had for the last few days, but the atmosphere between us was awkward.

  I looked at her and the blankness on her face made me ache inside. I wish you could see how beautiful you are, I thought. I wish you could just see that. But I didn't say it, because I knew she wouldn't accept the words. They would drift past, and the frustration of not getting through would only make me feel bad, which would then make her feel worse. Sometimes, she was so determined not to be loved.

  'Just that,' I said.

  She nodded, her face still blank. 'Quick kiss, then.'

  I left the spoon balanced and walked over.

  'You want me to go instead?'

  'No, it's fine,' she said. 'I love you.'

  If I now remember those words being grabbed at - said a little too quickly - then I didn't notice it at the time.

  'I love you too.'

  She closed the door behind her. A minute later, I heard the car start up and drive away.

  I was an introspective man back then. Prone to worrying. I'd imagine scenarios, always turning them around in my head to find the worst possible angle, then forcing myself to explore it. Whenever Marie was late back from work, I'd start to think that something terrible had happened to her. What if she doesn't come back? The minute hand on the kitchen clock would become a key turning slowly in my head, unlocking one awful possibility after another, so that they fell into my mind like coins. Late at night, I'd lie next to her and wonder what it would be like for one of us to lose the other.

  I don't know why I was like this, because nothing bad had ever really happened to me. Perhaps that's why.

  On that day, she should have been ten minutes at most. The shop she was heading to was only up the road, and for some reason I wasn't worried at all. You like to think you'd know, but the truth is that you don't. So the food simmered gently, and I kept on stirring it, the wooden spoon knocking against the base of the pan, and I was oblivious to the fact the world had quietly shattered without my noticing.

  I can't remember when I started to think bad thoughts, but I know it was exactly forty minutes after she left when I decided right, that's enough, and called her mobile.

  It was answered by a policeman. In the background I could hear sirens and a rush of traffic, and, straight away, I knew that this time something really had happened. In times of crisis, some part of your subconscious often takes charge, and I was shockingly calm as I spoke to him. It was only afterwards, as I grabbed my coat, that I realised I'd barely taken in a word he'd said, and that the ones I had didn't make any sense.

  Marie had been hit by a truck, he'd said, on the ring road that circled the city. I'd taken that to mean there had been a car accident, but then I realised she shouldn't have been anywhere near the ring road. And some other phrase he'd used implied she wasn't in her car when it happened. Later, at the police station, I got the full account, and those things clicked into place. It hadn't been the truck that killed her. Most likely, it had been the fall from the bridge, fifty feet above, where they found her car.

  The police always described it as the fall, never the leap, but that word was generally there in the tone of voice of whoever was speaking to me at the time. I heard the judgement attached to it. The sense that my loss was somehow not as great as the loss suffered by others.

  In general, people talk about suicide in two different ways. Either they have sympathy for the person who kills themselves and think it's a tragedy, or else they see it as the ultimate in selfish behaviour. Some people probably do a bit of both. I know all that, so I found it
easy to understand the attitude of the police. The truck driver, they told me, could have been killed. As things stood, he might never recover from what he'd seen that day.

  I empathised. But I couldn't bring myself to share that feeling. I didn't blame her. I was never angry with her. And I never hated her for what she did to us, not even for a second.

  Because I remembered the expression on her face when she left that day: full of regret for all that she imagined she'd put me through; full of that spiralling self-hatred. I remembered the last thing she said to me: I love you. And I knew that, whatever anyone thought, Marie hadn't been acting selfishly at all, or at least not when it came to me. In her head, however misguided her intentions, she was doing what she thought was best for me. She thought she was saving my life, rather than destroying it utterly.

  The understanding was brought home six months later.

  At that point, I was in the process of selling the house, and it had forced me to go through papers - things I'd been putting off for a while, reluctant to face. That was when I learned about the additional life insurance policy Marie had taken out. It had cost her twenty pounds a month. Almost unbelievably, it now equated to a single lump-sum payment of nearly half a million pounds.

  The suicide clause in the contract had become null and void after the first two years of the policy. Marie had waited for two years and eight days. She had been planning what she did, without me knowing or suspecting, for that long.

  Like I said, I never blamed her. It always felt like there were far more deserving targets to aim for on that level.

  So, that was the last time I saw my wife alive.

  But it was not the last time I saw her.

  * * *

  Part One

  * * *

  Chapter One

  Her father talks to her about death.

  The whole time, his eyes are very serious. They look like someone has drawn a perfect outline round them in red pen.

  She tries to understand, but sometimes she can't and they both get upset. Death is a monster, her father says, just like in the thin fairytale books she has in her bedroom. Like a dragon? she asks, but he shakes his head. It's bigger than that, and far more frightening. A dragon can only be in one place at a time, but Death can be anywhere it wants. It doesn't breathe fire. It breathes sadness.

  Sarah sits cross-legged in the corner of the settee, clutching a cushion against her stomach. Her father crouches down in front of her. It's evening, and the room around them is dark and gloomy. He reaches out and pinches his finger and thumb together tightly, like he's plucked a speck of Death from the air. Then he opens his fingers.

  He has explained all this so carefully that Sarah sees it fall.

  Death has ripples, he says.

  She squints at the rough fibres in the carpet and imagines the ripples of Death spreading out from it in wavery circles, like a stone dropped into water. In one of the books at school, there is a picture of a lifeboat angled on a wave, the yellow-jacket sailors holding their hoods in the spray. But she doesn't have to go to school any more.

  Death is contagious, Sarah. That means it spreads like a disease.

  That knowledge frightens her the most. Because Death has already bloomed once in their home, and if you can catch it like a cold then either of them might be next. Or both of them. Her father seems afraid of that too. It's partly why he stares at her, she thinks, and why she stares back. As though looking into each other's eyes is casting a spell to keep the monster away.

  Her father always breaks the spell first.

  He shuffles away from her afterwards. Sometimes, he looks frustrated. She heard him crying once, which made her even more scared because fathers don't cry. The thing is, her own mind is as full of Death as her father's, and she knows he's only trying to help her. It's like the way they used to read difficult sentences together, working patiently through each word until it made sense. When she hears him cry, she's determined to try harder next time.

  It's difficult, because she wants to cry too, and it doesn't feel like she should. Last week, she woke up in the night and thought she saw her mother shining, bright as a saint, in the corner of the bedroom. It was only a dream, but she told her father the next morning because she thought he might like to know, and because she wanted him to tell her that maybe it was real. But he said:

  Was she still bleeding?

  No, Daddy, Sarah said. She was smiling, I promise.

  Instead of being pleased, he searched the house. Even now, he still looks for her. He crouches down by his bed, lifts the duvet to look underneath, then talks to the space.

  Death is a monster, Sarah.

  She says: But how can we fight it?

  Well, this seems important. Her father thinks about it for a moment, and then he begins to explain, as best he can. She hangs on every word.

  There are some people, he says, who are so afraid of the monster they try to make it happy.

  Like sucking up to a bully? she asks.

  Yes, he says, and the man who hurt your mother was like this. But then there are others who turn their backs and run away, too frightened to face it.

  We can't be like that.

  Her father grips her shoulders gently, so that she understands how important this is.

  We have to stare it in the eye. We have to see. Do you understand?

  She nods. But he hasn't answered her question, and now she's even more scared than she was before. Because it doesn't feel like her father is fighting anything, and the only thing he ever stares in the eye is her.

  Sometimes, she sees him squatting by the front door, talking to people through the letterbox, telling them he's fine, and go away and leave us alone. She knows it's her aunt, because one time her father made her come down the hall and tell her that everything was all right. But he never opens the door.

  Every day, Sarah wakes up to hear him pacing in the kitchen. The house smells of his cigarette smoke. She can see it hanging in rooms where he's been, like blue silk. In the mornings, while she's still in bed, he only does it in the kitchen. She stays in bed until she hears the window opening then closing.

  She wakes up today and the house is quiet.

  It's the kind of silence that hums in your ears, like you've hanged your head on something and now it's ringing like a bell. It's the sound somebody makes after they've gone.

  Sarah slips out from beneath the covers, quiet as a whisper, and moves down the corridor. Her father isn't in the kitchen. There's no smoke in the air. Straight ahead, his bedroom door is closed. She walks up and taps on it. Nobody answers.

  Daddy?

  Nobody answers.

  She turns the handle and pushes the door, but it only opens a tiny fraction. There's something behind it, blocking it. Stopping It from opening.

  A second later something crushes Sarah inside. She understands what has happened. While she was sleeping Death has bloomed again in her home. Through the slight gap in the door, she can smell the sadness of its breath.

  At first she is frozen in place. Then she wants to run.

  But she mustn't turn away. Sarah begins to push the door harder, with all her small might, because she knows that she has to see.

  She is nine years old.

  And now she was thirty.

  Life had moved on, but those memories felt more recent than things that had happened yesterday. More present. But the past was a blueprint, wasn't it, for a drawing of the future. As time went on, you added new lines - or else they were added for you - but the old ones remained, and sometimes it was those that became the most pronounced. You just had to go over them enough times.

  And so the determination her father had left her with - that you always had to look, no matter how horrible or difficult it might be - had never left her. Instead, it had matured and grown, and it was still visible now, in the same way the little girl's features remained there in her adult face.

  Sarah shook her head, and then folded up the letter from Alex. He'd se
nt it two years ago, on the day he left Whitrow, and she'd read it so many times since that the paper had become worn. She even knew sections of it off by heart. I appreciate everything you've done for me, and how you tried to help me. I hope you can understand and forgive me for this. But she'd read it again anyway, because today it seemed appropriate. Today, two years on, she was leaving too.

  As always, it had set off her memories.

  You were right, he'd written. Death has ripples.

  She slipped the letter into her pocket.

  It was one item, at least, that she would not forget to pack.

  The rest of her things were proving a little more difficult to sort, and time was running out.

  Outside the window, the evening was just beginning to settle in, and the room felt drab and grey. She checked her watch. It was nearly seven o'clock, which meant the taxi she'd booked would be here in a few minutes. She wasn't organised at all.

  Without realising it, she'd started biting her fingernail.

  Did she have what she needed? The bag in front of her on the bed was only half full. There were enough clothes to be getting by with. Her real concern was all the personal items she wouldn't bear to be without: the small gifts and photographs that were inconsequential in themselves, but had memories tethered to them. You never remembered things like that until you cither saw them or wanted them.

  She'd spent most of the afternoon searching the house for what she wanted to take. It upset James - obviously - and she'd suggested it might be easier for both of them if he went out for a while. But he refused. He just sat there, ignoring her. Pretending it wasn't happening. His expression was set like stone, but waves of sadness had been escaping him, and the guilt she felt might have caused her to overlook something important.