Coldfall Wood Read online

  He put a black shirt on over the top of his T-shirt to hide the cuts on his left arm. They were his life carved out on his flesh. He was a cutter. One scar for every problem as it reached the point where it became overwhelming, like some crazy old physician bleeding his patient to get the demons out. Four of those cuts had arrived on other birthdays. It was always a bad day. It was one of two days you were supposed to spend with your family, and all these particular anniversaries did was underscore the fact that he was and always would be alone.

  As he was fastening his cuffs the door opened. It was Penny carrying a cupcake with a single candle in its frosting and singing “Happy Birthday.” He pushed his headphones down so they hung around his neck and grinning, took the cake off her. He blew the candle out. “I’m not telling you what I wished for.”

  “Good. I don’t want to know,” she said. “Now come on, I’m taking you out for a milkshake. Every Birthday Boy needs a bit of brain freeze.”

  He took the candle out of the frosting then took a bite that was half the size of the cake and made a show of scoffing it down while she shook her head.

  “You’re such a pig.”

  “And you love me for it,” Charlie said, pushing the last bite of cake into his mouth and licking his fingers as he hopped off the bed. “Okay, I’m in. Anything to piss off Bracken,” he said with a grin, and then the two of them crept down the stairs to the back door and out into the yard without closing it behind them.

  It was never about milkshake.

  They walked around the fringes of the Rothery into the more affluent streets around the shithole they called home, looking for a suitable birthday mobile, something smooth enough to turn a few jealous heads but not so desirable as to be locked down by some high-tech incapacitating alarm. “This one’s too hot,” Penny said, looking at a Porsche 911 Cabriolet. “And this one’s too cold,” she said, her eyes moving on to a battered Ford Mondeo.

  “But this one’s just right,” Charlie finished for her, smiling at the sight of a flame red sports car parked up in the driveway that was just begging to go for a joyride.

  It took Penny less than ten seconds to pop the lock and open the door.

  Another thirty seconds had the ignition overridden and the engine purring.

  Charlie clambered into the passenger seat and then they were off, tearing through the night streets toward the ring road.

  Penny wound the windows down, putting her foot to the floor and weaving in and out of slow-moving traffic as she raced from main street to side street to backstreet and back again, the still-light shop windows becoming a blur as they tore through the city. The rain intensified as she drove, lending a surreal aspect to the scene. They didn’t talk much. Most of the ride was taken up with laughing and shouts of “Left!” and “Right!” as corners came up almost too quickly to take.

  They crossed the river.

  Seen like this, the lights of the city were all the birthday present he could have ever asked for.

  He sank back into the seat enjoying the spectacle of his windswept, rain-drenched city through the windscreen as Penny turned the radio on, then drove one handed whilst fiddling with the dial until she found a tune she liked. The tune was backed by the dopplering siren of a police car behind them.

  “About time,” she said. This was what the game was all about, cat and mouse. She slowed enough to let the flashing light close the gap between them, then put her foot down, somehow finding more speed under the bonnet. The city lights looked like dying stars tonight, torn apart by the driving rain sluicing beneath the windscreen wipers. A red double-decker with its sign promising a destination that sounded almost exotic cut across the two lanes of traffic on the bridge, kicking up a spray. Their headlights did the dance of the streets.

  Penny focused intensely on the road ahead, changing through the gears and manipulating the pedals with unerring skill. Street racing wasn’t exactly a talent that went on a CV, but it was part of what growing up on the Rothery meant. She cut up the Rover between them and the bus, then broke every traffic law on the books, overtaking the bus on the inside in a maneuver that had the passenger side door scraping up against the safety rails before they emerged on the other side of the suicidal charge amid a blare of horns.

  She was still laughing when a red light on the far side of the bridge nearly killed them both, but managed to throw the car into a series of evasive twists and turns that put four lanes of cross-traffic between them and the police. She gave the chasing cops the finger through the rearview mirror, doubled down, and whipped the car through a series of ridiculously right turns and double-backs before reaching the arches down beside the river. The husk of a burned-out car was abandoned beneath the railway bridge. There wasn’t a single flake of paint left on the warped metal, and all of the upholstery and soft fittings had fused into an amorphous mess of plastic and faux leather. Broken bricks lay scattered across the hard-packed earth around the car, an inner-city re-creation of Stonehenge’s pagan altar. The wall inside the arch of the railway bridge had been daubed with a stylized rendition of the horned forest god, only he had no forests to watch over, only tower blocks with names like sycamore, oak, and elm.

  They abandoned the car and ran away whooping and hollering as the siren haunted the near distance, still searching hopelessly for them. They split up; both taking a different route back toward the Rothery, guaranteeing that even if the law did spot them, there was no chance both of them would be hauled in. As it was, the sirens rolled on for another five minutes or so, going in circles, and then gave up.

  Charlie made it back to the green in the heart of the Rothery first, and spent a good ten minutes sitting with his back up against the lightning-split tree in front of the burned-out shell of The Hunter’s Horns waiting for Penny to catch up. A flicker of movement caught his eye—a majestic beast utterly out of place in this shithole—a huge white stag with a crown of antlers walked across the green, seeming to bow to the lightning-struck tree before it walked on. It was utterly mesmerizing. He watched it until it walked away up Cane Hill and disappeared from sight.

  When Penny finally appeared, she was dancing in the street, arms flung out wide as she spun round and around, and tossed her head back, howling with laughter between butchered song lyrics, making him smile and forget about the stag as he enjoyed watching her dance and loving her just a little bit more.

  Hwaet! Áríseaþ!

  “You what?” Penny called out as she reached the grass.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Charlie said.

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Penny said. There was no one else out on the green, no one in the streets around them. “It sounded like it came from here. A man’s voice. You sure it wasn’t you, Birthday Boy? You trying to freak me out?”

  Charlie shook his head as he pushed himself to his feet.

  “Weird.”

  Penny reached out to steady herself against the tree and as her hand came into contact with the bark everything changed. She understood what she had to do. What they had to do.

  “Time to go back and face Bracken and death by seventeen candles,” Charlie offered a lopsided smile. “And cake. Cake is good.”

  “Not yet,” Penny told him. “There’s somewhere we need to be. Can’t you feel it?”

  He shook his head again.

  Penny held out her hand for Charlie to take.

  This time he could feel it through her, the ancient tree providing the connection back to the land. His mind filled with images of what had once been a green and pleasant place. The landmarks—the natural ones—were all the same, all familiar, but they had been built on and bled dry over and over until all that remained was the lifeless brick and tile of the Rothery. He was seeing a glimpse of what this place had been like before, and it was beautiful. Unrecognizable, but undeniably beautiful.

  He saw the white stag again as a voice filled his head.

  Þes sy eorðcyning …

  This is my land …

  I am her k
ing …

  Charlie pulled his hand free from Penny’s. With the contact broken, the voice fell silent. Penny looked as though she was in the throes of some intense religious experience, all thoughts of cake banished.

  5

  Julie Gennaro had dropped Alex off at the hospital an hour ago. Neither of them had touched a drop at Taff’s wake. He’d picked Ellie Taylor up from the station and now the pair of them sat watching a giant unload the white-paneled van outside the charity shop on the High Street. The guy was a skinhead. Even from this distance, it was obviously down to standard male pattern baldness rather than some sort of fashion or political statement. He was big. Easily six three, six four, and built like the proverbial brick shithouse, his muscles like over-inflated balloons. He dragged a couple of black garbage bags to the side of the road and bundled them up against the wall. Clothes, Julie thought, seeing a white cuff poking through a tear in the plastic. Next out was an odd-looking metal-legged chair with a padded seat.

  The guy set it down beside the door.

  It took Julie a moment to realize why it looked so peculiar: it was a commode.

  He put a standard light with carpet for a lampshade down beside it as though setting it up for the owner to take a break curbside and enjoy the evening air as he read a book and relieved himself. Then he put a balalaika down on the seat. It was one of the strangest juxtapositions of life he could remember seeing, a commode and a balalaika, but of course all lives were like that when they were gathered together in one place, no rhyme or reason to how the clutter of everyday was accumulated. These were a dead man’s things, he realized. The last few remnants of a house clearance. Julie couldn’t help but wonder if the deceased had played the instrument, or if his carer had, and now that he was gone had no need of it? That set his thoughts wandering down a strange avenue that culminated in a melancholic question: What was the last song from those strings? Was it something silly or poignant? A good-bye, maybe?

  He realized he was staring but couldn’t help himself.

  So much had happened in the last six months, some of it even good.

  Julie was a different man. He’d been given a second chance by Josh Raines and taken it with both hands. Even so, there wasn’t a shift that went by without him thinking about Taff, the Hollywood succubus in the white dress, and the horrors they’d lived through. It was hard to believe the Lockwoods were gone, but there was no mistaking the power vacuum around the Rothery their deaths had left behind. As hard to believe as it was, the place was worse now than it had been last summer. The place was a pressure cooker waiting to blow, all of that anger and frustration simmering away beneath the surface. It was only ever going to take one thing, one spark, for the whole place to burn.

  It was in the air.

  And right up until that pale-skinned man with his headdress of antlers had stepped in front of his car, all of the crazy things he’d been a part of with Josh felt less and less real, fading in the way of a dream. But he’d seen the impossible again, the man metamorphosing into a powerful white stag, and no matter what else happened, he was never going to forget.

  He moved from the flat above the shops to another flat, this one a newer build, trading his view of takeaway restaurants and their neon signs for one of trees. The new place overlooked the outskirts of Coldfall Wood, not too far from the cemetery where they’d just buried the last of Taff. The wood was one of the few surviving patches of the ancient Doomsday woodlands of London. It was a primary wood, meaning they thought that the trees had been there all the way back in prehistoric times.

  Sometimes he looked out of his window and just let time sink in.

  The biggest change, though, was the most unexpected one of all.

  Alex.

  He’d found love, or at least the beginnings of something that was certainly heading that way. Only her brother called her Lexy, she insisted, and she hated Sandi or Sandii, Sandie or Sandra, had no time for Lex—which made her sound like a supervillain—Alexa, or any other less masculine variant, and who was he to argue?

  He didn’t see much of Josh these days—they didn’t do family dinners or go to Orient games together, nothing like that, but what he did see was enough to know his transformation had been every bit as radical his own. Josh spent most of his days walking endlessly around the city looking for something that he was never going to find. There was an air of sadness about him now that was thoroughly depressing, like he’d lost himself along with everything else. With nothing to keep him there, he’d moved out of Boone’s old place on the Rothery to the shrine to Eleanor Raines in Rotherhithe, the one good thing he’d inherited through his family’s obsession.

  Alex and Josh couldn’t have been more different despite being carved from the same genetic building blocks. Josh was rootless, restless, still looking for the man he was destined to be, but Alex knew exactly what kind of woman she was. The first thing she’d asked Julie, no more than five minutes into their first date, was if he was a feminist. His answer, without even having to think about it for a second was, “Isn’t everyone?”

  “Only the people worth knowing,” she said, then told him to stay put for two minutes while she went to put some money into the jukebox. Her selections were anything but girl powered. She might be an awesome woman in so many ways, but she had seriously poor taste in music.

  Just thinking about the songs put a smile on his face.

  The delivery guy dragged another couple of bags out of the van, then emerged with an old black woolen greatcoat, like something out of coldest scenes of Doctor Zhivago.

  His new partner turned to him and said, “Wait here.”

  She left the car door open as she clambered out.

  “Sir? Excuse me?”

  The big guy turned to look at her, puzzled, then saw the uniform and became immediately defensive. “What?” Not: What can I do for you, officer? Just: What?

  “That instrument? How much do you want for it?”

  “You want it? Have it. Better it goes to a good home, I guess.”

  “Let me give you something for it.”

  The guy shook his head. “Ain’t mine to sell, I just emptied the place. The old guy died. Family didn’t want the stuff. Knock yourself out.”

  She took it.

  The guy ignored her as he continued to unload the last few things from the back of his van.

  That was it, the sum of a life laid out on the street outside a charity shop.

  It didn’t amount to much.

  She opened the back door and laid the balalaika on the back seat, then clambered back into the passenger seat.

  “Didn’t have you pegged for a Russian music aficionado?”

  “I’m a woman of many talents,” Ellie Taylor said, offering a lopsided grin. That she was. And as partners went she had one big thing in her favor: she wasn’t Taff Carter. He could forgive her pretty much anything because of that, and all things being equal a love of the balalaika wasn’t the worst secret she could have kept from him.

  The call came through before she could close the door. The dispatcher’s voice crackled over the airwaves. There was trouble on High Street, a stabbing. The culprit had been sighted making his way on foot, heading south from the scene, toward the Rothery.

  That was the spark.

  He knew it even as he heard the words. Six months of steadily mounting tensions were about to boil over and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Ellie picked up the radio to respond to the call as he slammed the car into gear and peeled away from the curb at speed. She still hadn’t buckled up by the time the white van was a distant gleam in the mirror.

  It was less than three minutes to the scene.

  Julie saw two teenage girls in the street, a few steps removed from the crowd that had gathered around the body. He fired up the siren, making sure everyone knew they were coming.

  The girls met them at the car as they pulled over.

  “What happened?” Ellie asked, already out of the car before it h
ad stopped moving.

  He left her to deal with the girls and hurried over to the milling crowd. This had to be done right. No second chances. Even the slightest screwup and it was all going to hell. “Let me through,” he said, and like magic words, the crowd parted. He hunkered down beside the boy, checking his pulse and airways first, but it was obvious there was nothing he could do. There was blood everywhere. It had seeped down between the cracks in the pavement. It puddled in the road, partially obscuring the double yellow lines. “Step back, please. Give me some room. Step back.” He could have repeated it until he was blue in the face, no one was moving. Death was a magnet, holding them locked in place.

  All the training in the world could never prepare you for something like this.

  His instinct was to take his coat off and cover the kid’s face to give him some sort of dignity in death, but that was the man thinking, not the policeman. Everything he did now had to be about preserving the crime scene.

  He lifted his face to stare up at a couple of men wearing the gravy-and-batter-stained uniforms of the takeaway restaurant, and said, “You two, make some space, we need to get the paramedics through and we’ll have to start taping off the area so people don’t trample all over the evidence.” That seemed to get through to them, and adding their own shouts of, “All right, everyone, move back, give him some space, come on,” to Julie’s, they gradually cleared a little breathing space for him.