I couldn’t believe him. Everything else about him may have been mysterious and intriguing, but arrogance was something I definitely didn’t find attractive in a person. And anyway, no one could handle a ‘little’ deer if it bounded out in front of you with no warning; I’d seen the consequences before and it wasn’t pretty. I’d heard even worse stories.
One of my dad’s friends worked for the Forestry Commission and he’d once been called to a car wreck on the road to Willowton.
A deer had smashed through some poor woman’s windscreen and made her veer off the road and straight into a tree. When they found her, the deer (also extremely dead) was draped across the front seat, its head in the woman’s lap, looking up at her face with large, glassy eyes. The woman’s right hand had been resting on the deer’s head, as if she’d been stroking it when they both died. She’d only been doing around forty miles an hour.
The radio had now progressed onto some ridiculously boring phone-in session where the topic in question was education opportunities for the under privileged. Connor was obviously on the same wavelength as me as he reached down to turn the dial again. This time, though, the dial got stuck, and he looked down to try and detect the problem.
Unfortunately, he decided to do this as we were going round a corner.
There wasn’t any time to stop.
Naturally, after our disagreement, my first thought was of a deer, but it wasn’t the figure of a stag looming up out of the fog I could see; it was the horrifying form of a human. A man.
I screamed and closed my eyes before I’d even really registered what was happening, and Connor instinctively slammed on the brakes.
Nothing happened. There was no impact, no thud as we splintered the bones of the unfortunate soul, no sound other than my scream which was still ringing in my ears.
Connor looked over at me, fear etched on his face. “Jesus, what was it?”
I took a deep breath, finally able to move again. “There was a man in the road. He was right in front of us, you didn’t see him?”
He shook his head, looking down at the radio dial again. “We didn’t hit anythin’ though, right? I didn’t feel anythin’…”
“Me neither.”
Connor breathed a sigh of relief.
“We should check though.”
Connor nodded, waiting for me to move, but I had absolutely no intention of getting out of the car. After all, it was Connor who hadn’t been concentrating. “Go on then!”
He groaned and put on his hazard lights.
“Maybe we should pull over to the side or something first?”
He glared at me but did as I said; the last thing either of us needed was someone coming up behind and crashing into the back of us.
He moved the car a few feet to the left and then got out, first walking in front of the bonnet and looking under, and then around the side and to the back of the car. After a couple of seconds he disappeared into the fog and I couldn’t make him out anymore.
In fact, I couldn’t make anything out. If possible, the fog seemed to have become even worse since we’d stopped the car.
The sound of static was coming from the radio again; Connor must have got the dial working just before the incident, and it was now in between stations. Behind the static I could hear some very faint music - it sounded like weird carnival or circus music - and I reached down to turn the radio off, preferring instead the thick, lonely silence.
It must have been a minute or so since Connor had wandered off into the mist; he was either doing a very thorough search of the area, or he’d got lost. I hoped it was the former and that I wasn’t going to have to go outside myself.
Placing my hands on the cold glass of the passenger window, I rested my head against it, trying to look through the fog for any sign of life. There was nothing other than the grey murk. Then I turned round in my seat and strained my eyes to look out the driver’s window. It was the same on that side of the car: an endless haze. Finally, I rested back against the seat, turning my gaze to the front windscreen.
There was a man standing next to the car.
I nearly screamed again but stopped myself just in time; it was Daniel Fields, cupping his hands to the window and peering in at me.
He smiled and waved at me as he realised who it was and I wound down the window to talk to him. “Are you OK?”
He stepped nearer to my window and smiled again. “Yes I’m fine; I just got a bit lost what with this damned fog!”
“You weren’t just in the middle of the road?”
“No… I was on the path, trying to grope blindly along the fence.” He gave a little chuckle, a noise very much out of place in the dense atmosphere. “I heard a car engine and came to see who it was. Isn’t this Connor’s new car?”
I nodded. “Yeah it is, he just went to look… I saw someone in the road, I thought we might have… it wasn’t you?”
“No, and I haven’t seen anyone on foot for miles. Although,” he looked off into the fog and smiled, “I don’t suppose I would. Do you think I could get a lift back to the village?”
“Of course, get in. I’m sure Connor will be back soon.”
It was only a matter of seconds before Connor opened the driver’s door and climbed in. He saw Daniel in the back seat and jumped, almost hitting his head on the roof of the car. “Dan! You haven’t been there the whole time, have you?”
Daniel laughed from behind me. “No, no. I got a bit lost in the fog, Beth here said you could give me a lift back. I hear you were just out looking for someone…?”
Connor nodded. “Couldn’t see anyone. Are you sure you weren’t mistaken, Beth?”
I was relieved that we apparently hadn’t hit anyone, but I wasn’t so relieved as to what the alternative - or alternatives - meant.
I glanced over at Connor as he was putting his seat belt back on, his face expressionless. Could I even trust what he was saying? He could easily have found someone and not told me. He could definitely have found someone on the road and dragged them into the trees, it’s not like anyone would have seen him. And it’s not like I didn’t think he was capable of something like that. Will and I had secretly charged him with much worse.
He was still waiting for my answer, so I quietly told him that maybe I was mistaken and he drove off into the fog once more.
I looked out the window and remembered the figure emerging out of the darkness; there was no way in hell I was mistaken.
No one said a word on the way back to Little Forest.
***
I called Will the day after and asked him to meet me in the park. I was looking at the exotic bird centre that always seemed so out of place in Little Forest when he tapped me on the shoulder.
“Well if it isn’t the little party planner.”
I turned round. “Hey.”
“Wow, Beth. You look like crap.”
I stared at him for a moment and then turned back to the birds. “Cheers.”
Will laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. Are you OK?”
I sighed, looking at a bright-feathered green and yellow bird that was pacing up and down in its cage. They were pretty big cages to be fair, but it was still slightly heartbreaking. “I’m fine, just tired. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
Will sat down on one of the wooden benches in front of the birds and gestured for me to do the same. “So what’s up?”
I went and joined him. “A few things, actually.”
Will smiled, leaning back against the bench. “What’s new?” He saw my annoyed look and sat up straight again. “I mean, go on.”
“Well, I went to Renfield yesterday with Connor.”
Will’s eyebrows knitted together in his ‘not happy’ face. “How come?”
“He’s got a new car and he wanted to go get some Poison Punch…” I saw his look of contempt. “I tried to get out of it, believe me. I even said I was on the way to your house but he’d seen you at work in the grocery store.”
“R
eally? I never saw him.”
I shrugged. “He was probably lurking. Anyway, we were in the Doctor’s Surgery pub and this old woman came up to me. She said that I’d ‘seen them’ or that I would soon.”
“Who?”
I shrugged. “I think she was mistaking me for someone else, she asked if I had a sister. It was weird, she stared at me the whole time I was there. Like full on, unapologetic staring.”
“OK… so how long were you there for?”
“What does that matter?
He shrugged.
“But that’s not all. John turned up there as well, and Connor sneaked off upstairs saying he was going to the toilet, but I went up and he was sitting talking to John, asking questions. John was getting really frustrated. They stopped when they saw me, though. I’m telling you, something wasn’t right.”
“I knew it. Did you ask Connor about it?”
“Yep. Totally ignored me.”
Will laughed harshly. “Sounds about right.”
“Anyway, it’s what happened on the way back that I really wanted to tell you about.”
“What, he used his Irish charm on you and now you don’t think he’s up to anything?”
“I… what? What’s wrong with you?”
He leaned back against the bench again. “Nothing, you just seem to be spending a lot of time with Connor, socialising and stuff.”
I sighed, getting exasperated. “Firstly, it wasn’t exactly socialising. He asked me to show him the way and I didn’t want to piss him off so I agreed. And secondly, I was trying to see if I could get any information from him, which I didn’t, but that’s not the point. When I asked him about the library, he came up with some rubbish story about finding out about the Cocktail building.”
My last comment didn’t even seem to register with Will. “Fine.” He closed his eyes, whether to pretend he didn’t care or so he wouldn’t have to look at me, I didn’t know.
Ignoring Will’s bad mood, I carried on. “On the way back, we nearly hit someone.”
He opened his eyes again; that got his attention. “Irish not so good with the driving, is he?”
“God, Will. Can you just listen?”
I told him what had happened, or what seemed to have happened.
Will sat up, staring ahead. “Maybe he jumped away at the last minute, or maybe you did hit him but he went flying into the fog somewhere.”
I punched him on the arm, a bit harder than I intended to. “Thanks for that, that’s made me feel much better.”
Will rubbed his arm and smiled sheepishly at me. “Sorry, Beth. So what are you saying about this guy you did or didn’t hit?”
I sighed, leaning back myself. “I don’t know.”
“Go on. I’ll listen, I promise.”
I looked at Will, trying to discern how sincere he was. I decided I didn’t care either way; I just had to get this out. “It just reminded me of a story I saw on one of those TV shows when I was younger, you know the ones your parents knew you shouldn’t be watching but let you watch anyway? It was about urban legends, and the episode I saw was about this one particular road in this town where accidents kept getting reported.
“The story was always the same: the driver would see a woman walk in front of the car and they’d slam the brakes on, unsure of what had happened. They’d get out the car and look around but they never found the woman. In each of the reports, the woman looked exactly the same and it always happened at the same point on the road. It turned out there was a woman who got run over and killed at that exact point years before. The description of her even matched.”
Will was nodding, slowly. “Creepy. But you said it yourself… it was an urban legend. We’ve got enough of those around here to know they don’t mean anything.”
Didn’t they? “I’m not so sure.”
“Beth? You don’t think the man you saw was… like the woman in the story, do you?”
I ignored Will’s question. I was staring at the bird, pacing up and down its cage, doing the same route over and over again, never deviating from its path. The image of Emma outside The Pit started hammering against my brain again, her last words refusing to budge from my mind. What if I had been seeing Emma’s last breathing moments? What if the way she died was so traumatic that she, too, was stuck reliving it over and over again? An endless cycle of death.
I shuddered at the thought.
Will pierced through my dark thoughts. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for what you saw, or what you think you saw.”
I sighed. I knew this would be his reaction. “Yeah, I’m a mess, I’m seeing things, got it.”
Will took my hand and patted it with his. “I’m just saying you’ve been under a lot of stress recently, with Veronica and your parents and everything.”
I pulled my hand away. “And what about Emma? None of the Veronica stuff had happened when I saw her outside The Pit.”
He shook his head, not looking at me, then stood up and started walking away.
“Will?”
Turning round, he looked half sheepish and half perplexed. “Sorry, Beth, I just don’t know what to say. I do know that we should add Connor and John’s conversation to our book though, you coming?”
He started walking off again and I took one last look at the helpless bird before running after him.
***
That Friday I was at work with Rach and the new guy, Graham. We were trying to show him how to use the slushie machine - which was much harder than we first thought it would be - when DCI Wood and DS Lawrence entered through the doors.
I saw their grave faces and my stomach lurched; I was having some serious déjà vu.
“Hello, Miss Powers, Miss Williams.” Rick looked at Graham, “And?”
Graham looked terrified at the thought of a police officer addressing him and was evidently having a hard time remembering his own name, so I responded for him. “Mr Underwood. I mean, Graham Underwood.”
Rick nodded at him before turning his attention back to Rach and me. “May I speak with you both again? In private?”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “Oh God, what is it now?”
Rick just repeated his question. “May we speak with you? I’m assuming you’ll insist on speaking to us together again?”
I glanced at Rach, who looked just as sick as me, and we both stood up. “Graham, can you mind the front while we’re gone?” He looked ill at the thought of it (the day of the funeral had apparently not gone well for him), but he nodded anyway, probably glad the police didn’t want to speak to him.
We led Rick and DS Lawrence into the staff room again and sat down at the same table, in the same positions as last time. I couldn’t help myself and blurted out another question. “Do you have any news on Emma?”
Rick seemed taken aback. “No… nothing’s changed. She died as a result of choking on her own vomit.” He paused, evidently trying to get back to the reason he was there. “What we came to talk to you about is John Rogers. He’s been missing for a few days. Have either of you seen him recently? Possibly at The Pit again?”
I was trying to take in what Rick was saying when Rach started asking some questions of her own. “Missing? Someone’s reported him?”
Rick nodded. “His roommate was worried when he hadn’t returned home. Obviously, due to Emma’s case we are keen to find out where he’s gone.”
I looked at DS Lawrence, who was smiling encouragingly at me and Rach. It seemed like some kind of watered-down good cop, bad cop routine, but we weren’t the ones who’d done anything wrong. I pulled my gaze away from him and aimed it back at Rick. “Do you think he had something to do with it? Emma, I mean?” I didn’t want to believe it - I couldn’t believe it, thinking back to how devastated John had been - but disappearing wasn’t a good sign.
Unless, of course, he hadn’t actually run away of his own free will. Surely, Connor couldn’t have…
I let my thoughts trail off as Rick cleared his thro
at, clearly annoyed at my question. “Like I said, she died as a result of…”
I interrupted him, hoping that giving him information would make him less pissed off with me. “I saw John at the Doctor’s Surgery pub in Renfield the other night.”
Rick got his black notepad out again and opened it to a fresh page. “And when was this?”
I thought back. “It was Monday.”
Rick nodded. “That was the last evening anyone saw or heard from him.”
My stomach lurched. “He hasn’t been seen since Monday night?” Four days was quite a long time for someone not to be seen around here; it was hard to go unnoticed in a village like Little Forest.
“Yes. Did you speak with John at all?”
I thought back to Connor and wondered briefly if I should leave that part of the story out. Then I realised how dumb it would be to lie to them, even if it was just neglecting to tell them something.
“I said hi to him when he walked in… he looked terrible, like he hadn’t been sleeping, but I guess that’s to be expected… then he went upstairs.”
“And did you see him after that?”
I nodded. “I was with Connor Maguire and he went to the toilet but must have got side-tracked talking to John. I went up to find him and they were sitting together. John was drinking, I think it was whiskey or something from the looks of it.”
“Connor Maguire, that’s the Irish man who’s recently moved here?”
“Yes.”
“What were they talking about?”
I hesitated. Regardless of what they’d actually been discussing, it didn’t look good. “I don’t know, John looked pretty agitated, like Connor was asking questions he couldn’t answer, or didn’t want to answer. He said something like ‘I told you what I know’ and asked him to leave it. He didn’t sound happy.”
Rick was writing in his notebook. “And then what happened?”
“Well, they saw me standing there and I told Connor I wanted to get home. I asked him about it on the way out but he wouldn’t say anything.”
“And do you know where I can find Connor?”
I could feel my stomach knotting up; I desperately hoped Connor wouldn’t find out it was me who’d told the police about his and John’s little conversation.
Rach was looking at me with her mouth half open - I’m sure she thought Connor was some kind of Saint.
“He works at Cocktail on Forest Way, and I think he lives on Pine Street?” I didn’t mention that I knew exactly which house it was. Instead, I pretended to look to Rach for confirmation.