Fallow Heart Page 11

  Lori shrugged as casually as she could manage. “About a week.”

  Walker wrote something in his file. He came back to the table, kicking out his chair and perching on the corner of it. The file flopped down a moment, and he took it back up hastily, catching Lori’s eye.

  “What symptoms are you experiencing?” he asked.

  He was needling deep, and Lori had sudden prickles on her arms. She shrugged again.

  “I’ve been sick and I feel hot,” she told him.

  Walker waited, but Lori gave him nothing more. She mopped her brow, a sheen of slimy sweat coming away. Was the room getting warmer? She tugged at the collar of her hoodie, glancing to the door. If she played up the illness thing, Walker might let her go soon. She coughed, forcing herself to turn it into a full-blown splutter. Her stomach gave a lurch. Could she make herself sick? Lori had never tried before, but if the moment called for it she’d give it a good try.

  “All right, all right,” Walker said. “I have one last issue to discuss with you, then I’ll have a brief word with your grandfather before you can both go.”

  She stayed with her head hung low, clutching her throat. Lori heard the ruffling of papers, and in her peripheral vision, she could see that Walker had put something on the table between them.

  “I need to know if you recognise anything about this photograph,” the detective said.

  Lori drew herself back up in her chair. She leaned on the desk, blinking, then focused on the image. Her insides seemed to fall right out of her body. The sudden emptiness was filled with a chill, and Lori’s body gave a spasm. Walker shifted in his seat, but Lori couldn’t take her eyes off the photograph. And the beast within it.

  The shop-front said Heart Funerals, though it was a night shot, barely lit by the faded orange glow of a street-lamp. The window of the funeral parlour was part-way broken, with a dark figure crossing through the smashed hole it had made in the glass. The figure was large and dark, almost as tall as the window itself, walking upright on two legs, like a human. But its head was another story. Two antlers sprouted from its crown, each a foot long, casting a huge shadow against the window, orange light blazing at their edges.

  “I…” Lori breathed. “I don’t know what that is.”

  Her guts twisted at the lie. She made the mistake of looking up at Walker. The detective studied her, his gaze piercing her mind.

  “You don’t know of anyone at your school that might be dressing in this get-up?” he said. Walker tapped the pictures rapidly. “Look again, please. Do you recognise anything, Miss Blake?”

  Lori did as she was told, though she couldn’t bear the take in the shape of the CCTV beast again. At the edge of the photo there was a date and time stamp in bold yellow print. The image had been captured at three o’clock that same morning. An hour before Lori turned up on her grandfather’s doorstep.

  “Is this place in the town centre somewhere?” she asked.

  “Brook Street,” Walker answered with a nod. “It’s where Ryan’s body was being prepared for his funeral next week.”

  Lori’s gaze snapped back to Walker.

  “Was?” she repeated. “What do you mean ‘was’? Where’s his body now?”

  The detective bit his lip. “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to divulge any more about the case to you. I shouldn’t have…” He pointed at the photo suddenly. “Lorelai, if you know anything about this costumed figure-”

  “I don’t,” she cut in. She gulped hard, licking her dry lips. “The picture freaked me out, sure, but that’s all. I don’t know what any of this means.”

  Walker’s glassy eyes stayed on hers until she looked away.

  “Then that’s all for now,” he said, getting to his feet. “You can wait in the foyer whilst I have a quick word with Tim.”

  He swept the photo back into his yellow file and stepped away to open the door.

  “Hey… Come on now. Wake up.”

  Lori’s eyes flickered open a tad.

  “That’s it. Listen to my voice. Wakey wakey.”

  She was leaning on something skinny. Someone skinny. It was pitch dark, and the chill of night air shot up the back of her pyjama t-shirt. She let go of the biceps she was clutching and a pair of hands fell away from hers too. She felt around, fingers roaming over her own shoulders and back.

  “Jesus, I’m not in the river again, am I?” she breathed. “Am I wet?”

  “No,” said the other voice with a small chuckle. “You’re fine.”

  Addy came into view. Lori hadn’t seen him since the night of her river episode, for her grandfather had been picking her up in the Clio and driving a different way out of the park. His thin lips were curved a little, his pale face corpse-like in the depth of night. Lori looked around properly, relieved to find that she was still within the confines of the caravan park. She looked at the few vans in this part, shaded by the thick, black branches of the trees.

  “You’re over on my side,” Addy explained. “I saw you from my window.”

  He pointed to a nearby van where the lights were still on. Lori rubbed her tired face, but recoiled a second later. She had rubbed something onto it.

  “Euch!” she exclaimed. “What the Hell?”

  “Yeah,” Addy said, his voice caught in half a sigh. “You were digging.”

  Her hands were caked with wet earth. Lori struggled to rub the grime from her face with her elbow, then tried to bat down the dirt and shake it off onto the ground. The clumps of earth fell into a hole in front of her. Lori gaped at it. Something was glittering back at her, reflecting the meagre light of the emerging moon. She crouched, reaching towards the glimmer.

  “Can you bury stuff on your own patch next time?” Addy chuckled again. “My van’s sinking into the soil enough, without you helping it along.”

  “Sorry,” Lori mumbled. She wasn’t sure she meant it.

  Her hand closed around something cylindrical in the dark dirt, and she struggled to pull it free. It clunked against something else, a sound that made Addy jump beside her. Lori pulled harder, loosening it from the other obstruction, and it suddenly came free with a force that flung her onto her backside. She hissed at the impact of landing, then looked at the thing in her hand.

  “Is that the spray can?” Addy asked. “The one you were using the other night?”

  By the faint light from the moon and the van’s windows, Lori knew that it was. Black paint, the kind she’d used to mark herself as Sown. And now, in her sleep, she’d come back to retrieve the can. Had she been the one to bury it too? What was she doing in the depths of her sleepwalking? How far out of her control was this going to get before it stopped?

  “There was something else, right?” Addy said.

  He was crouching too, reaching into the hole before Lori could stop him. She tried to stumble back onto her knees, forcing her weight forward, but the lanky swimmer was already using his long arms to delve back into the pit.

  “What the-” he began, but his words fell away.

  Antlers.

  No. That’s ridiculous.

  “Are these real?” Addy asked.

  He was shifting a set of large, black antlers to and fro in his hands. They didn’t seem to be shining like plastic. Perhaps they were real. Had Lori been digging them up, or trying to bury them?

  “I don’t know,” she stammered. “I’ve never seen them before.”

  That’s not true.

  She might have seen them before, that same afternoon, in Walker’s photograph. She forced herself up, then dragged Addy up by his elbows. He gawped at her, mouth open as if he was about to speak again.

  “Can you keep these for me?” she said, rattling his arms. “And keep them away from me?”

  Addy glanced down at the antlers again, then back to Lori. He furrowed his brow.

  “I can… if you want me to,” he said slowly, “but I don’t get it. What are they? Are they yours?”

  I hope not.

  “I don’t know,” Lor
i said again. Heat had returned to rage her body, panic flittering in her chest like a trapped moth. “You know I’m sleepwalking. Doing weird stuff. I don’t understand it yet. When I do, I promise I’ll be able to explain.”

  She hoped it was a promise that she could keep. Addy sighed, weighing the antlers again in his hands. He gave a small nod.

  “I guess if it helps you, I’ll do it.”

  She squeezed his arms a little, letting him go.

  “Thank you,” Lori breathed. “I’ve got to go and clean up before Mum sees me.”

  She began to walk away, but Addy called her name. Lori turned back. He looked so thin in the moonlight, his sides fading off into the shadows, and his face was long and almost silver. Horsy. Like a thin stallion. Lori shook the thought away.

  “Just an idea.” Addy shrugged. “But how about you strap yourself down for a few nights? See if it helps?”

  “Don’t worry,” she replied with a nod, “I’m going to.”

  Lori walked into the night, across the muddy plain with her bare feet. The earth was terribly cold beneath her, and a part of her wanted to sink down into it and cool herself off. She could use the river again now, and yet she was shivering too. Tablets. The suppressants would help with that feeling, she was sure of it. Maybe they’d knock out her busy mind too, send her back to sleep for a while. Her body would feel better in the morning, and then she could tackle her head. Tablets will help. As for the rest, for the other part of her that was awake when she wasn’t, the drugs didn’t seem to affect it.

  There’s something inside you, that cruel voice told her. Something that can’t be contained.

  Murder, and its many effects

  “Lori sweetheart, your breakfast is on the table.”

  Mum’s voice boomed through the thin caravan door. Lori heard the rattle as her mother tried the handle yet again. She continued to bundle the leather in her aching hands.

  “I’m not speaking to you,” Lori said firmly. “You know why.”

  “But it’s steak and eggs,” Mum said. “You love that. American style.”

  There was a pleading whine in her croaky tone. Lori had a pang in her chest. She took a breath.

  “Go away,” she replied. “I’m doing my homework.”

  It was not the usual behaviour for a Sunday morning. Lori stuffed the remains of two belts under her bed. She had pinched them from Brian’s wardrobe on Saturday evening and attempted to loop herself to the bedframe for the night: right wrist, left ankle. Sometime in the night the buckle had broken on the one of them, leaving Lori a stinging purple wrist from the struggle. Apparently, she’d managed to undo the one on her ankle after that without causing any further bruising. And Lori had no memory of any of it, save for the pain every time she moved her hand now.

  She did have her Spanish project up on the screen of the laptop, just in case Mum managed to fiddle the swivel-lock and burst into her tiny room. Lori returned to the computer once the evidence of her hard night was hidden, bringing up a new browser window over the top of the document. She pulled her hoodie sleeves down hard over her violet wrist, resting it gingerly on the edge of the keyboard. A hiss, and she pulled her hand back. Today’s typing would have to be leftie.

  The cursor blinked at her from the search bar. Lori skewed her mouth, chewing the corner of her lip. Most of Saturday had been spent trying to find more details about the two deaths that Walker had connected her to, but she could find no report of Ryan’s body going missing. Heart Funerals had issued a statement to confirm that, yes, they had been burgled in the night and had a window smashed in, but they made no comment on what had been stolen from them. Walker had been so cool and collected about everything else, but Lori’s question made him flinch. She knew that Ryan was gone. The question now was where.

  Pauline was easier to search, because there had been so many witnesses to the discovery of her remains. There was no further news on the other half of her being found, and Lori had passed the weekend with a deep, sickening sensation weighing her down. Would there be only half a corpse in the coffin this afternoon at St Werburgh’s? How awful that would be for her father. What were you supposed to say? Lori knew that when old people or sick people died, others said things like “Her suffering’s over now” and “He had a good innings.” But Pauline hadn’t even hit forty. She and Lori’s dad must have had so many plans that they wanted to see through.

  Lori tapped at the edge of the laptop, exhaling. She’d hoped that a night’s sleep might give her some new ideas of what to search, but her brain was still focused on the broken belt beneath her bed. No doubt her mother would have another sleepwalking episode to report to Granddad and Huw. Lori reached for the foot of the bed, dragging up her backpack. There was a comforting rattle from inside, and soon she was popping the bottle of pills open again. Who cared what Huw had discovered about their contents? They made her feel better. She swallowed a couple dry, then looked at the screen again. The cursor blinked on.

  Perhaps this was a sign that she should actually do her Spanish project. It might take her thoughts away from the belts and the Harvest and the D.C. at least. Lori loaded Google Espana, looking for some authentic stuff written in Spanish about Salvador Dali. It would certainly earn her credit with Profesora Marta, if her family ever saw fit to let her go back to class. She brought up a few pages with the help of Dali La Divina Comedia in the search box, needling in on what looked like a university’s report on the project. She scanned the page, looking for phrases she might recognise to see what the article was talking about. Under a sidebar named Relacionados, something caught her eye:

  Medio cuerpo

  It was part of a longer sentence, but those two words were all Lori needed. Medio meant half, as in half past the hour, and cuerpo was one of those words too similar to the English to forget. Corpse. Half a corpse. She recognised the sidebar as one of those that used your previous browsing to bring you clickbait. Her two lines of research had crossed over. Lori clicked through to the link, opening up a national Spanish news site. She’d been on it before for a homework project or two, but the image that greeted her now was far from school-friendly. A blood-soaked man was being held by two police officers, his face caught in a terrible tableau of anguish.

  Lori hit the little UK flag to translate the page. This was no time for a Spanish test, she had to know if this was something that could help her. The report was on the arrest of a man by the name of Matías Ruiz, a forty-two year old who had murdered his wife. When discovered, he was holding the lower half of her body, and the photograph had been taken as he was carried away by the police. There was a video embedded beneath the summary, so Lori let it play. It had clearly come from someone’s phone, watching as Ruiz was dragged towards the van in his bloodied clothes. He wailed at the camera and the officers alike, the same four words again and again.

  “No recuerdo! Por favor. No recuerdo!”

  She didn’t need a translator for that. Lori knew No recuerdo all too well. It was one of the first things Profesora Marta taught them to say when they couldn’t answer her questions in class:

  I don’t remember.

  Lori read on. Matías Ruiz had been attached to a string of murders, seven in all, and was finally caught red-handed with the body of his wife Aleida. He had pleaded his innocence time and again during the trial proceedings, claiming he had no account of his whereabouts on any of the nights that the killings took place. They could all be traced to him though. Friends, relatives, professional contacts. Every one was someone that he knew. Lori’s mouth ran dry, her hand shaking over the touchpad. She raced down through the translated article, looking for something, anything that didn’t sound like her situation. But she found the line that gave her that horrible feeling: the one where her insides seemed to fall clean out of her body.

  The attacks all took place between the hours of midnight and six a.m., a time at which Mr Ruiz claims to have been asleep. An interview with his neighbours, however, revealed reports of a figure le
aving the house regularly in the depth of night during the three-month period in which the killings took place.

  Lori sat back on her bed. She leaned on her hands and winced, cradling the sore wrist to her chest. She looked down at the painful purple ring around her flesh, trying to imagine the force she must have used to break the buckle of the belt.

  No recuerdo. I don’t remember.

  What if Ruiz had been sleepwalking too? She clasped the back of her neck, head bending down towards her knees. Lori’s mind swam with images. Pauline’s bloodied corpse. Ruiz’s bloodied form as he was dragged away, anguished and oblivious. Seven bodies. All his friends and family. It made too much sense. There was even half a corpse to report. Lori would have witnesses too, people who knew she’d been wandering out every night to God only knew where. If Detective Constable Walker pinned these murders on her, there was a mountain of evidence already stacked up to proclaim her as guilty.

  Worse than that, Walker might be right about her.

  Killer.

  “No,” Lori whispered. “Please. No.”

  She had to know. Even if the truth was unbearable to face, the possibility was already gnawing away at her, making her heart ache. Your poisoned heart. Your killer’s heart. Lori needed a plan. She’d have to find out more about Matías Ruiz and his killing spree, and whether he had any connection to the D.C., anything demonic about him. If he couldn’t recall stepping out in the dead of night to rip apart his loved ones, it seemed a horrifically likely cause. Lori sat up, sucking back the quivering threat of yet more tears. She’d save her crying for the funeral, let it all out where nobody would think it was strange.

  After that, it was time to investigate.

  Heads, and how easily we lose them

  “Get in, get in,” Lori’s mother said, yanking her arm. “Anywhere.”

  She broke contact, her icy palm leaving Lori’s burning grip. The church was already brimming with black-clad mourners, their eyes on the latest spectacle to enter the room. Lori clasped the folds of her maxi dress and wiggled her way into the first available pew. Her mother followed with tiny jabs at her elbow.