A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Read online

  ‘Forgives me!’ I spat. I seemed to be spitting a lot lately. ‘That’s rich.’

  With an effort I tore my eyes away from the little plot of crosses squeezed into the churchyard’s corner, and at the latest addition to their ranks, the still-raw earth already frozen solid but not yet covered with snow. ‘I’ll go and pick my things up from yours. Have a Happy New Year.’

  She wiped her eyes angrily. ‘We were just doing what we had to do. You think I liked doing it? But I told you, you can’t just keep the bits you like and throw away the rest.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Nearly forgot. Duty. Always nice to have someone else telling you have to kill. Means you can just sit back and enjoy it because God or whoever’s telling you to. And you liked it all right, Karen. Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it. Because I saw your face.’

  I walked past her without another word. As I did, I heard her laugh. For the last time, I turned back on looked at her. There was a bitter smile on her lips.

  ‘Do you really think you’re so different from us? Think you wouldn’t enjoy destroying what you knew to be evil? That you wouldn’t exult in it? We all would. That’s why there’s wars and cruelty in the world. It isn’t the taking pleasure in it that’s wrong, Roger. It’s the confusion. People can’t see it any more, because the Devil’s fogged their brains, just like the vicar said. But one day you’ll understand. And you’ll come back. And I’ll forgive you. I love you, Rog.’ She kept her smile fixed there bravely and took a deep, painful, shuddering breath. ‘And I’ll pray for you.’

  I couldn’t answer her. I had no words left. I just turned my back on her, for good and all, walked down the path and out through the lychgate. I kept my head bowed, walking faster and faster down the street, as the snow swirled down through the windy air.

  Love Knot

  I DIDN’T WANT TO BELIEVE IT, but it was true. I sat in my car and looked through the window of the café. It was him all right. Jack Fairchild. He was talking to a girl, a pretty, waif-like girl in a tie-dyed top and flared corduroys. Silver rings with semi-precious stones studded her fingers and she had about half-a-dozen rings in each ear, plus a stud in her nose. It made me wince just looking. Not that I’ve got a problem with other people doing it, you understand, but I’m squeamish, and I’ve never understood the attractions of body-piercing.

  After a couple of minutes, they got up and came out of the café. I dropped low and pretended to be looking for something on the floor of the car. A moment later, Jack’s car pulled out and I started driving after him, trying to hide in the traffic, and still trying to digest what I’d seen. Because Jack Fairchild was dead; he’d killed himself six months before, and I knew it beyond all shadow of a doubt. Because I was the one who’d found the body.

  Sheila Harris knew him, and she knew me. She’d gone out with Jack for nearly two years, finishing with him the year before his suicide, and next to me she’d known him better than anyone. If anyone else had told me that they’d seen Jack walking around in another city, I’d have dismissed it and said they’d seen someone who looked like him. But this was Sheila.

  She’d rung me up as soon as she’d got back from Preston, and asked if she could come round to my flat. I’d always enjoyed her company and it wasn’t particularly late—and in any case I’m a night-owl—so I said yes.

  I’d never seen her look so shaken. She was white as milk, and chain-smoked cigarettes all the way through. Sheila was another of the hippy-chicks that Jack was so fond of (and who were pretty fond of him too in their way)—all flared trousers, silver jewellery, assorted New Age knickknacks, and, in Sheila’s case, a scent of sandalwood—and cigarettes were something she usually only used to roll joints with. To see her demolishing the best part of a packet of twenty Embassy No. 1s was enough to alert me.

  I made her a cup of coffee and added a dash of Navy Rum—I keep a bottle handy for emergencies like this. So far she’d told me nothing, other than that she had to see me right now, and from her manner I was pretty sure it wasn’t because she wanted to propose marriage.

  ‘Okay,’ I said once I’d set up a saucer as a make-do ashtray, and watched Sheila stub out her second cigarette since entering before starting on her third without even a pause for breath. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘It’s Jack.’

  ‘Jack?’ Even as I said the name, I felt a wave of giddiness pulse through me. Thinking of him made me think of what I’d found. A lot of things brought back bad memories, had done ever since; the woods in autumn, the smell of wet leaves and damp earth, the creak of tree branches, and even the feel of a light rain on my face, all brought the pictures back. And so, of course, did his name. ‘What about Jack?’

  ‘Okay,’ Sheila said again, obviously psyching herself up. ‘You’ve got to believe this, Ian. I wasn’t tripping, okay? Hadn’t even smoked a spliff. God knows I could do with one. You haven’t——?’

  I did, but I wanted to get some sense out of her first. Sheila stoned tended to lose the plot totally and gibber out whatever went through her head, usually free-associating from one topic to the next every five seconds. If she took so much as a single drag on a joint she’d start telling me about whatever Jack-related thing it was, move on to the time we all went camping together, and within two or three minutes she’d be telling me about the Middle East or the Balkans. That was usually pretty entertaining, and God knows I’ve done stupider things myself under the influence, but tonight wasn’t the time, not yet. ‘Maybe later,’ I told her. ‘What did you see?’

  She sucked on her cigarette, hard, and gulped more rum-laced coffee. ‘You know I was on the coach back from Blackpool tonight?’

  I nodded; Sheila’s current boyfriend, a muscle-bound boy-racer called Andy, had relocated there a month ago. I was hoping the long-distance relationship didn’t pay off, partly because I’d always carried a torch for Sheila, but more importantly because Andy was an ignorant bully who’d done nothing but wear Sheila down since they met. It beat me what she saw in him. Still, it was her choice.

  ‘The coach stops in Preston on the way back, and I was nearly there when I remembered it’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow and I hadn’t got him anything. Not even a card. By the time I’d got back to Manchester it would’ve been too late to get anything, so I got off in Preston—thought I’d get the next one.’

  I nodded understanding. Nothing weird or Jack-connected there.

  ‘I went and found a shop—got him a big bar of dark chocolate and a card. You know how he loves dark chocolate. Anyway. There was time before I went to get the coach, so I went for a coffee. There’s a little caff in Preston, really nice—I’ve told you about it before.’

  I remembered now. ‘Louie’s?’ Sheila nodded. Louie, she’d told me, was a transplanted American who’d never quite realised that the ’sixties were over, and set up his own shrine to the decade in the café named after him. I’d been in once or twice; he still dressed the way he had back then—possibly in the same clothes—and bound up his long, greying hair with a red white-spotted bandanna. The café served mostly vegetarian food, but the coffee was great, apparently. And there are worse soundtracks than America, the Byrds, and the Rolling Stones back when they were good to listen to while you eat.

  But I digress.

  ‘So I went in there, and I had a coffee and a bit of carrot cake, and then I was just setting off when I saw him. I’d got across the street, when I saw his car pull in, in front of Louie’s—you remember how Jack used to park?’ Didn’t I just. Like he was going to ram-raid the premises and changed his mind at the last moment.

  ‘That was what made me look. And then I saw him getting out of the car. He didn’t see me. It was him, Ian! It was Jack Fairchild, I swear to God!’

  ‘Jack’s dead, Sheila. You were at the funeral, remember?’

  She snapped furiously, slamming down her mug so coffee spilled on the table, ‘Don’t fucking patronise me, Ian!’

  ‘I’m not! But he’s dead, Sheila
; I should bloody know!’

  Sheila stubbed out her cigarette and her fingers played with one another, knotting and unknotting for a whole five seconds before she lit up another smoke. ‘Shit, I’m sorry, Ian. But it was him, you know? I didn’t know him as long as you did, but it was a long time, and Jack was always pretty . . . distinctive, you know?’

  I knew. It was one of the more restrained things the local vicar had said about him the time he’d left something extremely unpleasant on the altar at the local church.

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Nothing much. He went in, had a coffee, that was it. I had to go—had a coach to catch, and to be honest I was afraid he’d see me.’ She stubbed out yet another cigarette. ‘So there you are. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you rolling a joint now?’

  ‘I think that could be arranged,’ I said, and reached for the tobacco tin I kept under the sofa. Either she’d seen him or she hadn’t. But equally I’d seen him, and in a condition which would make going into a café six months later for a drink pretty unlikely. Even in Preston.

  So ultimately there was only one thing left to do.

  And that was why I’d driven up to Preston. Jack and his girlfriend were heading across the city, into a residential suburb just outside the city. They stopped outside a rambling Victorian house on a road called Laburnum Close, and went inside. After a couple of minutes, I got out of the car and strolled along the road towards the door.

  It was early evening and the setting sun glinted in bits through the branches of the sycamore trees along the roadside. I reached the bottom of the house’s narrow drive. A rambling, overgrown front garden sprawled out on either side of it. The porch, recessed into an arch of greyish-red brick, had a white door with four frosted glass panels, flanked by two curtained windows. It put me in mind of a mouth open to snarl, howl, or bite, flanked by bulbous eyes like those of a predatory fish.

  Beside the door were five bell-pushes—the house had been converted into flats. I looked at the names: MR A. AKINBODE, MR N. SINGH, MR M. ORTEGA, MME LAROUSSE, MR F. JACKSON.

  F. JACKSON. Always assuming that this was where Jack and not the girl lived—and she hadn’t looked like a Madame—this was presumably him. F. JACKSON instead of Jack Fairchild. There was a certain humour in that.

  Something moved out of the corner of my eye—I thought I caught a glimpse of a pale face pressed against the glass of the window to my right, but it was gone as I looked, and the tightly drawn curtains didn’t even so much as twitch, or shiver.

  I’d had a good long look at him, and there was no doubt that it was Jack Fairchild. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. But . . .

  I got in the car and drove back to Manchester as fast as I could, but however fast I drove I couldn’t seem to outpace the memories.

  I’ve got a different approach to Sheila when it comes to things that frighten me, shake up my sense of what’s possible in this world, or generally just plain freak me out. Sheila had come to me as a friend to talk to, unburden herself. Me, I paid a visit to the bottle of Lamb’s Navy Rum under the sink and put as much away of it as I could between reefers. I passed out on my sofa around one in the morning and woke up again around seven with a scream and a splitting headache. I’d slept badly, dreamed badly. My scream had been the carry-over from my last dream—sitting up half-awake to see Jack Fairchild in the armchair opposite, grinning at me with a pale face, lips bloated and purplish-black, his eyes full of blood. At least, I hoped to God it had been a dream.

  I went to see Sheila about it the next day. She brewed a soothing cup of camomile tea and offered a massage on my neck and shoulders. I accepted and thought impure thoughts as she unknotted the muscles that had been cramped up by sleeping on the sofa.

  ‘You were right,’ I admitted finally. ‘It was him.’

  ‘Told you,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘Question is, what do we do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know. The police checked the body I found pretty thoroughly. He had a record with them, remember; enough for them to have his prints. They checked those and his dental records. One hundred percent proof positive. That was Jack’s body I found—even if I hadn’t recognised him that would clinch it. But . . .’

  ‘But he’s alive and well and living in Preston.’

  ‘Occam’s Razor,’ I said simply. ‘The simplest explanation is usually the right one.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘A look-alike. A doppelgänger. Hell, maybe even an identical twin.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  But we both knew it. The man we’d seen didn’t just look like Jack; it dressed like him, it even had the same little mannerisms. What were the odds against that?

  ‘So what do we do?’

  I drove back up to Preston the next day, returned to the house on Laburnum Close, and rang the bell for Mr F. Jackson’s flat. No answer. I thought for a few minutes, then rang another of the bells.

  Mr A. Akinbode answered the door, a tall Nigerian with a lilting accent and half-moon glasses that made him look ten years older than he was, an exchange student at the local college. Yes, he knew Mr Jackson. Yes, the description I gave matched him. No, Mr Jackson wasn’t in. Mr Jackson had left that morning. No, he didn’t know where. No one did. There one day, gone the next, leaving his keys and his unpaid rent in an envelope pushed under the landlady’s door.

  Gone. No forwarding address. ‘Probably ran off with one of his girls,’ said Ade Akinbode. The ‘A’ stood for something long and complicated I kept getting in trouble with, but he’d laughed and just told me to call him Ade (‘A-day’) like everyone else.

  ‘Girls?’

  Ade laughed again; it was a loud laugh, booming, and a couple of pigeons clattered from their perches in the sycamore just outside the drive. ‘Oh yes, girls, my friend. A different one almost every night.’

  ‘That sounds like him,’ I smiled. Shortly after, I made my excuses and left.

  It might have ended there. Whatever the mystery, the Jack Fairchild look-alike had departed for parts unknown. As time went by, it was easier and easier for both Sheila and I to convince ourselves that we’d only seen someone who bore a resemblance to Jack. It hadn’t been that long since his death after all.

  And even if it somehow was Jack, he’d made no effort to get in touch with his old friends, had he? If somehow and for some reason we couldn’t understand he’d faked his death, he obviously wanted to make a break from the people he’d known, if not the lifestyle. It hurt to think that, so we preferred the first explanation. And so the memory of the incident faded from our minds, until now and again we only occasionally joked about it.

  Sheila gave Andy the Arsehole the push. A couple of weeks later, she came round for a dinner I’d cooked, but nothing came of it. Another week or two went by, and she started seeing someone else. Not for the first time, I kicked myself soundly and told myself to get a life.

  I went out with a couple of girls—a nice but vacuous receptionist for a computer firm and a girl I’d met at a rock-and-metal club in Manchester who claimed to be a witch. The second one lasted a while, but then her old boyfriend—a Hell’s Angel—finished his stretch in Strangeways for GBH with intent, and they got it back together. And that was the end of that, as I had no wish to have a man known to his friends as Mad Dog for a love rival.

  But Lorry—short for Lorelei, or so she claimed—left a few legacies, like a Motorhead CD I rather enjoyed playing now and again, and a copy of The Big Issue. I was flicking through the magazine one day, not long after Lorelei was clasped once more in the arms of Mad Dog, trying to find something I hadn’t read. The features range from the entertaining to the disturbing, and among other things there’s a regular column on Missing Persons. ‘Have You Seen . . .?’ it asks, and then below are the pictures of the disappeared and a little information. I used to share a flat with a drama student when I was at college, and what a flake he was. I kept expecting to see him
in that section of the mag.

  I didn’t see him, but I still nearly dropped the magazine as my stomach gave a horrible lurch. There were three missing persons, but I didn’t notice the one on the left or the one in the middle. It was the one on the right who caught my attention.

  She smiled up at me in flat, grainy black-and-white. It wasn’t a great picture, but I recognised the face, the smile. And I recognised the half-dozen rings you could just about make out in each ear, and the stud in her nose.

  I met Jack Fairchild when we were at primary school together. The ripe old age of five.

  We grew up together. We were different even then; he was sporty, forever tearing round the asphalt playground in a game of football, while I was the bookish type, forever buried to the nose in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Hobbit, or, better yet, a Dr Who book. But he liked Dr Who as well, and that was the beginning.

  So we became friends. We invited one another to our birthdays, we went out on our bikes together in the summer holidays and at half-terms. Went camping together, rang doorbells and ran away together, dared each other to venture across the local golf course and brave the slicing balls of power-crazed golfers.

  We tried alcohol for the first time with each other, tobacco, cannabis. Got drunk together—and threw up; smoked together—and threw up; got stoned together and lay sprawled out on the floor with zoned smiles spread across our faces, talking about how, like, one tiny atom in our thumbnails could be, like, one little tiny universe. . . .

  We went out in search of willing girls as well, headbanging away in the hard-rock and metal clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, although Jack was always a damn sight better at it than me.