Innocent Blood

Sixteen

Frank was driving to see his sister, Carol, when his cellphone rang. It was Nevile.

‘I got your messages, Frank. I’m sorry, something came up and I had to go away for the weekend. How are you feeling now?’

‘I’m not sure. Baffled, I guess, more than anything else. Worried.’

‘Why don’t you come and see me? There’s some things that I need to tell you, before we go any further.’

‘OK. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.’

It must have been the maid’s day off because the teenager in the splashy Hawaiian shirt opened the door for him with a grin like a cheap piano.

‘Sir, you are very, very welcome, señor.’

Nevile was waiting for him out on the deck, dressed in a charcoal-gray shirt and black pants, with black suspenders, like a priest. He looked pale and distracted and there were dark circles under his eyes.

‘Hello, Frank.’ He lifted a large cut-crystal tumbler of whiskey. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘A little early for me, thanks.’

Nevile drew out a chair and sat down. ‘I owe you an apology – vanishing off the face of the earth without telling you. I didn’t mean to leave you in the lurch. I had to go away for a couple of days and have a think, otherwise I wouldn’t have been any use to anybody, myself included.’

Frank said nothing, but waited for Nevile to explain himself.

‘The thing is, this business with Danny is a lot more complicated than it first appeared. I think it might be a lot more dangerous, too. Quite honestly, we might be better off if we called it a day.’

‘Just a minute. On Friday you were telling me that it was absolutely critical that we found out what it was that Danny was trying to tell me.’

‘That was on Friday.’

‘So it’s only Monday. What’s different?’

‘Well . . . after you left, I decided to try picking up some more psychic resonance from that truck seat that Lieutenant Chessman had given me. You know – the one from the Garry Sherman Show.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘I was in the right mood for it, after that séance. How can I describe it? My psychic antennae were still tingling.’

‘So what happened?’

Nevile swallowed whiskey and grimaced. ‘To begin with I got nothing more than the same flashes that I had seen before. A man shouting, and then a walk between some cypress trees. They still didn’t tell me anything coherent. Nothing that might account for a young man wanting to blow himself up.

‘But later that evening, when I was sitting in the library, writing up my notes, my PC started misbehaving. No matter what I typed on the keyboard, it insisted on writing something else. Here,’ he said, and handed Frank a print-out. The text started off plainly enough.

Thursday, September 20:

I began my communication session with Frank Bell by attempting to establish contact with Danny’s real spirit. ^*see my notes p.13^* In order to give Danny’s spirit a recognizable signal, I made use of Mr Bell’s overwhelming need to hear that Danny forgave him.

I channeled and amplified the intensity of Frank’s feelings so that Danny might home in on them – rather like the Doppler signal that identifies an airport in thick fog. I had no idea whether Danny was prepared to forgive his father or not. He might very well have wanted to curse him for what he had done, or what he failed to do. But the first priority was to make contact and to verify that I had found the genuine Danny.

At this point, however, the text altered completely.

KiLL the basstuds 4 wat they Dun 2 me all them yRs the basstuds never LET UP never LET UP treet me liK sum kind dOg ONy wors than dog more Lik dogshIt pa alwis ScrEEEmin an ScrREEEMIN never LET UP jus never LET UP alwis HITTin and HITTin an makin me DO THEM THINS makin me DO THEM thins all of them ALL of them pa an his frends an all of them utha Men til I was pUkin sick an noBODY NEVER helpt not doCtus not teecHus noboDY NEVER in the hole wirl But now I goT the chants to kLL the basstuds an here I GO.

Frank read it and then he handed it back to him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Automatic writing, twenty-first century style,’ said Nevile.

‘What’s automatic writing?’

‘It’s when a spirit takes over your consciousness and writes messages from the other side. And this is what’s happened here.’

‘Who is it, do you know?’

‘I think it’s Richard Abbott. I can’t be one hundred percent certain, but I spent the whole afternoon trying to contact him, through that truck seat, and he was the last person who ever sat in it.’

‘And he wrote to you?’

Nevile nodded. ‘Automatic writing is one of the most effective ways of contacting people who have passed over. You ask a question, you open your mind, and you allow a spirit to control your hand as you write. Some mediums use a Ouija board, but most of them simply use a pen and a notepad. Anybody can do it. You could do it, if you were prepared to sit calmly and quietly for twenty minutes and wait for the words to flow. I wouldn’t guarantee that the words would make very much sense, or that you’d necessarily know which spirit was using you to communicate its thoughts, but the chances are that you’d get something from beyond. Some mediums even claim that Shakespeare has used them to write whole new plays, or that Beethoven has inspired them to finish off his symphonies.’

‘But this spirit wrote to you on your PC.’

‘Yes and I’ve heard more and more cases of that. When you think about it, a spirit would probably find a PC much easier to write with than a pen, because it’s electrical, and all the spirit has to do is use its own electrical energy to take control of my keyboard mapping.’

‘So Richard Abbott is trying to tell you that he was abused by “pa an his frends an all of them utha Men”?’

‘It would appear so, yes.’

Frank thought about that. ‘That manifestation of Danny . . . he was being abused, too.’

‘Yes,’ said Nevile, ‘and that’s a very important clue. But I also think it’s taking us somewhere very dark indeed. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that the real Danny – your Danny – has anything to do with any of these phenomena. Danny’s image is simply being used to draw you into this. I won’t mince words, Frank. This could be very, very dangerous.’

‘Dangerous in what sense? I mean, what are we looking at here?’

‘Madness and death, Frank. That’s what we’re looking at.’

He was still talking to Nevile when Lieutenant Chessman arrived at the house, accompanied by Detective Booker. They came out on to the deck and Lieutenant Chessman stood by the rail and took two or three deep breaths.

‘Makes a change from carbon monoxide.’

Nevile said, ‘This is what I was telling you about on the phone,’ and handed him the ‘automatic writing’ from his PC. Lieutenant Chessman read it, moving his lips as he read, and then passed it to Detective Booker.

‘Weird. How reliable is this kind of message, in your experience?’

‘Unusually reliable, as far as spirit communications go. It’s absolutely exhausting for a spirit to put anything down on paper, because it requires such intense concentration and a huge amount of natural energy – kinetic, when they’re using pen and paper, but in this instance, electrical. Let me put it this way: very few spirits ever take the trouble to write anything stupid or mischievous. It’s too much effort.’

‘So what do you make of this? You really think it was written by Richard Abbott?’

‘I’d put money on it. I’ll make some further tests to confirm it, but remember that his mother said on TV that his father used to beat him.’

‘So what’s Mr Abbott trying to say?’

‘If it is him, it’s my belief that he’s trying to explain to us that he wasn’t just whipped, but seriously abused by his father and his father’s friends and other men, and that this experience was one of the factors that led him to become a suicide bomber.’

Lieutenant Chessman took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his nose. ‘Pretty tenuous theory, wouldn’t you say? What about the other bombers?’

‘I don’t know yet. But I did some psychic communication for Mr Bell here, to see if he could contact his son, Danny. We had a spirit visitation – not, in my opinion, from Danny, but from another spirit who used Danny’s image as a means of arousing Mr Bell’s sympathy. Whoever that spirit was, it appeared as if he had suffered from serious childhood abuse.’

‘So where does this take us?’

‘I don’t know with any certainty. But abused children commonly grow up to be abusers themselves, don’t they, and to seek revenge on society in general for destroying their self-esteem. Maybe this is what’s happening here.’

‘Your father belts you and so you blow up Disney Studios?’

‘It’s conceivable. Do you have any other ideas?’

Before he left, Lieutenant Chessman turned back to Frank. ‘By the way, Mr Bell, about your mystery woman.’

‘What about her?’

‘I have another witness who saw her walking along Gardner Street soon after the explosion at The Cedars. She identified her as wearing jeans and a creamy-colored shirt dress and one sandal, so that she was walking with a limp. She even stopped her and asked her if she was OK.’

‘I see.’

‘The witness said the woman was aged about twenty-three or twenty-four, with short brown hair. Very pretty, she said, in spite of the fact that she had smudges all over her face. Reminded her of somebody she knew, she said, although she couldn’t think who it was.’

‘Oh.’

‘Just thought that might help to jog your own memory, Mr Bell. Try to think of some TV actresses that she could have looked like.’

Frank thought about Astrid but he shook his head. ‘Sorry. I only write TV; I hardly ever watch it.’

While Nevile showed Lieutenant Chessman and Detective Booker to the door, Frank took a look around his library. On a side table he noticed a photograph in a silver frame – a slim, blonde woman, leaning on the parapet of a bridge someplace, wearing a straw hat. She had one hand lifted to prevent the hat from blowing away, and she was laughing.

‘Attractive lady,’ Frank remarked as Nevile came back in.

Nevile took the photograph away from him and gave it a wistful smile. ‘Yes. That was taken on Albert Bridge, in London.’ Pause. ‘We were supposed to be getting married.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘No, no. Don’t worry about it. That was all a long time ago. Nine years and three months, to be precise. Her name was Alison. She was a very clever girl, great fun. She wanted to be a QC.’

‘What happened?’

‘An accident. A boat party, actually, on the Thames, for somebody’s birthday. I was invited, too, but I was working with the Sussex Police that day, trying to find two little girls who had gone missing on the South Downs. It was such a fine summer evening that I drove all the way back to town with the top of my car down.

‘I was driving through Putney when I heard on the radio that a dredger had collided with a pleasure boat close to Westminster Pier, and that a number of young people had been drowned. Fifty-two, as it turned out, in the end; and Alison was one of them.’

‘I’m sorry. Jesus, you must have been devastated.’

‘Well, I was. I haven’t really got over it, even now. I keep thinking of what she would have been like now, if she had lived. Sometimes I’m driving along the street and I catch a glimpse of her, disappearing into a doorway, or climbing into a taxi. I know it can’t really be her, but I can’t get her out of my mind.

‘In fact, it was two years after Alison drowned that I experienced automatic writing for myself, so that’s how I know how reliable it can be.’

‘Alison wrote to you?’

Nevile nodded. ‘I was sitting by the Thames one August afternoon at Boulter’s Lock. It’s very peaceful there . . . several miles upstream from the City. I was writing notes for a lecture on psychic detection, but I had drunk one two many glasses of wine over lunch and I started to nod off. My writing hand started to go into a sort of a spasm, rather like a cramp, but not so painful. It circled around and around my notebook, and then it made all kinds of squiggles.

‘I suddenly felt that Alison was very close by – that she was leaning over my shoulder. I tried to resist turning around because I knew that she wasn’t really there, but in the end I couldn’t stop myself.’

‘And?’

‘I was right. She wasn’t there.’

Nevile paused for a moment, smiling wistfully at the memory. Then he hunkered down and opened one of the drawers underneath the bookshelves. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘the very piece of paper.’

Frank took it and tried to read it. All he could make out was RO smmr AD tom FFG.

‘Incomprehensible if you don’t know what you’re looking for,’ Nevile admitted. ‘But most automatic writing is very personal. If you fold the paper in the middle, the letters RO and AD join together to form the word ROAD, and The Road by Edwin Muir was one of Alison’s favorite poems.

‘It’s all about passing time. “There is a road that turning always|Cuts off the country of Again.” And the verse that Alison was trying to remind me of goes: “There a man on a summer evening|Reclines at ease upon his tomb|And is his mortal effigy|And there within the womb|The cell of doom.” See . . . “smmr” is “summer”, “tom” is “tomb” and “FFG” for “effigy.”’

He took the piece of paper back and returned it to the drawer. ‘She was telling me that everybody dies. Even when we’re laughing on Albert Bridge, we’ll soon be dead. Even after we’re dead, though, we still journey on, although only the dead know where.’