Black Rabbit Summer

  It’s incredible.

  And then there’s the atmosphere, the wasteground air, with its faint but insistent smell of gas. It’s always been there, this vaguely unsettling odour, even though the gas towers have been empty for years, and it always seems to smell the same. It’s never weaker, never stronger. It’s always just there – an ever-present scent in the air. But the strangest thing of all is that as soon as you leave the wasteground, as soon as you step through the fence, or climb the bank into Back Lane, the smell of gas is suddenly gone.

  So, yeah, like I said, it’s a weird kind of place, the kind of place that makes you think… but I don’t suppose I should have been thinking about it just then. Because if I hadn’t been thinking about it just then, if I hadn’t been gazing around as I ran, thinking about the weirdness of the wasteground, I might have seen the two kids standing in the shadows of the gas towers earlier, and I might have had more time to think…

  But I didn’t.

  They were standing just to the right of the nearest gas tower, and I didn’t see them until they’d stepped out in front of me, blocking my way, and I’d almost run into them. I stopped just in time, turned quickly to the left, and ran off round the other side of the tower. They didn’t make much of an effort to get hold of me, and they didn’t come rushing after me either… and I suppose I should have realized then what was happening. But I was too busy being scared to think straight. It wasn’t until I’d reached the other side of the tower, and I looked up to see where I was going, and I saw Wes Campbell standing in the middle of the path, looking at me with a mocking smile on his face…

  That’s when I realized what was happening.

  Sixteen

  ‘Hey, Boland,’ Campbell said to me. ‘You all right? You look a bit hot and bothered.’

  He’d chosen a good spot to wait for me. With the gas tower to my right and a thick spread of brambles to my left, he was blocking the only way forward. And I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know that the Greenwell kids were behind me. I could hear them – muttering and laughing, getting their breath back, lighting cigarettes.

  I was trapped.

  All I could do was stand there and watch as Campbell started moving towards me. Grinning softly, his eyes fixed coolly on mine, he didn’t stop walking until he was almost on top of me.

  As I stepped back a little, he raised his eyebrows and smiled at me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he pouted. ‘Don’t you like me?’

  Someone behind me sniggered.

  I said to Campbell, ‘Pauly rang you, didn’t he?’

  Campbell shrugged. ‘Pauly’s always ringing me.’

  ‘He told you I was at his house –’

  I stopped talking as Campbell leaned in close to me and placed his finger on my lips. It was a curiously gentle gesture, almost intimate. But it was also incredibly menacing.

  ‘Shhh,’ Campbell whispered, leaning in even closer. ‘You talk too much… you know that, don’t you?’

  I found myself nodding at him.

  He stared at me for a moment, his eyes only inches from mine, then he slowly took his finger from my lips, smiled at me again, and took a step back. ‘I just want a little chat with you, OK? Just me and you… is that all right?’

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.

  Campbell carried on staring at me for a while, then eventually he raised his eyes and looked over my shoulder, turning his attention to the Greenwell kids behind me. ‘All right,’ he told them, nodding his head, ‘you can go now. Wait for me back at the corner.’

  ‘How long you gonna be?’ one of them said.

  Campbell gave him a look. ‘Just wait for me.’

  I heard a few mutterings, the scuffle of moving feet, then the sound of shuffling footsteps as they all turned round and headed back across the wasteground. As Campbell watched them go, I wondered what they’d do if I turned round and called out to them – Hey, hold on, don’t go… don’t leave me alone with him…

  But it was too late now.

  They were gone.

  And I was alone with him.

  And he was looking at me as if he could do whatever he wanted.

  And I didn’t like it one bit.

  ‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good.’ He smiled. ‘Because I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to talk to you. All you’ve got to do is keep your mouth shut and listen, and everything’ll be all right. OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s not too difficult, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ He jerked his head towards a stack of old bricks next to the gas tower. ‘Sit down over there.’

  I went over and sat down.

  When Campbell came over and sat down next to me, I didn’t know if he was sitting too close on purpose, or if it was just something he did without thinking – an instinctive tough-guy thing, invading your space to intimidate you. Whatever the reason, I found myself shuffling away from him, but almost immediately he put his arm round my neck and pulled me back towards him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he said, tightening his arm.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I muttered, almost choking. ‘I was just, you know… I was just getting comfortable…’

  He loosened his grip and draped his arm round my shoulder. ‘Is that better?’

  I couldn’t say anything.

  He grinned at me. ‘Are you comfortable now?’

  I’d never felt less comfortable in all my life, but I nodded at him anyway.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, listen… are you listening?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right… this is what you’re going to do, OK? You’re going to stop poking your nose into things that don’t concern you. You’re going to forget whatever you saw at the fair. And you’re not going to ask any more questions about anything. Do you understand?’

  ‘No…’

  He sighed. ‘I thought you were supposed to be smart?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘It’s not difficult, for Christ’s sake. You didn’t see anything, you don’t know anything, you don’t want to know anything. Which bit of that don’t you understand?’

  ‘I was only asking Pauly about Raymond –’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Raymond… Raymond Daggett.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s Raymond Daggett?’

  ‘He was with me the other night, you know… Saturday night, in Back Lane –’

  ‘The spazzy kid?’

  ‘Raymond’s not –’

  ‘Fuck Raymond,’ Campbell said angrily, gripping my neck again. ‘I don’t give a shit about Raymond… this has got fuck all to do with Raymond. This is just me telling you to keep your fucking nose out, all right?’

  ‘Or else what?’ I heard myself say.

  There was a split second’s silence then, just enough time for me to wonder if I could have said anything more stupid, then Campbell’s arm suddenly tightened round my neck and he leaned to one side and violently yanked my head down. As my body doubled over, my legs flew up into the air, and I ended up kind of half-sitting and half-lying on the stack of bricks, with one arm jammed under my chest, the other one scrabbling around, trying to find something to hold on to, and my head shoved down between Campbell’s legs.

  It was ridiculous.

  I was scared to death.

  But it was still ridiculous.

  I could hardly breathe, my head was exploding with pain, but even as Campbell tightened his grip, squeezing my throat so hard that I thought my neck was going to snap… even then, I was still faintly aware that my head was shoved down between his legs, and that didn’t feel right at all. I actually felt kind of embarrassed about it. God knows why. I mean, it wasn’t as if I’d chosen to be in this situation, and there were far more useful things I could have been feeling than a vague sense of irrational embarrassment.

/>   Or maybe there weren’t?

  Maybe that’s what happens when you think you’re going to die – you concentrate on the trivial things to take your mind off the horror. You think of embarrassment rather than pain. You concentrate on the spotless white jeans of your killer, rather than the fact that he’s strangling you. You smell his scent, a darkly sweet perfume, and you wonder where you’ve smelled it before…

  You think of the darkness, closing in around you…

  The darkness.

  The stars…

  Going out.

  Dark silence.

  White plains.

  The blackness…

  It was everywhere now.

  Hey!

  It was a nice feeling… like sitting in a bubble of light…

  Boland?

  … in some kind of primitive consciousness…

  Hey, Boland!

  Someone was shaking me now, shaking the life back into me, and I could hear a distant voice in the sky.

  ‘You listening to me, Boland?’

  ‘Yuhh…’

  A whisper.

  ‘Look at me.’

  I opened my eyes. I was lying on the ground at Campbell’s feet – lying on my back, looking up at him. My throat hurt. My neck hurt. The sun was too bright.

  ‘Look at me.’

  I sat up slowly and looked at him. His face was blurred, cold and waxy.

  ‘Next time I won’t let go,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’

  I nodded, wincing at the pain in my neck.

  Campbell squatted down in front of me and stared into my eyes. ‘No more questions, all right? You don’t know anything. You didn’t see anything. And this never happened.’ He reached out his hand and gently lifted my chin. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’

  He let go of my chin, patted my cheek, then got up and walked away.

  Seventeen

  My neck started stiffening up quite badly as I walked back home along the lane, and every time I breathed in, I could hear a weird kind of scraping sound in my throat. My head was aching too, and I had lights in my eyes – little flashing lights, like tiny white stars. But apart from that – and considering what Campbell had just done to me – I didn’t actually feel too bad.

  Not physically, anyway.

  Mentally, I was falling apart.

  I was scared, for one thing – and when I say scared, I mean really scared. Shaking-inside scared. It’s all right, I kept telling myself. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a delayed reaction, some kind of emotional aftershock… it’s perfectly natural to feel like this. But it didn’t feel perfectly natural – it felt like I’d never feel normal again.

  And I couldn’t think either. I just couldn’t seem to get anything straight in my mind. The thoughts were there – thoughts, memories, facts, feelings – but I couldn’t do anything with them. They wouldn’t keep still. They just kept buzzing around in my head, like a room full of flies, and every time I tried to grab hold of one, all I’d get was a handful of nothing.

  I couldn’t reason.

  I couldn’t connect anything.

  I had flies in my head.

  And lights in my eyes.

  You don’t know anything. You didn’t see anything…

  Next time I won’t let go.

  The air was too hot to breathe.

  When I reached the end of Back Lane and started crossing over to Hythe Street, I thought for a moment that the flashing lights in my eyes had suddenly gone into overdrive, and I wondered briefly if I was going to pass out again, but then I realized that the lights I was seeing now weren’t white, they were blue, and they weren’t the kind of lights that only I could see…

  They were the flashing blue lights of police cars.

  There were two of them, parked at the corner by the gate to the river, and as I crossed over St Leonard’s Road and started up Hythe Street, I could see more blue lights flashing further down the street. A uniformed PC was stringing crime-scene tape across the road, trying to keep back a growing crowd of onlookers, and there were other officers milling around the cars, talking on radios. I was vaguely aware of sirens wailing in the distance, and the faint chop-chop of a circling helicopter, but all I could really hear was the sound of my heart pounding in my chest as I pushed my way through the crowd and ducked under the crime-tape.

  They’ve found Raymond, I was thinking. Oh God, they’ve found Raymond…

  ‘Hey!’ the PC shouted, hurrying towards me. ‘Hey, you!’

  I ignored him and carried on walking. The gate to the river was open, marked off with crime-tape, and two crime-scene investigators in paper suits and overshoes were walking carefully along the edge of the path. As I neared the gate, the PC caught up with me, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me back.

  ‘Come on,’ he said gruffly. ‘Out.’

  I tried pushing him away, but he was a pretty big guy, and as soon as I started struggling he just twisted my arm up around my back and began shoving me towards one of the police cars.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘just a minute –’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand –’

  ‘Mike!’ he yelled at one of his uniformed colleagues. ‘Get this kid out of here, will you?’

  I saw Dad then. He was coming up the street from the direction of our house, his eyes taking everything in, and when he saw me being shoved around by this big PC, he immediately started running.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted, waving his hand. ‘Hey, Diskin!’

  The PC who was holding me looked in Dad’s direction.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dad called out to him. ‘Let him go!’

  ‘Jeff?’ PC Diskin said as Dad came running up to him. ‘What are you –?’

  ‘Let him go,’ Dad said breathlessly.

  ‘But he was –’

  ‘He’s my son.’

  ‘Your son?’

  As Dad nodded, Diskin loosened his grip on my arm.

  Dad looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing… I was just –’

  ‘He was heading down there,’ Diskin told Dad, indicating the gate. ‘I had to stop him. I didn’t know –’

  ‘What’s going on anyway?’ Dad asked him, looking around. ‘Have they found something?’

  Diskin hesitated. ‘I’m not sure… we were told, you know…’

  ‘What? You were told not to tell me?’

  The PC shrugged. ‘You’d better talk to the DI.’

  Dad looked at Diskin for a moment, then he just nodded. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I think he’s still down at the river.’

  ‘Is Kesey with him?’

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  Dad nodded. ‘All right… thanks, Ross.’

  Diskin smiled awkwardly. ‘Yeah… look, I’m sorry about this, Jeff. But you know how it is…’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dad said. ‘I know how it is.’ He turned to me. ‘Come on, Pete, let’s get you home.’

  But we didn’t go home just then. As PC Diskin went back to controlling the onlookers – who’d now been joined by a crowd of press reporters and TV crews – Dad led me off to a relatively quiet spot just behind one of the police cars. We were still inside the taped-off area – which I could see now was blocking off the street in both directions – and I could tell from the looks that Dad was getting from his colleagues that they all knew he wasn’t supposed to be here, but none of them actually said anything.

  ‘What’s happening, Dad?’ I said, rubbing my neck. ‘What have they found? Is it Raymond?’

  ‘I don’t know… I’ve only just woken up. I don’t know any more than you do.’ He looked at me. ‘Are you all right? Did Diskin hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’ve just got a bit of a stiff neck.’

  Dad looked at me. ‘I thought you were supposed to be in your room?’ br />
  ‘I couldn’t sleep… I went for a walk.’

  ‘Where?’

  I shrugged. ‘Nowhere… I was just walking…’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re really starting to annoy me, Pete. I mean, look at all this…’ He waved his hand around. ‘This is serious stuff – police, press, TV people… and you’re part of it, Pete. You’re part of it, for Christ’s sake. You can’t just keep wandering off on your own all the time –’

  ‘Jeff?’

  We both looked up at the sound of Dad’s name, and I saw two men coming towards us from the direction of the gate. One of them was John Kesey, and I guessed the other one – an older man with a reddened face – was Dad’s DI, George Barry. Both of them were wearing suits, and they were both sweating hard in the afternoon sun. As they came up and stopped in front of us, Kesey gave Dad a friendly nod, but DI Barry just glared at him.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Jeff?’ he said sternly. ‘I thought we’d agreed –’

  ‘I live here, sir,’ Dad told him calmly. ‘My house is just down the street. I didn’t know this had anything to do with the investigation. I just saw all the commotion and came out to see what was happening.’

  ‘I see,’ said Barry.

  ‘What is happening?’ Dad asked Kesey.