Page 1 of Watching You
Chapter 1
Body One of Eight
29 September
Death wasn’t wearing a hooded black cloak when it came for Dale Abnay. It wasn’t holding a scythe, nor did it beckon him towards a reassuring light. Death, Dale realised, as he was pulled by the feet, face down, his chin gathering leaves while the tide of his life ebbed, was a devious scumbag who’d cheated by sneaking up behind him. It hardly seemed fair. He’d always imagined himself staring death down, being given the chance of a fair fight. But death was a coward wielding what Dale guessed was a rock and saying precisely nothing as it stole his life. Bastard.
The single blow to Dale Abnay’s head had set off a biological bomb inside his skull, and now there was one river rushing out through his ears and another issuing from his mouth. His consciousness retreated through the arteries of his brain to a small, private space in his memory that looked an awful lot like his childhood bedroom. It was the one place in the world that he’d loved and where he’d felt truly safe, until the day his father had run off with his aunt. After that, it had become a sanctuaryfrom his alternately weeping then screaming mother, who’d called her sister words Dale had never heard before, words that got him in trouble at school aged only seven, when he’d shouted them at a girl in his class.
Somewhere beyond the walls of that childhood room, a red haze was incoming. The wind that brought it closer howled with the sound of a fox fighting hounds, and blew in the stench of maggots devouring a carcass. Dale made sure the door to his room was locked and slid under his bed. He didn’t fit there quite the way he had as a child – his feet stuck out of the end and his back hit the underside slats – but the important thing was that his notebook was still there.
In the notebook, he remembered, were the musings of a pre-pubescent kid who’d dreamed of only two things – a career as a professional footballer, and receiving all the latest computer games at Christmas. For a while he’d wanted a puppy too, until an elderly neighbour had rescued a dog from the animal shelter. Dale had watched her walk the scruffy mutt every day, stooping awkwardly to pick up its crap in little black bags, then swinging the steaming package as she went. That had made him rethink his wishlist. He’d never been good enough to make the school football team either. At least as an adult he’d been able to buy all the games he wanted.
The room bounced up and down. Dale’s head hit the underside of his bed hard enough for his ears to ring as a crack appeared in the floor. That had to have been an earthquake. Imagine that, an earthquake in Scotland! It was the first he’d experienced. Dale reached up and pulled the cover over the side of the bed to curtain off the destruction, vaguely aware that something really bad was happening but determined to finish reading his notebook come what may. That was a better idea. Why concern himself with the things he couldn’t change? Thathad been a favourite of his mother’s sayings, some jumbled version of it anyway. It was the first time Dale could recall it actually applying to a situation he’d found himself in, and he decided he didn’t like it.
Dale opened the journal, rubbed his eyes, closed the cover once, waited a few seconds, then opened it again. Gone were the scrawled imaginings of a kid who’d had big dreams for a boy whose school report often noted that he struggled to concentrate and was rude to teachers. The tiny cartoon figures he’d liked drawing in the bottom right-hand corner, so he could flick the pages and watch them move, were gone. The list of who his friends were at any given time was gone. The special name he’d written over and over again – Lucy Ogunode – had been erased completely.
He’d loved Lucy. She’d started school with him on day one and been there still when his education had ended at eighteen. She’d never once pulled a face upon being asked by a teacher to sit next to him, and had never called him names like the other kids. Lucy was kind and sweet and lovely, and her smile had been a candle in the darkness of childhood. Until it wasn’t any more, and thinking about that made his face burn and his stomach ache, so he decided he wouldn’t.
Dale looked around for a pen or pencil. There had always been one somewhere under his bed for making late-night additions, and occasionally writing notes when he’d awoken from dreams. Not today, though. Today, all his fingers found as he reached around the dark corners were leaves and twigs, and that couldn’t possibly be right because his mother would have given him hell if he’d let his bedroom get that dirty, and he was never, ever allowed to wear his outside shoes into his bedroom.
Two wires tried desperately to connect inside his head. They very nearly made it, but then the lights went out. Dale wasn’teven sure where the light had been coming from because the curtains had been drawn and he hadn’t actually seen a ceiling, but now it was pitch black beyond the bedcovers, yet somehow he could still see the pages of his book. The source of that light, he realised, was a small torch shining from behind him. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it was providing just enough illumination for him to see instead of forcing him to curl up, alone, with nothing to do but wait.
He looked back at the notebook, wishing he could write Lucy’s name onto the pages again, but now every page was filled with thick black scribble, cancelling out every good thought he’d ever recorded there and transforming each page into a bottomless hole. Dale pulled his fingers back from the paper, certain that if their tips touched that graphite mass they would disappear and he would immediately be sucked in after them.
He flicked on through, careful to touch only the very corners of the paper, until a drip from above distracted him and his hand trailed across the page, his fingers coming away not black but green, the darkest shade of moss, and textured like – he had to think about it for a moment, and thinking was painfully slow – the stuff his mum used to arrange flowers in. It came in a block and would crumble if you grabbed it too hard … Oasis, that was it. He rubbed the infected fingers on the floor, but the stain wouldn’t shift, so he tried again. That time there was movement. He watched open-mouthed, with his skin flaking away as if he were rubbing his fingers on a cheese grater. It should have hurt, but it just didn’t. That, in itself, might have been a mercy save for the fact that he realised he couldn’t feel anything. Not anything at all. Dale pinched himself. Then he bit his bottom lip with his upper teeth. Then he punched himself in the thigh.
‘Nothing,’ he whispered.
More drips hit his head from above, and that was an awfullot of liquid to have got through the duvet, and the sheets, and then the mattress. That water, slime-laced and icy cold, smelled of mud and worms. He hadn’t ever thought about how worms might smell until that moment, but his journal was getting wet which was bad news because it was the only thing he had left to hold onto, and if he let go of that – if helostthat – then he knew perfectly well that it would be the end.
Lucy’s name had appeared on the pages again, but there were no hearts or flowers decorating the letters the way they used to. Instead, the script was starting to run, leaving streaks of grey tears on the paper. He dropped the book, startled by the sudden scent of smoke and the flames spiking out from the spine. That part of it was real, he remembered, not a hallucination, which was good – better than good – because it meant there was still a chance that he wasn’t losing his mind after all. Maybe the fire would be enough to wake him from his nightmare and return him to reality.
Of course he couldn’t be reading his notebook again, because in the real world, he’d burned it. He’d tried at first to rip it in two but failed, then thrown it into the fireplace in disgust, squirted lighter fluid over it and revelled in the blaze. Lucy had ruined everything. He’d spent so many years loving her from afar but keeping his distance, knowing the teenage pecking order would never permit him to be with her, before making contact once school finally finished, doing his best to befriend and charm her, and finally finding the strength to ask her out. All of which was met with nothing. Just a bland, polite rejection, which he’d found worse, in fact, than if she’d slapped his face or told him she was a lesbian or declared that she’d found Jesus and was off to join a convent. But nothing was what she’d given him, and it had been amazing how much the absence of something could be such a force.
He’d pursued other women since Lucy, of course, but none who’d warranted having their names written in his book. As quickly as it had burst into life, the fire reduced to mere embers. Paper ashes formed a shifting, twisting haze in the slowly fading torchlight.
Women weren’t for Dale, apparently. They were either too good or not good enough. And he’d heard somewhere – was it in a movie or on a TV show? – that the lesser women were the ones he should be approaching because they were more grateful for the attention and thus more likely to let him do the things he dreamed about. The logic of that was unacceptable to him. Why should he be relegated so young to the company of women with imperfect bodies and average faces? Why did beautiful women with high, bulging breasts and tiny, tight waists not want him the way women seemed to lust after men in the videos he’d watched in that very space, beneath his bed, in the small hours when his mother was fast asleep and couldn’t catch him?
The torch flickered a few times. Dale grabbed it and shook, trying to jolt the batteries into a second wind, but it was no good. There was, eventually, nothing but the darkness. Dale tried to call out, but drips splashed onto his tongue and the sourness made him gag. The water was creeping in now from all sides. He wanted to speak, to be allowed a few last words, but his tongue was a useless, clumsy flap of meat in his mouth, and was the bed pressing down harder on his back or was he imagining that? He felt sad that he hadn’t always been a particularly nice person, but he’d recently put a plan in motion to rebalance the scales. He’d wanted more. He was working on being better. Now it was too late.
He tried to roll onto his side, intent on pulling his knees up to his chest, to find those last few shreds of foetal comfort, but the leaves from the corners had multiplied and amassed around hisbody, pressing in like a dank blanket. The air was thick in his mouth and tasted of death. In his final seconds, as his conscious mind opened his bedroom door and allowed him to understand where his earthly body really was, he had just enough time to wonder if Lucy Ogunode – wherever she was – would hear about his death. And if she’d care.
As Dale faded from the world a few too-long-too-short minutes later, five girls watched and wept.
Chapter 2
Body Two of Eight
5 May
Detective Sergeant Lively from Edinburgh’s Major Investigation Team was sitting in a church and hoping he didn’t spontaneously burst into flames given the fact that he’d spent decades telling anyone who’d listen what he thought of religion. Still, there were days when the job took its toll, and recently it had taken far too many people he cared about, hence the visit. He hadn’t quite managed to get as far as actually praying when his mobile started playing ‘Black Hole Sun’ which meant the call was coming from the station.
‘Give me strength,’ Lively muttered. ‘Can a man not get a single moment of peace?’ He answered the call. ‘It’d better be fucking good.’
‘Define good,’ DS Christie Salter replied. They were of equal rank in spite of their age difference – Lively in his fifties and Salter in her thirties – but he’d taught Christie all she knew and rarely let her forget it, something she secretly loved.
‘Either I’ve won the lottery or Scotland has become a territory of the Bahamas and we all have the right to move there in ourretirement,’ Lively said, already moving out into the graveyard and resenting having his personal time cut short. There were grave markers close by that belonged to some of his former colleagues, and he’d wanted to pass a few minutes with them, too. Paying his disrespects, as he thought of it. Dead friends didn’t want to be respected, they wanted to be remembered in their best moments.
