Page 1 of Pressure Head
Whatever it was I was following, it was dead ahead. Calling to me, tugging at my mind. I fought my way through prickly hawthorn and incongruously festive holly, a minor annoyance as they clutched at my padded jacket. When I reached a clearing, I broke into a run. Melanie’s face was seared in my mind, and I thought,Please, God, let it not be her. Let it be some drunk’s alcohol stash . . .
I already knew it wasn’t. There was the stench of guilt about this one, turning my stomach even as it dragged me nearer. Guilt and violence—and death.
I reached a thicket, dropped to my hands and knees, and crawled in. Twigs scratched my face, caught in my hair. Damp soaked through the knees of my jeans, the chill reaching to my bones, numbing my core. There was barely any light to see by, but I didn’t need any, my questing fingers meeting cold, waxy flesh. I fumbled to be certain and found I was holding her hand.
For a moment, I was six years old again, with the little girl in the park.
But when you’re twenty-nine and you find a body, you don’t get to go blubbing for your mother.
It started with a phone call, as these things usually do. I haven’t exactly got an office, more like a stack of files in a cardboard box that I hand over to my accountant once a quarter, and the answer phone’s on the blink, so if anyone wants to get in touch with me, they have to call my mobile.
I was out in one of the villages when he rang. There are a lot of villages around St. Albans, most of them filled up with people who commute into London to work and keep the house prices sky-high. In between, you get the green belt made up of pony farms and golf courses, plus the odd actual working farm tucked in, with small herds of placid cows looking like refugees from the nineteenth century as they chomp on the grass and idly wonder what happened to the neighbourhood.
I was fitting some new kitchen taps for Mrs. B., who made great coffee and liked to chat. I always had to be careful I didn’t go over time here. It wasn’t easy when I knew the next call was to Mrs. L., a sour-faced old biddy who always watched me like a hawk in case I made off with the teaspoons or did something unspeakable to her pet poodle.
I put down my spanner and dug my mobile out of my pocket. “Paretski Plumbing,” I answered in my jaunty “trade” voice, flashing Mrs. B. an apologetic smile. She dimpled.
“Tom? Dave Southgate. Got a little job for you.”
“Oh, yeah? Blocked toilet down at the station? Must be all those doughnuts you lot eat.” I wasn’t talking about the place you catch a train from. Dave Southgate is one of our boys in blue—or he would be, if he still wore a uniform. And when he rang, the job was never all that little, though I lived in hope.
“I wish. No—young lady by the name of Melanie Porter. Last seen going off to meet person or persons unknown three days ago—ifyou believe her useless yob of a hoodie boyfriend, who I personally wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw his drugs stash. We’ve received information suggesting we have a look for the young lady in the woods up by Brock’s Hollow.”
“I do have a proper job to do, you know.” Even I could hear the resignation in my voice.
“Cheers, Tom, I owe you. We’re up on Nomansland Common. Up past Devil’s Dyke—you know the area? Combing through the woodland, the usual drill. How soon can you get up here?”
I looked at my watch. “About ten minutes—I’m only down the road, as it happens. Just need to finish up.” And I’d have to ring Mrs. L. and apologise for the no-show, but that’d be more a pleasure than a duty.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket and finished tightening up the taps. Opened the supply pipes and turned the taps on and off to prove they worked. “There you go,” I said, wiping my hands on an old rag. “All sorted.”
“That’s lovely. Sure you wouldn’t like to stay for another coffee?” She gave me a winning smile, and the dimples deepened. “I’ve got some Belgian chocolate biccies.”
“Sorry, Mrs. B.,” I said regretfully. “Duty calls.”
I first met Dave Southgate around three years ago. A kiddie went missing in Verulamium Park, and they put out an appeal on local radio for help finding the little lad. He was only three. I tracked him down under a bush right next to the main road, crying his little heart out and clutching a half-eaten loaf of bread he’d taken to feed the ducks.
Obviously, me being a single gay man who’d managed to find a missing toddler, it wasn’t just as simple as handing the kid over and receiving the effusive thanks of a grateful police force. There were a lot of searching questions about just how I’d known where to look. Eventually, I managed to convince Sergeant Southgate, as he then was, I just had this knack of finding stuff. Or people, as it might be. Since then, he’s called me in a few times to look for things—burglars’ loot, hidden drugs—and bodies.
It’s a bit hard to explain, but I can’t just find any old thing. I’m not some bloody database on the location of everything in the world. It’s only certain types of things. And usually, there has to be some strong emotion involved. So lost things are almost always impossible, because if you’d been feeling that strongly about the thing at the time, chances are you wouldn’t have lost it, would you? Hidden things, on the other hand, call out to me. All the guilt and shame and sneakiness involved in the hiding acts as a kind of beacon. And I can often tell from the feeling just what sort of thing it is that’s hidden.
I mean, say you buried a suitcase in your garden. I’d have a pretty good idea before I dug it up whether it contained your collection of hard-core porn, letters from a lover, or the body of your dead baby.
Bodies, actually, are the classic one. I have to be close enough physically—although there’s tricks I can do to help, I’ll get on to those later—but once I’m there, it’s like they’re howling at me.
The first one I found, I thought she really was howling.
It was back when we lived in London. She wasn’t anyone I knew. I think Mum knew her mum a bit, but that was all. She was too young to have played with me, and certainly too young to have played with my sister. She was only four, you see, when it happened. Just wandered off in the park, I guess, met a man who seemed really friendly . . . do I have to spell it out for you? He’d hidden her under some bushes, right in a patch of nettles. Must have been wearing gloves, I suppose. I had shorts on when I found her, and I got covered in stings.
But she was crying, at least I thought she was, and I knew I couldn’t leave her there. So I crept in after her, calling out, “Don’t cry—it’s all right.”
Of course, it wasn’t all right. Not for her, and not for her poor mum and dad. For them, I expect it was never all right again. She stopped crying as soon as I found her, so maybe she found some peace. I don’t know. I thought she was asleep, but she was so cold. I tried to drag her out, but I was worried I’d hurt her, so in the end, I left her there and ran and got my mum.
And then things got very grown-up, very fast.
Anyway. Hidden things. Lost things, sometimes. And water, funnily enough. I’ve never really understood that one.
I rubbed my hip as I walked over the rough grassland of the common to the edge of a scrubby patch of woodland, where I could see Dave and a couple of police dogs with their handlers. I broke my pelvis badly when I was seventeen—got hit by a car and spent months recovering—and it aches whenever the weather turns cold and damp. Which, this being Britain, it does quite a lot, especially in November. Maybe I’d move to Florida when I retired.
