The Darker Half Chapter 1 & 2

 

The Darker Half Chapter 1 & 2

By Janet Baldey`

CHAPTER 1

ANNA

                         
Anna wonders what it’s like to drown.  She’s heard that after the first few frantic struggles, it’s a peaceful way to go.  Oxygen leaches from your brain, your worries fade away and you drift away on a cloud of euphoria.  She’d like to think that was true but isn’t convinced.  How does anyone know?  Most people think they are so clever. Unlike her. She is always one step behind, always the last to know.  She hadn’t even recognised the signs when her world started to collapse.

 A frozen stream of air scythes down from the Arctic and she draws her coat closer.  For the first time, she becomes aware of the cold stone of the parapet cutting into her stomach and she draws back a fraction, only to lean forward again, mesmerised by the river pounding underneath the bridge. Its colour is constantly changing from metallic blue to pewter, reflecting the turbulent clouds scudding across the sky. There’s a twig caught in the grip of the current and she follows its progress as it spins towards the weir.  Without thinking, she toes off first one shoe and then the other, standing on the balls of her feet, watching the water writhing and foaming as if in the grip of a seizure.

 “Is everything all right, Miss?”

Anna’s body jerks and her hands tighten on the parapet as she smothers a scream.   She’d thought she was quite alone.

The man’s bulky figure is silhouetted against the bitter orange of the dying sun and all she sees is the luminous oval of his face. He sounds concerned and she feels a surge of irritation. When she replies her voice is curt.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Her cheeks burn as she feels around for her shoes and slips them back on. With a brief, dismissive, nod she turns and hurries towards the town.

Frost sparkles the pavement as Anna walks through the empty streets. It’s full dark now and most of the houses have drawn their curtains against the night. Lit by electricity, the lemon coloured windows look cosy and Anna slows, gazing at them in the same way that a sugar starved child gazes into a sweetshop. Inside those houses, families will be brewing tea, asking each other about their day and settling down for the evening. Her own will be in darkness except, maybe, for the blue flutter of a television in the front room.

       As she rounds a corner “The Queen’s Head” materialises in a blaze of light. It’s a cheerful place and in happier days had been her local. As she draws nearer, a drone of sound spills out into the darkness and early Christmas decorations shiver in the windows as they catch the draught of the ever-opening door. Suddenly she craves the warmth of uncomplicated human companionship and without thinking, her body swerves towards the entrance. Just in time, she stops herself, imagining what would happen if she did go in, walk up to the bar and order herself a drink.  At first, no-one would notice but, sooner or later, someone’s look would harden into a stare. One by one, other heads would turn, and the buzz of conversation would dwindle.  Anna’s blood runs cold at the thought.  She turns away and, picking up speed, almost runs down the road.

Her steps are slow as she reaches her street. A car comes around the corner and its headlights wash over her house, briefly illuminating its windows one by one. The house looks as if it’s winking at her. It looks sly. She used to love it once but not now.      

She crunches up the gravel drive and deliberately fumbles her key in the lock, making sure they know she is back. As she slams the door a light goes on. A moment later, Romeo appears in the doorway. His face is flushed, his hair tousled.  He stretches, and his mouth opens in an elaborate yawn.

“Nice walk, love?”

Apprehension dulls his eyes as she doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns left, into the kitchen, giving a sick shudder as a scene she’s repeatedly tried to obliterate flashes into her mind.  She grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut, pushing the image away, desperately trying to think of something else. At some time, she knows she will have to deal with it but she’s not strong enough yet. Weak with misery, her body leans against the sink. At last, she opens her eyes.  Reaching forward, she wipes condensation from the window and looks out at the garden, seeing but not registering. Long moments pass before she realises that it’s started to rain. Picking up a white plastic kettle she thrusts it under the tap, listening as the hiss of the water drowns out the steady drumming of the weather.  Wavy lines of raindrops march down the panes and on reaching the kettle’s pale reflection, merge slowly coalescing to form the shape of a face. Her knees start to shake as a sudden certainty makes her gasp,

“No.” she whispers and shakes her head.  “It can’t be.”

  The lips twist in a familiar smile of triumph and she knows she’s wrong. Almost instantly the face vanishes and is replaced by the stygian black of a winter’s night.    Feeling weak and ill she puts the kettle down and stumbles to a chair, wondering if she is going mad.

“Oh, Alec,” she whispers, “how you must be loving this.”

CHAPTER TWO

 BILL

The sound of the front door closing echoes as he stands in the hall unbuttoning his coat.   Unable to break the habit, he glances up the stairs expecting to see the faint line of yellow light below their bedroom door but it’s as black as pitch up there.  He frowns, impatient with himself.  It’s been a year now since Martha went and he still can’t get used to the emptiness of the house. The dog’s the same. He looks at Jackson who’s also got his eyes fixed on the dark at the top of the stairs, ready to bound forward the minute he hears her voice.

         “Come on, yer daft bugger…there’s no one there.”

Turning away, he opens the door of the sitting room. A faint warmth lingers but the fire is almost out, he can just see a dull crimson glow underneath the layer of grey ash.  Carefully, not wanting to smother what’s left of the fire, he places a few lumps of coal over the embers and crouches, covering the hearth with a sheet of newspaper until he hears the dull roar telling him the flame has caught.  He remembers his Dad doing the same thing, all those years ago in Derbyshire and wonders if anyone else, besides himself, brings a fire to life like this these days?  Probably not many, he thinks, just us oldies.  After he’s banked up the fire, he stands up and listens to it crackle, staring into the mirror over the mantelpiece. Not, that old, he thinks.  Fifty’s no age these days.  He peers closer, a bit of grey around the temples.  Distinguished, that’s all.   Bags under the eyes though, he hasn’t slept well since Martha went.  Can’t get used to being the only one in a double bed.

Briefly, his body sags and he slumps into his armchair. The blank screen of the televisions stares at him but he makes no move to switch it on, he’s not in the mood and anyway he’d bet there’d be nothing worth looking at. He reaches for the whisky bottle placed close to hand on a side table.  For some reason, he can’t stop thinking about the lass on the bridge. The moment he’d caught sight of her, shoeless and slumped against the bridge, he’d known she was a jumper.  He hadn’t spent all those years in the Force for nothing and when she’d turned round his instinct had turned to certainty. He’d recognised the look on her face, vacant and spaced out, she’d been psyching herself up.  The furrows crossing his brow deepen.  He knows her from somewhere; it isn’t a recent memory but her face was definitely familiar. It wasn’t one that was easy to forget, the broad forehead and large eyes, placed a little too far apart. Not pretty exactly, but striking, her cloud of dark hair redeeming her. He closes his eyes for an instant, willing a name to fit the image. 

  ‘Come on Bill Dexter, Detective Inspector retired.  Think.  You know who she is.  You know you do.’

  But it won’t come and with a shake of his head, he gives up for now. But, he’ll get it in the end, he knows he will. Once a copper, always a copper.  The trick is not to think about it too deeply.

He lifts his glass towards the light and watches the amber liquid swirl. He’s drinking too much and knows it. Half a bottle a night; if he doesn’t watch it, soon it’ll be a bottle. It’s the long, empty, boring days that does for him. Two years ago he wasn’t like this.  Two years ago he had a career, a wife and a home, all of which he’d loved, possibly in that order. Now, he’d got bugger all. Even his house isn’t a home any more, just a place where he lives; if you could call it living.  He barks a laugh, a short unhappy sound that makes Jackson twitch his ears.  He takes a gulp of whisky knowing that, in spite of the consequences, he doesn’t regret what he’d done and given the same circumstances would do it again. It was the look in Martha’s eyes that had finally decided him.  She hadn’t asked, she was past it by then, but they’d been together for nigh on thirty years and he’d known what she wanted.  

Anyway, what’s done is done and can’t be undone. He bangs his glass back on the table so hard that some of the whisky slops from the glass. His eyes flick towards the clock.  He hasn’t had his tea but he’s not hungry. He forces his mind back to the problem at hand, perhaps there’s something in his archives that might jog his memory, it’d be something to do anyway, might stop him feeling so sorry for himself.

He knows it’s a mistake as soon as he starts leafing through the dusty folders peering at the scribbled notes in the margins, all in his own spidery handwriting, some so illegible and obviously done in haste that he can hardly make them out.  He’d always kept details of all his old cases from the very first, even his failures - those that he’d known damn well who done it but just couldn’t prove it. Why, he’d never been quite sure, perhaps at one time he’d had a vague idea of writing a book when he finally retired.   Every turn of the page brings back glimpses of the past, tiny shreds of detail he’d thought he’d forgotten, the sound of an abandoned child sobbing in the silence of a bedroom at the top of a house so squalid they’d held their noses as they entered. The drained corpse of a suicide in a bath brim-full of gore.  The dead eyes of a mother who’d just smothered her baby. He gasped feeling pain as sharp as a bayonet thrust. His own eyes must have looked like that as he sat feeding Martha her sleeping tablets, one after the other, praying he wouldn’t botch it.  It would be the end of his career, he knew that at the time, but he hadn’t cared. He owed Martha and gratitude in her eyes, as she lay obediently choking down her pills, was worth any sacrifice.

But now the yellowing papers do nothing but remind him of past evenings spent in this very room, in this very chair, scribbling the notes he is reading this very moment. He breathes in half expecting the savoury smell of the evening meal to waft through the door and to hear the low mutter of the radio, “The Archers” maybe or the husky voice of Neil Diamond and the faint clatter of china as Martha bustles around in the kitchen. For an instant the memory is so warm and alive that his stomach rumbles in response, then his appetite disappears as he remembers.  His hands tremble as he stacks the pages together and replaces them in the folder.  They’d been no help and his useless trip down memory lane has only served to torment him. If only he could turn back the clock.   They’d all been so kind, his colleagues.  Some he’d worked with for so long that they’d become close friends.  They’d all promised to visit and they had at first.  He glances towards the silent phone.  It’s a long time since it had rung. But he couldn’t blame them, they were busy and had their own lives to lead. It wasn’t their fault that he’d ended up a sad and lonely sod and he’d rather rot than be a burden to anybody.  Thank God he had Jackson. He leans forward and strokes the collie, plunging his fingers deep into the dog’s thick fur and feeling the warmth of its body.  He looks at the clock again.

“Come on lad, time for bed.”   He isn’t tired and knew he wouldn’t sleep but eventually he’d drift off and at least he’d be lying down. Perhaps a mug of cocoa would help.   He might even take one of Martha’s sleeping tablets if there were any left.

Copyright Janet Baldey