Only Darkness Read online

  Their dead faces stared back from the board in the room where Berryman’s team was based; and from another wall, in another place.

  He keeps the photographs on a board just by the entrance to his loft. He likes doorways, entrances, spaces that are neither one place nor the other. In the doorway, on the threshold, there is a place that is nowhere. It is a place where it is easier for him to be his real self. It is a dangerous place – some people protect themselves from it by hanging charms above the door, or protect their loved ones by carrying them across it. It isn’t dangerous for him, he lives in this space. He doesn’t need any charms. He can’t keep his souvenirs on the threshold, but he likes to see his pictures as he climbs from one world into another.

  The trains are rattling around the tracks, running to time, running like clockwork. At eight-thirty-two, a train pulls into Goldthorpe station, another pulls out of Sheffield on its way to Barnsley, another on its way to Hull, calling at Meadowhall, Moreham Central, Mexborough, Conisbrough, all the way to the end of the line. Signals change, points move, freight trains rush through stations without stopping, slow and stop at signals. At night, the landscape is illuminated with points of light – lights at the stations, lights where the roads run near to the track – but there are dark places too where the track runs through unlit expanses, the trains briefly lighting up the night and vanishing, leaving silence behind them.

  The Christmas shoppers are out in force now. They crowd the stations. An InterCity express thunders through the small station at Meadowhall, as the tannoy warns travellers to stand back from the edge as a fast train is approaching. These places are dangerous. A station is a first step across the threshold. A train is a doorway. The train is the doorway, with its exit miles, maybe hundreds of miles, away. The threshold ends at the destination. But things can happen in places that are no places, places that are doorways hundreds of miles long. Such places are dangerous.

  He can’t settle. He needs to do something. He looks at the paper again. He frowns. When he first saw it, he’d been quite upset. They were saying, they were implying, that he’d made a mistake, and he hadn’t made a mistake at all. It was all a matter of timing. He knew the other Thursday woman would be there. He’d arranged it so that he was gone by the time she arrived. Of course he’d had to go back. He needed to check that he hadn’t left anything behind. He liked to prolong, to savour the moment, to delay just a little. He’d had the forethought to make sure that the light was dim on the other platform. He would have done something about her if he’d needed to. In fact, he can see that it might all be working out for the best. He gets his scissors out and carefully cuts around the photograph. This is the first time he’s had a such good photograph of before. The others are most unsatisfactory. The photographs of after are better. If you want a job doing well …

  He knows why he can’t settle. He’s been given the sign. He needs to hunt again, and time is getting short. This one is a good one. She goes to places where he can hunt, he knows that already. After all, he’s been watching. Carefully, he tapes the photograph to his notice board in the loft, and looks at it for a moment. Then he takes a Stanley knife and, using a fresh blade, cuts first one eye, then the other from the picture. Then he pushes a pin through the place where the mouth is. This one speaks and he doesn’t much care for what it says.

  5

  Tuesday morning, Debbie, who had woken up at about half past five and had been unable to get back to sleep, caught the seven-twenty train and was actually in college by quarter to eight. She had planned to spend an hour catching up on her marking, but as she sat at her desk sipping a cup of bitter coffee, she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate. Right. Something else then. She had her GCSE English class at nine that morning. They’d been looking at ghost stories – it was a topic Debbie always did at Christmas, and she was trying to get them to write stories of their own. They had trouble with writing horror, because the model from their own experience of books and film was fantasy based and excessively violent. The idea that their own world of the everyday could be far more horrific was alien to them. Debbie decided that today she would show them ghosts.

  The Broome building offered an excellent venue for a ghost story. Debbie went roaming, trying to remember the best stories, find the best places. The high-ceilinged corridors were shadowy, brown, grey and black, the brighter colours on the paintwork long since worn off. Ghosts could easily walk here. Debbie went on up the stairs to the top corridor – there was a story here – and began a narrative in her head in which someone was standing where she was standing, her back against the window, watching through the crazed glass in the swing doors, the shadow of something stalking her, knowing she was trapped in a dead end with no way out but the eighty-foot drop through the window behind her.

  Footsteps beyond the doors brought her back to earth – the sound was heavy and solid. A man, then. She peered back down the corridor into the shadows, and saw a shape loom against the glass. The door opened, and Les came through, carrying a bunch of keys. He looked at Debbie.

  ‘Morning,’ he said. Should she explain what she was doing? He didn’t seem curious, but he must have wondered. As he came towards her, she said, ‘I was just looking at those places that you tell the stories about, you know, the ghosts.’

  ‘Not me.’ Les looked dour. ‘It’ll be one of those young ones telling you a lot of nonsense. I’ve worked here near on forty year, and I’ve never seen any ghosts.’

  ‘But they’re good stories. I was trying to remember that one that was supposed to have happened one Christmas – I’m sure it was you that told me.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the footsteps on the long staircase.’ Les seemed reluctant to tell the story at first, but Debbie had remembered it as soon as he mentioned the staircase.

  The long staircase was originally a fire escape. It ran in a spiral down the inside of a tower-like structure built at the point where the corridors ended. An external fire escape now served the building. The doors that led on to the long staircase were nailed up and had been since before Debbie started work at the college. The only way on to it now was through the IT resource centre. At the back of the room was the old fire exit with a push-bar handle. Students no longer used the long staircase which led out into the lane behind the college, and now it was mostly used for storage. It was dark even on the sunniest day.

  The story that Les was telling was about a caretaker who had gone down the staircase one night to check that the outside door was locked. He went down the stairs and checked the door. He didn’t check anything else, because there was nothing else to check. As he was climbing back up the staircase, slowly, because it was late and he wasn’t a young man, there was a sudden draught, the door above him slammed shut and the light went out. He stopped, because it gave him a shock to be suddenly in the dark, then went on, a bit more quickly now. It was cold and somehow unpleasant, at night, on the stairs, in the dark. Then he stopped again. Down below him, on the stairs he’d just climbed, he could hear something, something that sounded like footsteps coming lightly and quickly up the stairs behind him, from where there had been nothing but an empty staircase and a locked door. He didn’t wait. He ran as quickly as he could in the dark, up the last two flights to the door that was hard to open from the inside. As he struggled with it, he could hear the footsteps getting closer and moving more quickly as they came towards his landing. He managed to get the door open, was through it and had it shut and bolted behind him more quickly than he thought was possible. He was leaning against the door getting his breath when something struck it with such force he was knocked to the ground. But nothing was ever found on the staircase to account for it.

  When Debbie had first heard the story of the footsteps that came from nowhere, pursuing their victim in the dark, the hairs had stood up on her arms. That would be an excellent story to tell the students. She could take them on to the stairs, show them.

  The double doors were pushed open, making them both
jump, and Les fumbled with his key ring as Rob Neave came into view. ‘On the warpath today,’ he muttered.

  Neave saw Debbie, and made some attempt to hide his irritation. ‘I want you down with the delivery van,’ he said to Les. ‘Get Dave or someone to open these rooms and for Christ’s sake don’t take all day.’ His face was white and he looked ill, as if he had a serious hangover. Debbie remembered what Louise had told her the other evening.

  ‘That was my fault,’ she apologized for Les. ‘I was getting him to tell me his ghost story.’

  Neave looked at her with a faint smile and shook his head when she asked him if he knew it, so she told him the story she’d just heard from Les. He didn’t seem too impressed. ‘You don’t believe all that, do you?’

  ‘Of course not, but it’s a good story. Don’t you think so?’

  He smiled properly this time, and she felt a small sense of triumph. ‘No, I just see Les coming up the stairs with his head tucked under his arm.’ She laughed, and then he said, ‘I need a word with you. Will you be in your room around five?’

  The ghost tour of the Broome building went down very well. Debbie wondered, only half facetiously, if she should suggest it to the college marketing forum as a money spinner. Despite the success of her class, she felt uneasy. That feeling of foreboding was back, and she was glad that the college was bustling with pre-Christmas activity. She felt better in the crowded corridors. As soon as she was on her own she had that feeling of eyes on her, a sense of cold and menace. She cursed Tim, and she cursed herself for thinking about ghost stories – especially college ones.

  It didn’t help when, at coffee break, her head of department summoned her to his office to discuss the newspaper article. Peter Davis listened to her explanation, but his concluding, ‘Well, we’ll let it go this time but don’t let it happen again,’ served to fire up her anger. It was hard to pull her mind away from it and concentrate on her class. Anyway, she missed coffee.

  At lunchtime there was a union meeting. City College was in trouble. Falling student numbers and financial constraints meant that the college was losing money, and the college management were planning cuts. The union was fighting for its members’ jobs, but the staff were divided and undecided. The meetings were usually acrimonious or inconclusive.

  The room was filling up as Debbie arrived. She’d meant to give herself time to buy a sandwich before the meeting started, but she’d stayed behind to talk to two of the students, and had had to come straight along. She saw Tim Godber indicating an empty seat next to him, but ignored him – Why is Tim trying to be friendly again? – and found a seat at the other side of the room. The news was all bad. City College was running more deeply into debt, and the management were looking for savings in the staffing budget. Nervously, Debbie thought about her overdraft and the money she needed each month just to pay the mortgage.

  She had to leave before the meeting was over, and go straight to the classroom for her afternoon session with another GCSE group. They were a particularly lively group – standard euphemism, Debbie thought, for difficult and obnoxious – and she didn’t feel up to controlling them through a trip round the building. No ghost tour, then. She decided to read them some ghost stories instead, and try to get them writing that way. They enjoyed the stories and contributed some of their own – mostly plots from videos, but there were one or two local stories that were interesting, and Debbie got them to record those on to audio tape, after they’d giggled and messed about. The students stopped cooperating when it came to writing, though, and dealing with the disruption, the constant demands for attention, requests for pens and paper tried her patience almost to breaking. By the end of the afternoon she had a headache and was too exhausted to feel hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since she left the house that morning.

  When Rob Neave got to the staff room it was gone quarter past five. Debbie was sitting in her chair drinking coffee and eating chocolate. She offered a piece to him. ‘What is it about teachers and chocolate?’ he said, turning her offer down.

  ‘This’ – she waved the chocolate bar – ‘is because I haven’t had anything since breakfast.’ He still looked tired, she noticed, as if he’d had as little sleep as she’d had these past few nights, but he looked better than he had in the morning, more like himself. She wanted to say something about this, but she couldn’t think of any way to say it that didn’t sound like an intrusion. ‘Have you heard about the cuts?’ she asked instead.

  He had but didn’t seem too concerned. ‘I’m not planning a long stay here, anyway.’

  Debbie wondered when he planned to leave. The place would be duller without him. ‘You said you wanted to see me about something, didn’t you?’

  He seemed unsure of himself, which was unusual. ‘That thing at the station. I’ve been talking to some people,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘and it’s possible you did see something important that night …’ He was watching her closely now. Debbie put down her chocolate bar. She wasn’t hungry any more. ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to talk to you again, I think. Just – be a bit careful. Don’t use the train on your late nights.’

  ‘Is this official?’ Debbie tried hard to keep her voice calm.

  ‘No, it’s just advice. From me, not them.’

  ‘I need a drink.’ Debbie plucked up her courage. ‘Come and have a beer or something – if you’re free.’

  He looked at his watch and hesitated. She thought he was going to refuse, but he said, ‘I’ve just got some stuff to see to in the office. Where are you going? Across the road? I’ll see you in half an hour.’

  Suddenly elated, Debbie packed her work into her briefcase and sorted her mail into the out tray. As she was leaving the room, the phone rang, and it was a bit more than half an hour before she was walking through the door of the Grindstone into the smell of beer and old smoke, and saw Neave leaning on the bar, talking to the landlord.

  He bought the first round, bringing the drinks over to a table, and dropping a packet of salted peanuts in front of her. ‘You need to get something inside you,’ he said, pushing his chair away from the table as he sat down, and hooking his foot over the rung of another. Debbie felt shy, as though she didn’t know what to say to him in this new context, but he didn’t seem to notice anything, and talked casually about the pub and how it had been the place where the police used to drink, when he was in the force. ‘More crimes got solved at this bar than at the station,’ was how he put it. He seemed more relaxed in this atmosphere, and Debbie asked him a bit about his life in the police force. He made her laugh with some stories of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met, and then he asked her about herself, moving on to her parents, her childhood, her current life and her plans for the future.

  Debbie found herself talking about her father, something she didn’t often do. ‘He was a miner,’ she said. ‘It was in the family, kind of thing. His father was a miner as well. He used to spoil me rotten.’ Rob sat there quietly, watching her as she talked. ‘He couldn’t cope when they closed the pits down. He got paid off, but he couldn’t get another job. He used to hate the way the people down at the job centres talked to him.’ She paused. She wasn’t sure about the next bit.

  ‘What happened?’ He was sitting close to her, listening.

  ‘He died … It’s some time now.’ But Debbie could remember what it felt like, believing he hadn’t cared enough, thinking that he had chosen to leave them. She still felt angry about it. She wanted to change the subject. She realized that, though they’d been talking for a while, she still knew very little about Rob.

  ‘You’re not local, are you?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve lived round here for years, but no, I was born in North Shields. Lived in Newcastle while I was growing up.’

  ‘What brought you to Moreham?’ It seemed a strange place to come, to Debbie.

  ‘Nothing. I came to Sheffield to work.’ He still seemed relaxed, but Debbie was aware
that he was stonewalling her questions, that he didn’t want to talk about himself.

  She tried another tack. ‘You said you weren’t planning to stay at City. Where next?’

  He was looking round the room, watching the other drinkers at the bar. ‘Nothing planned. But City has only ever been a temporary thing. You ought to be thinking about moving on as well. It’s no place to get stuck.’

  ‘I like it.’ Debbie recognized his ploy to turn the conversation back to her. ‘I like the students and I like the work. I am looking for something else though – but only because of what’s happening.’ She tried again. ‘Would you go to another college, or what?’

  He laughed. ‘No, I’m not planning a career in college security. I don’t know yet, something. Do you want another drink?’

  ‘My round.’ Debbie reached for her purse and found it contained her travel pass and fifty pence. She went red. ‘Oh, God, I ask you for a drink and I haven’t got a penny on me.’

  He thought it was funny. ‘I’ll ask you next time I’m broke. Don’t worry, Deborah. Come on, what do you want. I’m buying.’

  ‘OK, thanks, I’ll have the same again. But next time …’

  When he came back from the bar he smoothly took charge of the conversation again. ‘Your father wasn’t an old man, was he?’

  Debbie shook her head. ‘He was fifty-five when he died.’ She thought Rob was watching her, but he was looking across towards the bar, frowning slightly, as though he was thinking something over.

  ‘What is it that makes you so angry about it?’ His question was so unexpected that she felt winded. The response was forced out of her before she had time to think about his right to ask it.

  ‘Everything. All of them.’ She felt her face flush. ‘He thought it was his fault, you see. He was a pit deputy and he thought he should have joined the strike.’ She looked at Rob, uncertain whether to go on. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He voted to strike. He was Catholic,’ Debbie explained. ‘His mother’s family were deep-dyed Irish Catholics. So he felt guilty.’ She thought about it again. ‘They just threw them out, made them feel useless. Oh, there was good redundancy, but Dad didn’t want that, he wanted his job, he was proud of it.’