Touching the Dark Read online

  He pulled another folio from the shelf and slowly examined it, picture by picture. He paused briefly at the photograph that he had used in his article. Two child soldiers playing in the ruins of a burned out house. It was the smiles on their faces that always got to him. Kids pausing for a game in the middle of a war. Stopping the world for playtime and exchanging a joke, their whole childhood packed into odd moments such as these, torn apart and maybe even ended in the hours or moment to come.

  On the facing page, a baby born at the heart of the conflict cradled in her mother’s arms. The child had been wrapped in a United Nations T shirt, the blue fabric and ring of stars clear and recognisable. The woman stared out at the photographer, her eyes impossible to read though there was unmistakable pride in the tilt of her chin and the set of her bare shoulders. He wondered where it had been taken. He shook his head. Not that it mattered, she had similar images of everywhere from Sarajevo to Northern Ireland. Picture postcard from the world’s conflict. Catching a single moment in the lives of those whose existence had been torn apart.

  Slowly Simon turned the next page.

  “Oh God!”

  He’d seen bloodier images in Tally’s repertoire but never something so filled with horror. The man was not old, perhaps only middle aged, but the lines of pain that seemed to have been burned around his eyes were ancient. He had been horribly mutilated, what was left of his right arm cradled across his chest and his left missing just below the shoulder. Blood pooling on baked earth deep enough to mirror the outline of the figure bending over him. Tally, Simon thought. It had to be Tally. The man had skin as black as Simon’s own, but the expression in his eyes was beyond divisions of race or age or time and that was part of the shock of it. Simon knew that this man was dying. That Tally had captured that decisive moment between living and the drawing of the final breath and that the man knew and was giving his final testament to this unknown woman and her camera. It was the image she had told him she could not take. The decisive moment, frozen forever by a stranger’s eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “I found two Jack Chalmers on the voters register,” Alec told them.

  They were gathered around Naomi’s dining table, drinking coffee and sorting through the stacks of material Simon had gathered. The mood had softened, Alec and Naomi tacitly agreeing that neither of them entirely had the right of their argument, but neither quite ready for formal apologies either.

  “Neither of them could be our man,” he went on. “One’s in his seventies and the other’s a teenager, registered for the first time this year.”

  Naomi knew from experience that the register of electors, though invaluable, was never complete or completely accurate. People moved house and missed out on registration, or for other reasons chose to slip through the net.

  “I’ve crossed referenced with similar names – John, Jonathan, Jason and so on, but nothing seems to fit the bill. Chalmers is not a particularly common name and I’ve got only three households of Chalmers that have a male member of around the right age.”

  “That’s probably not his real name,” Patrick commented.

  “Maybe not, but it’s all we’ve got to go on right now.”

  “And that’s the whole crux,” Naomi added mournfully. “If we could figure out who Jack really is, what his relationship is to Tally Palmer. What hold he has over her, we can get to the bottom of this.”

  “At least we’re agreed he has a hold over her,” Simon said, unable to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

  “I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that,” Alec resisted. “It seems to me that this is a reciprocal thing. That Tally is as reluctant to part with Jack as he is with her.”

  “I remember saying something like that,” Simon reminded him pointedly.

  “Less said about that night the better.” Alec reminded him abruptly.

  “What have you found, Patrick?” Naomi asked. She had been listening to him shuffling around among the newspaper clipping that Simon had collected. Now his riffling had ceased and she could sense his interest.

  “Something about a car accident,” Patrick said. “You’ve fastened it together with a bit about a murder,” he said to Simon.

  “Miles Bradshaw and Adam Hunter,” Simon said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me see,” Alec reached across and took the clippings. “Teenage driver killed in fatal accident,” he read. Then, “‘Quiet Close Shocked by Brutal Murder.’”

  “What’s the connection?” Naomi asked

  Simon took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Tally Palmer,” he said.

  “What way?”

  “Ok. Maybe no way, maybe...I’m not sure. Adam was Tally’s boyfriend. He’d just passed his test, went out to celebrate with three of his friends and crashed the car.”

  “It says he was drunk,” Patrick put in.

  Simon nodded. “Blood alcohol levels twice the legal limit. By all accounts, Tally was devastated. Rose, that’s Tally’s mother, she told me this was Tally’s first big emotional attachment and for a while she thought she’d breakdown completely.”

  “And Miles Bradshaw?” Alec asked

  “Oh, you must remember,” Naomi insisted. “Miles was in my year. Nasty piece of work, thought he was god’s gift. I remember the murder because of all the fuss it caused. The school was buzzing for weeks and his girlfriend was in my class, we did History together. She was off school for about a month.”

  “And how was Tally involved.”

  “I don’t know,” Simon admitted. “She probably wasn’t and I didn’t know her then. We still lived in Earby, if you remember, went to a different school, but there’s something...” he rummaged amongst the paperwork. “Here, it’s something that caught my eye both times. One kid that survived the crash. He was in a coma for a long time so no one took any notice, but he swore that someone, a small blond someone ran across the road and caused Adam to swerve.”

  “Twice the legal limit would take care of that without the pedestrian,” Alec observed.

  “Sure, but there’s a brief mention in the Miles thing. One of the papers quoted a neighbour who saw a blonde girl knocking at Miles’ door earlier that evening. She went inside. She was small with long blond hair wearing a blue coat. Tally was small with long blond hair.” He paused again and Naomi could hear him weighing it up in his own head, perhaps realizing for the first time how flimsy this connection sounded when he mentioned it out loud.

  “You’re suggesting that Tally somehow caused the death of her boyfriend and that she somehow was implicated in Miles Bradshaw’s murder,” Alec said flatly. “Simon, to say your evidence is weak...”

  “And why would you want her to be involved?” Patrick asked him. “I thought you loved her, thought she was an o.k. person.”

  “I do,” Simon said defensively. “God, I don’t know what I think. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that Tally’s had a lot of tragedy in her life. Family deaths, then her boyfriend then Jon O’Dowd. I guess I wondered if, maybe, she felt guilty about something connected with one of them and that Jack was, I don’t know, feeding her dependency. Maybe adding to her guilt,”

  “Deaths in the family?” Naomi queried.

  “Hmm, yes. Her father when she was about thirteen, but before that, he brother Zechariah. He was a year older than Tally and they loved each other. She doesn’t talk about him much. It was an accident. I hunted out the reports.”

  “Of course you did,” Alec commented wryly.

  “Well, anyway. He fell onto a railway line from the embankment. Slipped and bashed his head. He hung on in a coma for a while but they finally pulled the plug.”

  “Was this before or after the father died?”

  “Oh, before. He left the following summer, just after Tally’s younger brother, Carl, was born. It turned out he’d been having an affair. He had a kid with another woman and then died a couple of years later. Tally tells this crazy story about how her mum made them go to the f
uneral and made a right scene. She actually got herself arrested.” He laughed, briefly. “I talked to Rose about it, she reckoned she was still hurting and still mad as hell. Temporary insanity, she says. The new family dropped the charges anyway. I can’t imagine her doing anything like that. She’s really down to earth and level headed.”

  “It must have hurt so much though,” Naomi commented. “First the death of a sibling and then your father taking off like that.”

  “I guess so,” Simon agreed, though to hear her talk about it, she was glad that he’d gone.

  *

  Her father had so little impact on her life that he had left three days before she even noticed that he’d gone.

  It was the summer that she was ten and two months after her baby brother had been born. Her father had not been keen on the new arrival, who had appeared without permission and proceeded to invade the house and her mother’s affections in a way that no one else had ever dared. She had grown used to her father coming home from work, staying long enough to eat and then absenting himself ’til long after she had gone to bed. Days would pass with barely a word spoken and, although Tally had been vaguely aware of something being extra wrong in those three days it was only the arrival of her aunt and uncle that told her what it was.

  She had, of course, been sent to play while the grown-ups talked but instead had watched and listened, hidden behind the half open door, as her mother wept and railed and called her father by words she had to write down quickly and look up later. After three days of silence, of her mother being moody and withdrawn this noisy shift in tone was an entertaining thing.

  Tally watched through the crack in the door as her mother flung her arms around the aunt and wept noisily into her shoulder. Then she pulled away, first, waving her hands in distraction then pounding with fists at her armoured chest, crying out against the injustice of it all. Tally had heard the preacher at Sunday school talk about folk in ancient times beating their breasts in grief but she had never seen it done before now.

  She wondered if it hurt. If it did, then her mother seemed not to notice.

  It was only after several minutes of this carry on that she was discovered.

  “Hush,” her aunt counselled. “The child.”

  She hustled towards the door, smiling at Tally and gave her the briefest of hugs. Tally could feel the wetness on her shoulder from her mother’s tears.

  “Go and play now, Tally,” aunt Bee said. “Then as though inspired, “find that nice dolly I gave you. You find that baby and some clothes and later on we’ll have a tea party together.”

  She was pushed gently but firmly from the room and this time the door was closed.

  “Tea party!” Tally was disgusted. Only little kids played that sort of game. Didn’t her aunt remember how old she was? And as for finding that doll...

  Tally went outside into the garden trying to recall exactly where she had buried it this time. She figured she’d better dig it up again, just in case aunt Bee remembered and wanted to play. Today didn’t seem such a good one to court adult disapproval.

  She found the body of the doll under her mother’s orange rose. The legs were in the mint patch and the arms shoved into the big pot of geraniums just outside the back door together with the brunette head. She had long since lost track of the blonde one.

  Tally washed Tallulah-Two-Heads under the kitchen tap, scrubbing the doll clean with her father’s tooth brush. Then she sat it to dry, splay legged on the steel draining board in a patch of sunlight that heated the bright metal almost hot enough to burn flesh.

  “My father’s gone to live with a bitch of a painted whore,” Tally told the doll. “Mum says he’s a fucking-wanking-bastard.” She looked around quickly, scared of being overheard but the adults were still closed up in the other room. And the words sounded pretty good so Tally said them again and again, a little louder each time until a slight sound from the living room had her certain that the grown-ups must have heard. Panic-struck, she dodged out of the back door and ran down the garden. Plonked herself on the swing and pretended she had been there all the time. But it was a false alarm. Several minutes passed and no one appeared. Tally began to breathe again.

  Slowly, she crept back up the garden path and peered around the kitchen door. There was no one there except Tallulah-Two-Heads, still sitting on the hot patch of steel. Hopefully, Tally looked for some expression of discomfort or even pain on the painted face but Tallulah-Two-Heads, calm as ever, merely stared.

  Her father had taken everything, emptied the bank account and was refusing to pay a penny to Tally’s mother. She was taking him to court, but in the meantime they were existing on what little her mother could squeeze out of the DSS. Bills went unpaid and her complaints that her feet were cold, still wearing summer shoes in November, were met with tears.

  She saw her father only twice that winter. Once when he came by to pick up the remainder of his things and the second time when she waited for her mother outside the court.

  The first time, she saw him only through the window. She stared out through the rain streaked glass as he scrabbled on the ground gathering the clothes and books her mother had thrown there. He saw Tally as he stood up, his arms full of his sodden possessions and rivulets of water streaming down his face from his wet hair. For the briefest of times their eyes met and she tried to read in them if he was sorry to be going or if life was better with his bitch-whore woman. But she couldn’t tell. The rain fell too fast, thumps of wet grey sound against the window. The sound of sky too loud for her to hear the lesser message in her father’s eyes.

  She tried to catch a glimpse of the woman in the car as her father struggled to open the door and dumped his bundle of belongings on the back seat, but rain and glass got in the way and all she saw was a blurred red shadow in the driving seat of the car.

  The second time, in the February, he didn’t even look her way. He walked swiftly through the panelled corridor, the squeak-flap of new shoes against the wooden floor almost drowned by the sharply painful tap of her mother’s heels as she pursued him down the hall. Her solicitor ran after her calling for her to “calm down Mrs Palmer, please calm down”. His robes flying out behind him like a vampire’s cloak.

  Things began to improve then and Tally had new shoes the week after. She chose red trainers with white stripes that her mother hated but let her have because, as she said, they needed cheering up. Tally wore them that year right into the autumn until they had all but fallen apart and her feet had grown another size. Wore them even with her best pink dress or her yellow jeans thought her mother winced at the clashing colours and sometimes the loudness of the tonal noise they made hurt Tally’s eyes and burned her ears.

  But she couldn’t not have chosen them, not from the moment she saw them in the shop window. It had been raining and the grey water streaked the glass so heavily that the shoes were like red shadows at the back of the display, the exact same shade as the clothes the bitch-whore woman wore, the day Tally had glimpsed her through the windscreen of the car.

  The thing that stayed with her from that winter and that she had been reminded of many times as she had travelled is that there is a stink to poverty that has nothing to do with the price of soap. It’s the smell of damp rooms in houses that are truly warm only in the best of summers and of clothes that dry too slowly inside when the cold rains fall. It is largely a winter smell. Even the poor can have their share of summer. They can let the sunlight into their houses and sit outside in their yards or on the front step, storing up the heat against the winter. But it’s the cold time that truly shows the difference, that breeds the odour of too many bodies crowded into the one heated room. The stale air kept in by windows closed tight and sealed with stretched polythene to keep the precious warmth inside.

  After her father left, the house was cold. The kitchen only really warm at the end of the day when her mother cooked. They ate their meal at the kitchen table, leaving the oven door open wide so the last vestiges of he
at leached out into the room. They would sit in the moist, food fragranced room until the chill crept in under the back door.

  Her mother cooked bread and pies and fruit cake that they spread with butter. Even at the worst of times she refused to buy margarine, they just spread what they had more thinly and made it last.

  Tally grew afraid of the cold. For a long time afterwards, even when things were better and the heat came back into the house, she kept her fear of chill and draughts. Scorching her cheeks sitting too close to the fire and wearing her socks to bed.

  *

  “It was losing Zechariah that really got to her,” Simon added softly. “The biggest tragedy of her life. Rose said that the two of them were inseparable. I guess losing someone you’re that close to must scar forever.”

  Naomi nodded slowly thinking of her own childhood scars. When she was twelve years old her best friend, Helen Jones, whom, had she lived, would have been Patrick’s aunt, had been abducted and murdered. It was a killing that had only just been solved. The family and Naomi being forced to wait for close on twenty years before they even knew the location of Helen’s grave. Childhood loss was not something that could be painlessly or easily put aside, especially when it seemed so random and so pointless.