The Taking of Annie Thorne Read online

  C. J. Tudor

  * * *

  THE TAKING OF ANNIE THORNE

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  Follow Penguin

  By the same author

  The Chalk Man

  Writers are like jigsaws. We need patience, perseverance

  and occasionally, someone to pick up the pieces.

  This is for Neil, for completing me.

  Prologue

  Even before stepping into the cottage, Gary knows that this is bad.

  It’s the sickly-sweet smell drifting out through the open door; the flies buzzing around the sticky, hot hallway and, if that isn’t a dead giveaway that something about this house is not right, not right in the worst possible way, then the silence confirms it.

  A smart white Fiat sits in the driveway; a bike is propped outside the front door, wellies discarded just inside. A family home. And even when a family home is empty it has an echo of life. It shouldn’t sit, heavy and foreboding with a thick, suffocating blanket of silence like this house does.

  Still, he calls again. ‘Hello. Anyone here?’

  Cheryl raises a hand and raps briskly against the open door. Shut when they arrived, but unlocked. Again, not right. Arnhill might be a small village but people still lock their doors.

  ‘Police!’ she shouts.

  Nothing. Not a faint footstep, creak or whisper. Gary sighs, realizing he feels superstitiously reluctant about entering. Not just because of the rancid aroma of death. There’s something else. Something primal that seems to be urging him to turn and walk away, right now.

  ‘Sarge?’ Cheryl looks up at him, one pencil-thin eyebrow raised questioningly.

  He glances at his five-foot-four, barely-breaking-one-hundred-pounds companion. At over six foot and almost twenty stone, Gary is the Baloo to Cheryl’s delicate Bambi. At least, in looks. Personality-wise, suffice it to say, Gary cries at Disney movies.

  He gives her a small, grim nod and the pair step inside.

  The ripe, rich smell of human decay is overwhelming. Gary swallows, trying to breathe through his mouth, wishing fervently that someone else – anyone else – could have taken this call. Cheryl pulls a disgusted face and covers her nose with her hand.

  These small cottages are fairly typical in layout. Small hallway. Stairs to the left. Living room to the right and a tiny kitchen tacked on the back. Gary turns towards the living room. Pushes open the door.

  Gary has seen dead bodies before. A young kid killed by a hit-and-run driver. A teenager mangled in farm equipment. They were horrible, yes. Needless, most definitely. But this. This is bad, he thinks again. Really bad.

  ‘Fuck,’ Cheryl whispers, and Gary couldn’t have put it better himself.

  Everything conveyed in that single appalled expletive. Fuck.

  A woman is slumped on a worn leather sofa in the middle of the room, facing a large flatscreen TV. The TV has a spiderweb crack in its front around which dozens of fat bluebottles crawl lazily.

  The rest buzz around the woman. The body, Gary corrects himself. Not a person any more. Just a corpse. Just another case. Pull it together.

  Despite the bloating of putrefaction he can tell that in life she had probably been slim, with pale skin, now mottled and marbled with green veins. She is dressed well. Checked shirt, fitted jeans and leather boots. Telling her age is difficult, mainly because most of the top of her head is missing. Well, not exactly missing. He can see chunks of it stuck to the wall and the bookcase and the cushions.

  Not much doubt about who pulled the trigger. The shotgun still rests in her lap, bloated fingers bulging around it. Quickly, Gary assesses what must have happened. Gun inserted into her mouth, pulls the trigger, bullet exits slightly to the left, as that’s where the worst damage is, which makes sense, as the gun is in her right hand.

  Gary is only a uniformed sergeant and doesn’t have a lot to do with forensics, but he does watch a lot of CSI.

  Decomposition probably occurred quite rapidly. It’s hot in the little cottage, stifling in fact. The temperature outside is mid-seventies, the windows are shut and, although the curtains are pulled, it must be creeping up to ninety. He can already feel the sweat trickling down his back and dampening his underarms. Cheryl, who never loses her cool, is wiping her forehead and looking uncomfortable.

  ‘Shit. What a mess,’ she says, with a weariness he doesn’t often hear.

  She stares at the body on the sofa, shaking her head, then her eyes shift around the rest of the room, lips pursed, face grim. Gary knows what she is thinking. Nice cottage. Nice car. Nice clothes. But you never really know. You never really know what goes on inside.

  Apart from the leather sofa the only other furniture is a heavy oak bookcase, a small coffee table and the TV. He looks at it again, wondering about the crack in the screen and why the flies are so interested in crawling all over it. He takes a few steps forward, broken glass crunching beneath his feet, and bends down.

  Closer, he spots the reason. The splintered glass is covered in dark, crusted blood. More has run down the screen to the floor, where, he realizes, he has only just avoided standing in a sticky puddle that has spread over the floorboards.

  Cheryl moves to stand beside him. ‘What’s that? Blood?’

  He thinks about the bike. The wellingtons. The silence.

  ‘We need to check the rest of the cottage,’ he says. She looks at him with troubled eyes and nods.

  The stairs are steep, creaky and streaked with more trails of dark blood. At the top a narrow landing leads to two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. If possible, the heat on the landing is more intense, the smell even more repugnant. Gary gestures for Cheryl to go and check the bathroom. For a moment he thinks she’ll argue. It’s obvious that the smell is coming from one of the bedrooms but, for once, she lets him play the senior officer and walks cautiously across the landing.

  He faces the first bedroom door, a bitter metallic taste in his mouth, and then, slowly, eases it open.

  It’s a woman’s room. Clean, neat and empty. Wardrobe in one corner, chest of drawers by the window, large bed covered with a pristine cream duvet. On the bedside table, a lamp and a solitary picture in a plain wooden frame. He walks over and picks it up. A young boy, ten or eleven, small and wiry, with a toothy smile and messy blond hair. Oh God, he finds himself praying. Please, God, no.

  With an even heavier heart he walks back out into the corridor to find Cheryl looking pale and tense.

  ‘Bathroom’s empty,’ she says, and he knows that she is thinking the same thing. Only one room left. Only one door to open to reveal the grand prize. He angrily swats aw
ay a fly and would have taken a steadying breath if the smell hadn’t already been choking him. Instead, he reaches for the handle and pushes the door open.

  Cheryl is too tough to be sick, but he still hears her make a retching noise. His own stomach gives a good solid heave but he manages to fight the nausea back down.

  When he thought this was bad, he was wrong. This is a fucking nightmare.

  The boy lies on his bed, dressed in an oversized T-shirt, baggy shorts and white sports socks. The elastic of the socks digs into the swollen flesh of his legs.

  Bright white socks, Gary can’t help noticing. Blindingly white. Fresh-on white. Like a detergent ad. Or perhaps they just seem that way because everything else is red. Dark red. Streaking the oversized T-shirt, smeared all over the pillows and sheets. And where the boy’s face should be just a big mushy mess of red, features indiscernible, crawling with busy black bodies, flies and beetles, wriggling in and out of the ruined flesh.

  His mind flicks back to the splintered TV screen and the puddle of blood on the floor, and suddenly he sees it. The boy’s head being smashed into the TV again and again, then hammered into the floor until he is unrecognizable, until he has no face.

  And maybe that was the point, he thinks, as he raises his eyes to the other red. The most obvious red. The red it is impossible to miss. Big letters scrawled across the wall above the boy’s body:

  NOT MY SON

  1

  Never go back. That’s what people always tell you. Things will have changed. They won’t be the way you remembered. Leave the past in the past. Of course, the last one is easier said than done. The past has a habit of repeating on you. Like a bad curry.

  I don’t want to go back. Really. There are several things higher up on my wish list, like being eaten alive by rats, or line dancing. This is how badly I don’t want to see the craphole I grew up in ever again. But sometimes, there is no choice except the wrong choice.

  That’s why I find myself driving along a winding A-road, through the North Nottinghamshire countryside, at barely seven o’clock in the morning. I haven’t seen this road for a long time. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen 7 a.m. for a long time.

  The road is quiet. Only a couple of cars overtake me, one blaring its horn (no doubt the driver indicating that I am impeding his Lewis Hamilton-esque progress to whatever shitty job he simply must get to a few minutes sooner). To be fair to him, I do drive slowly. Nose to the windscreen, hands gripping the steering wheel with white, peaked knuckles slowly.

  I don’t like driving. I try not to whenever possible. I walk or take buses, or trains for longer journeys. Unfortunately, Arnhill is not on any main bus routes and the nearest train station is twelve miles away. Driving is the only real option. Again, sometimes you have no choice.

  I signal and turn off the main road on to a series of even narrower, more treacherous country lanes. Fields of turgid brown and dirty green sprawl out either side, pigs snuffle the air from rusted corrugated huts, in between tumbledown copses of silver birch. Sherwood Forest, or what remains of it. The only places you’re likely to find Robin Hood and Little John these days are on badly painted signs above run-down pubs. The men inside are usually more than merry and the only thing they’ll rob you of is your teeth, if you look at them the wrong way.

  It is not necessarily grim up north. Nottinghamshire is not even that far north – unless you have never left the hellish embrace of the M25 – but it is somehow colourless, flat, sapped of the vitality you would expect from the countryside. Like the mines that were once so prevalent here have somehow scooped the life out of the place from within.

  Finally, a long time since I’ve seen anything resembling civilization, or even a McDonald’s, I pass a crooked and weathered sign on my left: ARNHILL WELCOMES YOU.

  Underneath, some eloquent little shit has added: TO GET FUCKED.

  Arnhill is not a welcoming village. It is bitter and brooding and sour. It keeps to itself and views visitors with distrust. It is stoic and steadfast and weary all at the same time. It is the sort of village that glowers at you when you arrive and spits on the ground in disgust as you leave.

  Apart from a couple of farmhouses and older stone cottages on the outskirts, Arnhill is not quaint or picturesque. Even though the pit closed for good almost thirty years ago, its legacy still runs through the place like the ore through the earth. There are no thatched roofs or hanging baskets. The only things hanging outside the houses here are lines of washing and the occasional St George’s flag.

  Rows of uniform sooty-bricked terraces squat along a main road, along with one tatty pub: the Running Fox. There used to be two more – the Arnhill Arms and the Bull – but they shut a long time ago. Back in the day (my day), the landlord of the Fox – Gypsy – would turn a blind eye to some of us older kids drinking in there. I still remember throwing up three pints of Snakebite, and what felt like most of my guts, in the filthy toilets, only to emerge to find him standing there with a mop and bucket.

  Next door, the Wandering Dragon takeaway and chippy is similarly untouched by progress, fresh paint or – I’m willing to bet – a new menu. One glitch in my total recall: the small corner shop where we used to buy bags of penny chews, flying saucers and Wham bars has gone. A Sainsbury’s Local stands in its place. I suppose not even Arnhill is completely immune to the march of progress.

  Except for that, my worst fears are confirmed. Nothing has changed. The place is, unfortunately, exactly as I remember it.

  I drive further along the high street, past the tatty children’s play area and small village green. A statue of a miner stands in the centre. A memorial to the pit workers killed in the Arnhill Colliery disaster of 1949.

  Past the village’s highlights, up a small hill, I see the gates to the school. Arnhill Academy, as it is called now. The buildings have been given fresh cladding, the ageing English block, where a kid once fell from the very top, has been pulled down and a new seating area put in its place. You can roll a turd in glitter, but it’s still a turd. I should know.

  I pull into the staff car park around the rear of the building and climb out of my knackered old Golf. There are two other cars in parking spaces – a red Corsa and an old Saab. Schools are rarely empty during the summer holidays. Teachers have lesson plans to write up, classroom displays to organize, interventions to supervise. And sometimes, interviews to attend.

  I lock my car and walk around to the front reception, trying not to limp. My leg is hurting today. Partly the driving, partly the stress of being here. Some people get migraines; I get the equivalent in my bad leg. I should use my stick, really. But I hate it. It makes me feel like an invalid. People look at me with pity. I hate being pitied. Pity should be saved for those who deserve it.

  Wincing slightly, I walk up the steps to the main doors. A shiny plaque above them reads: ‘Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Till your good is better and your better is best.’

  Inspiring stuff. But I can’t help thinking of the Homer Simpson alternative: ‘Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.’

  I press the intercom beside the door. It crackles and I lean forward to speak into it.

  ‘I’m here to see Mr Price?’

  Another crackle, a piercing whine of interference, and then the door buzzes. Rubbing at my ear, I push it open and walk inside.

  The first thing that hits me is the smell. Every school has its own individual one. In the modern academies it’s disinfectant and screen cleaner. In the fee-paying schools it’s chalk, wooden floors and money. Arnhill Academy smells of stale burgers, toilet blocks and hormones.

  ‘Hello?’

  An austere-looking woman with cropped grey hair and spectacles glances up from behind the glass-fronted reception area.

  Miss Grayson? Surely not. Surely she’d be retired by now? Then I spot it. The protruding brown mole on her chin, still sprouting the same stiff black hair. Christ. It really is her. That must mean, all those years a
go, when I thought she was as ancient as the frigging dinosaurs, she was only – what? – forty? The same age I am now.

  ‘I’m here to see Mr Price,’ I repeat. ‘It’s Joe … Mr Thorne.’

  I wait for a glimmer of recognition. Nothing. But then it was a long time ago and she’s seen a lot of pupils pass through these doors. I’m not the same skinny little kid in an oversized uniform who would scurry through reception, desperate not to hear her bark their name and rebuke them for an untucked shirt or non-school-regulation trainers.

  Miss Grayson wasn’t all bad. I would often see some of the weaker, shy kids in her little office. She would apply plasters to scraped knees if the school nurse wasn’t in, let them sit and drink squash while they waited to see a teacher, or help with filing, anything to provide a little relief from the torments of the playground. A small place of sanctuary.

  She still scared the crap out of me.

  Still does, I realize. She sighs – in a way that manages to convey I am wasting her time, my time and the school’s time – and reaches for the phone. I wonder why she’s here today. She isn’t teaching staff. Although, somehow, I’m not surprised. As a child, I could never picture Miss Grayson outside of the school. She was part of the structure. Omnipresent.

  ‘Mr Price?’ she barks. ‘I have a Mr Thorne here to see you. Okay. Right. Fine.’ She replaces the receiver. ‘He’s just coming.’

  ‘Great. Thanks.’

  She turns back to her computer, dismissing me. No offer of a tea or coffee. And right now my every neurone is crying out for a caffeine fix. I perch on a plastic chair, trying not to look like an errant pupil waiting to see the headmaster. My knee throbs. I clasp my hands together on top of it, surreptitiously massaging the joint with my fingers.

  Through the window, I can see a few kids, out of uniform, messing around by the school gates. They’re swigging Red Bull and laughing at something on their smartphones. Déjà vu swamps me. I’m fifteen years old again, hanging around the same gates, swigging a bottle of Panda Cola and … what did we hunch over and giggle about before smartphones? Copies of Smash Hits and stolen porn mags, I guess.