Human Remains Read online

  What do you think?

  Very nice.

  That’s called damming with faint praise.

  You mean damning.

  Whatever.

  All right, it’s better than very nice.

  Hmmmm.

  Who took the picture?

  My sister.

  You were on vacation somewhere?

  Greece, 2 summers ago.

  Looks as if you were having a good time.

  Yes. My sister died six months after.

  I’m sorry to hear that.

  She had cancer.

  I had no reply. This wasn’t the way I needed the conversation to go, and I had no idea how to get from here to asking her for sex, which was, after all, the purpose of this phenomenal waste of a perfectly good evening. As it turned out, though, she managed to surprise me. A few moments later another message came.

  You can cheer me up Mark. Do you want to meet?

  I met her in a bar in Crouch End. She was three minutes late. I was wearing a black jacket, as agreed. Although there were other men in there wearing black jackets, I was the only one who was alone and therefore I assumed she would have no trouble recognizing me. I had also provided her with a recent picture of my face and shoulders.

  She’d aged a lot since the Greece picture I thought. Her hair was still brown but it had an inch of gray at the roots, and her face was pale, not tanned, and lined around the eyes and mouth. Other than that, she was perfectly acceptable. I shook her hand when she came over.

  “So . . .” she said.

  “Shall I get you a drink?” I asked her.

  “Dry white wine, please,” she said.

  I went to the bar and handed over a ten-pound note in exchange for a small wine and a half of Coke. I would have quite liked a pint with a whiskey chaser, but not at these sorts of prices. And besides, if Justine invited me back to her house I would still need to drive home afterward.

  I asked her about herself, avoiding the topic of her sister and her unfortunate demise, and found out that she lived alone, worked part-time for an insurance company in their call center, went to salsa classes on Tuesday night, and had been single for six months. She had no pets and was a vegetarian. She enjoyed meeting new people and, although she wasn’t particularly looking for a new relationship, she would be open to it if the right person came along.

  It was amazing how simple it was to get someone to share so much personal information without volunteering anything in return. Every time she asked me something I would offer a general answer and then inquire more about her, leaning forward, maintaining eye contact, smiling at her, and making a resolute effort to listen to her responses. Within the hour she was leaning toward me, playing with her hair, touching me on the knee.

  Half an hour after that we were making our way on foot to her house, a few streets away. She stopped outside a terraced house and on the doorstep she put her hands around my waist, inside my jacket. This sudden contact came as a shock but I recovered quickly and moved closer to her, feeling the warmth of her body. She turned her face up toward mine and I thought she must want me to kiss her, so I did that. Her mouth was dry and her breath smelled of wine. I touched her cheek and she opened her mouth. It was like kissing Helen again. I pulled back from her. “Shall we go inside?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, looking at me with her head tilted to one side.

  “What are you unsure about?”

  “You might be a serial killer,” she said.

  I laughed out loud at that and she held me a bit tighter.

  Then she smiled. “You’re too sweet to be a serial killer,” she said. She let go of me then and opened the door, turning on the lights in the hallway and leaving the door open for me to follow her inside.

  Justine had a greater impact on me than any of the others, even Eleanor. By giving herself to me so freely, she made me realize that the fun was not in the accepting but in the taking, that this wasn’t about casual sex. It wasn’t something to be taken as a pastime, an amusement; it was a vocation. A calling.

  We had sex in her bedroom, in the dark. Her body was somewhere in between angel and whore I suppose: clean, and slack. She kept trying to kiss me but that always made me think of Helen, so I turned my head away. I’d remembered to take a condom with me and thankfully she applied it. After that it was very quick. I lay next to her in the darkness feeling sated and disappointed at the same time. I had expected so much more. I had expected—what?—a connection.

  When she put an arm across my stomach and moved closer against me, I moved away and sat on the edge of the bed, my hands loose between my knees. I could see my penis, hanging flaccid, spent, mocking.

  “Are you OK, Mark?” Justine said, from behind me.

  “I need to go,” I said.

  “Already? Can’t you stay for a bit?”

  “I’ve got work in the morning.”

  The rest was unspoken. I thought she would ask about seeing me again, but thankfully she did not. She looked sad, but I could do nothing about that. There was nothing wrong with her, other than compliance.

  She was irrepressibly, resolutely alive. And that was without doubt a disappointment.

  Annabel

  Sam came to see me most days. At first when he came I could only stare at the clock on the wall opposite while he asked me questions. Some days I pretended to be asleep. But after a few days I realized I didn’t mind him being there, and actually I found myself waiting for him to show up. I think that was when I must have been getting better, because I began to feel like talking.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “You should be at work.”

  “I can go back in later,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  I didn’t answer that. I had no words to describe it. Or, more accurately, I had no feeling. No sensation of anything other than vague disappointment that I was still here.

  “Annabel?”

  I looked across to him, aware that it was my name and therefore I should respond to it. “What?”

  “Do you want to know how the investigation’s going? Andrew Frost said he’d been to see you. He wanted to keep you updated.”

  I tried to remember if anyone else had visited me but it was all just a blur. I looked back at the clock. I waited every day for the line, the perfect straight vertical line that denoted six o’clock, expecting something to happen. Expecting relief, expecting silence, expecting a feeling of peace. But it never came, and by five past six every day the process of waiting had begun all over again.

  The clock said twenty past eleven. I felt like going to sleep properly, but soon it would be lunchtime, and in any case every time I tried to sleep during the day someone came by and woke me up. There were rules on this ward, and one of them was that sleeping happened at night. Despite the noises, the shouts, and the cries.

  “He told me they really need you back, Annabel.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said.

  “There are so many questions they need to ask you. What happened to your phone? Who gave you the other phone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have met someone, Annabel. You must have met a person who gave you a cell and took yours away. Can you remember?”

  I tried to concentrate because maybe he would stop asking if I gave him the right answer, but there was nothing there—just a comfortable blackness, a warmth, a space in which everything had been fine until I was ripped out of it and brought to this white, loud, cold place.

  “I can’t remember anything.”

  “Did you go out? Did you meet someone while you were out?”

  The nurse came then and interrupted him. He sat quietly and smiled at her while she checked on me. “You’re talking to us today, Annabel? That’s really good to hear. Would you like to go outside for a walk?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Maybe your friend could take you.”

  Sam quickly said, “Yes—I could take you out for a bit. What do yo
u think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s a lovely day. It would do you good to get some fresh air.”

  The nurse put me into a wheelchair even though I could have walked. Maybe she knew that if I’d not been in the chair I would have kept on walking right out of the doors and away.

  Sam pushed me out the fire door and into one of the quadrangles. It was surrounded by buildings; there was no way out even if I could have managed to stand up and run. He sat me in the sunshine and I tipped my head back and felt the warmth of it on my face. A breeze lifted my hair, which was greasy and itchy. The rest of me was clean, though—they’d made me take a shower yesterday and I’d stood there until they came to take me out again.

  “There was a rainbow,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I saw a rainbow. It’s the last thing that happened. And the angel.”

  “The angel?”

  He must know I was talking metaphorically I thought. The angel was my angel; he wasn’t going to appear to anyone else. As far as they were all concerned the angel was a figment of my imagination; only I knew he was real. He was the one who could change everything, who came to me when I most needed him, when I was desperate and lonely and sad. He came to me and showed me the path to take. Sam clearly didn’t have an angel and it made me sad for him.

  “It’s not real,” I said, trying to console him. “None of it’s real. You know that.”

  “How do you know it was an angel?” he asked. His voice was calm, quiet.

  “He made me feel better. He took all of the bad stuff away.”

  “What did he say? Do you remember?”

  “He said I was fine, that everything was fine. He told me to go home and that I didn’t need to worry about anything.”

  “Did he give you something to drink, something to eat?”

  I started to laugh, which made me cough. “He wasn’t that sort of angel.”

  “I’m worried he wasn’t a good angel, Annabel.”

  I opened my eyes and squinted at him, my eyes adjusting to the bright light until I could focus on his face. It was the first time I’d looked at him properly for a while and I had a sudden recollection of meeting him outside the hospital, how annoyed I’d felt at that intrusion, but how afterward he’d made me feel better about Mum, about what had happened to her. He had a nice face, and his eyes reminded me of my dad’s—how they seemed to be smiling even when he was being serious. He was kind I thought. Kind to keep visiting me.

  “What do you mean?”

  He was sitting on a bench and the wheelchair was parked right next to it, so he could reach across and take hold of my hand, which was in my lap. His hand was warm, his grip firm.

  “What if he was pretending to help you? What if he was pretending to be an angel?”

  The answer came automatically. “I don’t know anything.”

  He tried again. “Do you know where you are, right now?”

  I looked around at the buildings surrounding the patch of green. “It’s a hospital,” I said. “I think it’s a hospital.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re here because you were at home on your own and it looked as if you hadn’t eaten any food or drunk any water for four days.”

  I could hear the words he was saying but they didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t felt thirsty, or hungry. I had just wanted to sleep. I had wanted it all to go away, to be left alone. But it was different now, wasn’t it? The sun was shining on me.

  “They said you were trying to starve yourself to death.”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s not right.”

  “I said the same thing to them. I said you were busy with the investigation; you had things to do. Yes, it had been a rough time for you, with your Mum dying, but you didn’t want to die. You weren’t trying to kill yourself, were you?”

  “No,” I said. “I just wanted to go to sleep.”

  “They think you want to kill yourself. That’s why you’re here.”

  “I just wanted to sleep,” I repeated.

  I concentrated hard and suddenly something came back to me.

  “I remember him visiting,” I said.

  “Who? The man?”

  I tutted with annoyance. “No, Frosty. I remember him coming here . . . sitting by the bed. He wanted to know why I hadn’t told him I was depressed.”

  “He’s a kind man, Annabel. He thinks you’ve had such a hard time of it.”

  “I didn’t even realize that was what depression felt like.”

  He frowned, leaning forward in his seat and looking at the ground. “There’s no shame in it. Lots of people have depression. It’s not easy to talk about.”

  I watched him closely, wondering why it hadn’t crossed my mind during those days I was alone that I would never see Sam again.

  “When they discharge you,” he said, “you can come and stay with me, if you like.”

  “No, thanks,” I said automatically.

  “I don’t think they plan on letting you go home, or at least not for a long time. If you stay at my house they might let you out sooner. We’d love to have you, even if you are grumpy and antagonistic most of the time.”

  “Thanks!” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I smiled, despite myself.

  “My dad’s wife—Irene—she’s a good cook. And she’s a trained caregiver, so you couldn’t be in safer hands. She’s longing to start feeding you up, you know. She needs a project.”

  “Is that supposed to be tempting?”

  “It was my unsubtle attempt at trying to make you feel comfortable about it. Well, what do you think?”

  I didn’t reply at first. I tried to imagine going home and locking the door. It felt as though that was the right thing to do, the right path to choose—but there was something about it that made me feel afraid.

  He shifted in his seat again. “Do you remember the people who died, Annabel? You were working on all those bodies that were found decomposed in their homes. Do you remember?”

  I nodded, although I hadn’t thought about them for a long time.

  “You remember Rachelle? Do you remember Shelley, the woman you found in the house next door? And the two who were found just before they started the investigation? Do you remember that I had a phone call from one of the victims, telling me where to find another one?”

  I frowned at these specifics, trying to grip the memory and stop it from slipping away.

  “They’re still trying to find the man who’s responsible for all this, Annabel. I think he’s the man you met. I think he did something to you and you were heading the same way as all those other people.”

  “But . . .” Why was this such a struggle? Why wasn’t my brain working; why couldn’t I think clearly? “But I was . . . happy.”

  “You were happy, starving to death?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said, shaking my head. “It was just like . . . I don’t know . . . it was like floating away.”

  “But you didn’t want to die?”

  “I don’t think so. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just wanted to sleep.”

  “But you would have died if I hadn’t found you.”

  “You found me?”

  “I tried to call you but your phone was switched off. I sent you a text, and a few hours later there was a really weird reply saying you were thinking of going away and you wanted to be left alone. In the end I went over to your house. The back door was unlocked. Your cat was going mental.”

  “Cat?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been going to your house every day and feeding her. She’s a lovely cat. What’s her name?”

  The cat. I tried to find the other word in my head, searched for it, nearly gave up—and then suddenly it was there.

  “Lucy. She’s called Lucy.”

  “Well, that’s better than Puss, which is what Irene came up with.”

  The colors were too bright, the green of the grass and the
leaves on the tree that were red and gold and brown and every imaginable color in between. And the sky, so blue, a bright blue that hurt my eyes.

  “My mother died,” I said. “It feels like years.”

  “It was just over two weeks ago,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know how hard grief is. I went through it, too. You need time, and as much support as possible.”

  “I should be doing things, shouldn’t I?”

  “I can help you with it. It’s all right. I spoke to the family relations officer at the hospital, so they’re keeping your mum safe until you’re ready. Nothing to worry about.”

  The sun went behind a cloud and the breeze felt suddenly cold. I shivered and folded my arms in front of me.

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  I looked back over my shoulder at the fire door, at the ward beyond it. “No. Can I stay a bit longer?”

  He smiled then, a big happy smile, and I found I was smiling back at him. “You’re going to be OK,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  He reached across to me and rubbed my arm, then patted my knee.

  Colin

  Rachelle came into my life a month after Justine.

  The time between them was spent on study, whiskey, and porn. The only class I attended in that period was Nigel’s NLP—and every evening, after work, I devoted myself to further study in the subject as well as expanding into such topics as hypnosis, mind control, and suggestion. I stayed up until I was too tired to see the computer anymore, and at that point I would put a DVD on in the bedroom and watch it to the inevitable conclusion.

  I knew now what all this had been leading to. I knew and understood it all with an astonishing clarity—that this was my calling, this was what I had been born to do, and that everything that had happened so far in my life had been leading up to this moment.

  I met Rachelle while I was walking in the country park in Baysbury one Sunday morning. It was a bright day—cold, sunny—the sort of day you’d expect to find a lot of people in the park, which is why I nearly didn’t go. I’d forgotten that there was a big football match on and as a result everyone was at home or in the pub watching the game. Everyone except for Rachelle and me.