Step Inside My Soul

by Nick Curran

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

He wants your life...

Matt Langley used to be somebody. Back in the late '90s his star shone bright. Thanks to his debut novel, the shocking The Devil's Debt, he was at the forefront of the Bright Young Things. He was on chat shows and culture shows. He was the man of the moment. And then it all stopped, because there was no second book.

Now, with his marriage to Naz on the rocks, they're trying to start over. They've sold the house that The Devil's Debt built and moved to a farmhouse deep in the wilds of Northumbria, where no one knows them, and for a while their new life is fragile but good. Furthermore, Matt's leading a writing group at the library and is even thinking about writing again.

Marlin is part of that writing group. He's a quiet young man who has survived things no kid should ever have to. On meeting Matt he shows him his battered copy of The Devil's Debt. The book is filled with underlinings and notes and, he soon discovers, messages from the young man's dead mother.

That book serves as the basis for a bond between the two. Matt feels like they have a kinship, and wants to help the young writer. So, when he and Naz find him sleeping rough they invite him into their house for a week or so, until Marlin is back on his feet. But Marlin is a malevolent cuckoo they've brought into their home. And that was their first big mistake...

PRAISE FOR NICK CURRAN

'Grabs the reader from the very first page - and never lets go' DAILY MAIL

'Taut and properly disturbing. . . Impressive' The Critic


'Oh boy, this is going to keep you up at night, or abandoning everything else to race through the pages' Peterborough Telegraph

'Throws out a great hook and then twists and turns its way to a heartstopping climax' Stephen Gallagher

'Not just a ruthlessly compelling novel of suspense but an unflinching examination of the repercussions of a crime. Disturbing, harrowing and moving, it signals the arrival of a new master of crime fiction.' Ramsey Campbell

'Taut, compelling, original. An emotionally charged story that will leave you thinking of the main character long after finishing the book. A true page-turner' J A Corrigan

'Curran's debut is an absorbing, dark and suspenseful thriller. He is a writer to watch' David Fennell

'An utterly gripping Cobenesque mystery keeps you turning the pages fiercely to find out what's happening' Crime Podcast FM

Release date: April 25, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

It was the dream. Until it wasn’t.

I looked around the old place for one last time, saying goodbye to the rooms one by one. It was a little ritual I’d picked up from my mum. She’d walk around every house we lived in, doing one last circuit through the rooms to say goodbye bedroom, thanks for keeping us safe at night, goodbye kitchen, thanks for keeping us fed, goodbye lounge, thanks for all the nights of laughter and fun watching TV.

I didn’t much feel like reminiscing. It was more of a good riddance tour, putting all the demons in their place to make sure they didn’t follow us to the new house.

Clean start.

Once upon a time this place had represented all of our hopes and dreams. Naz had always wanted to live by the sea, and when things had been going well, I’d been rash and reckless and desperate to do anything that would make her happy, so I’d put pretty much every penny I had into buying the house and its million-dollar view. Well, five hundred and fifty-grand view, but even adjusting for inflation that was nowhere near the million-three the new owners had paid for it.

I went through to what had been the study, where I had always dreamt I’d write that second, difficult, book, and move from the realm of one hit wonder into being the real writer that I’d always wanted to be. What no one tells you about a runaway success is that it comes with an unhealthy load of pressure and a weight of expectancy, and sometimes you just can’t deal with it.

I leaned against the old windowsill, feeling out the grain in the wood, and took one last look out through the window at the wild sea crashing and rolling a couple of hundred metres away. It was still a breath-taking sight, and in any other lifetime I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. But in this lifetime I was done with the sea, the view, the cold stone walls, all of it.

I took a deep breath.

How did we get here?

The easy answer was, after twenty years, it turned out I just wasn’t a very good husband. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I didn’t try. I remembered the important dates, I did the flowers, I listened, the first question whenever Naz came through the door was always ‘How was your day?’ And I was genuinely interested to share all of it with her.

But another part of me lived a second life inside my head.

She used to joke that I got this far-away look and she could tell she’d lost me. That’s when she’d say I was writing. That’s one of the things I used to get asked about, how long did it take you to write The Devil’s Debt, and the short answer is four months. The long answer is about fourteen years. Because so much of the writing process wasn’t putting pen to paper, or sitting at the keyboard, it was daydreaming, wondering what if, and generally living in that make-believe world inside my head where stories grow. Which was fine when there was going to be a second book. But somewhere around fifteen years ago I finally admitted to myself I didn’t actually have a second book in me. And that was fine. One and done was still so much more than most dreamers get.

There were bad days, of course. It’s hard to give up on dreams when they’re intrinsic to the person you think you are. I write, therefore I am. I’ve always been a writer – from school all the way to that first published novel, making it onto some of those Hottest New Talent Under 30 lists, and even afterwards, doing the circuit, signing dog-eared paperbacks and telling the uncomfortable kid shuffling his feet that I loved really battered copies more than the pristine ones because it meant the book had been loved – all the way until I wasn’t.

It wasn’t a choice.

There were days I’d sit in this room and stare out to sea, thinking today, today’s the day I get something worthwhile down on the page.

But it never was.

And then we’d lost Penny. Not that she’d actually been Penny when we lost her. She was The Bean. The miscarriage had just about killed Naz, and I’d tried to do what I always did, hide myself in my internal world. It was just one of the many ways I’d failed her in this house. And one of the reasons I couldn’t wait to get away from here and everything it represented.

But it wasn’t the main one.

Somewhere along the way she’d met someone, and for a while he’d been everything I wasn’t, which was exactly what she needed. I don’t know all the details. She’d offered to tell me them, when she’d come to me – again in this room – and shattered my soul into a million little pieces, but I didn’t want to know. What good was it to know if they’d fucked in our bed? If she’d given him head in our shower? Or, and in so many ways this felt worse, he’d consoled her in our kitchen, giving Naz the shoulder she needed to cry on as our marriage fell apart and I was too damaged to even notice?

I didn’t blame her for any of it, which probably tells you everything you need to know about me.

It takes two to commit adultery, but it only ever needs one to destroy a marriage.

‘You saying goodbye to the novel that never was?’ Naz said softly, close to my ear, as she came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist.

It felt good to feel her warmth pressed up against me.

So much better than the cold air that would have been all around me if she’d made a different choice that night.

‘Something like that,’ I agreed.

‘It’ll be good for us. Fresh start. Somewhere new. Away from everything.’

Everything.

Yeah, that was one way to put it.

All encompassing.

‘Maybe so, but I’m going to miss this view,’ I lied.

‘There’s a whole new view waiting for you at the farmhouse. Who knows, maybe the moors will inspire you? All that gorse and heather, plenty of Heathcliff and Cathy going on to fire the blood – who knows, you might even start writing again.’

‘As long as there are no pretty ghosts outside my window,’ I said, not believing it for a minute. ‘I can’t help thinking that we’re giving up on the kids we were, you know, the ones who moved in here with such high hopes.’

‘Or maybe we’re putting our faith in them? Trusting ourselves to get back to where we were before.’

Ever the optimist. I half-smiled at the thought. The thing is, I wanted to believe.

The sacrifices we make for love.

The sea churned. The wind bullied the bushes out there, bending them to its will. I could see the lighthouse down on the promontory. It had been years since any light had burned in there. Its days of protecting seafarers were long gone. It was a half-abandoned luxury house now; the guy who’d had such grand designs for the place when he’d bought it a few years back had gone bust long before he’d ever moved in. Now the old lighthouse was just waiting for the cliff to crumble so that it could fall into the sea.

I felt Naz’s kiss against the nape of my neck. That moment of connection still had the power to thrill me.

‘Come on, Matt, no point being all maudlin, we’ve got a lot of driving to get done today if we’re going to beat the movers to the new place, and we still need to drop the keys off at the estate agent.’

Naz had always been the more practical one of the two of us, but that’s what comes from fleeing an oppressive regime when you are six years old. She’d spent the first year of her life in this country not understanding a word and being taught very basic English with flashcards in class while everyone else was learning more complex sentence structures, addition and subtraction, the hours of the clock and things like that, so she’d gone from feeling like she belonged to feeling stupid because she struggled to understand what came naturally to everyone else.

That shaped her in ways neither of us can really understand, even all these years later.

She’d never been back to Iran, and I’d never suggested it, but after her mum died a few years back there had been talk of taking Babak, her dad, back to see the old country before he joined his beloved, but we’d never managed it. Somewhere along the line he just stopped wanting to live. We watched him shrink and hollow out day by day until three months to the day after Fatemeh’s death, he went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

Naz tried to think of it as a mercy, but with both of my parents still with us, I really couldn’t grasp the sheer overwhelming burden of grief she was suddenly living under. Losing one parent was hard. Losing both, that was devastating. It changed her. Of course it did.

I walked out of the house, determined that this was going to be an end to it, a line in the metaphorical sand, an end to thinking about that other man inside her whenever I looked at my wife, an end to looking at strangers and friends in the town and wondering: was it you?

She was already in the car, smiling at me, and God there was nothing like that smile to melt me.

The removal men were securing the last of the load and battening down the tea chests and boxes in the back of the van, cursing me. When we’d booked them, they’d asked if we had anything heavy, like a grand piano? I’d told them we had books. They’d laughed at that and said no, really heavy. But after carrying almost five thousand hardcovers and paperbacks out of my study they’d changed their definition of heavy.

‘See you on the other side,’ I called to the biggest of them. He had a harness across his back that allowed him to stack multiple boxes at once, and thigh muscles that would have shamed a racehorse.

He gave me the thumbs up.

I got into the car beside Naz, and she drove us away from our old life and everything we’d known.

‘Mr Langley, Mrs Langley, good to see you.’

The estate agent was all smiles as he came out to meet us in the street. I’m sure it wasn’t because he was thinking about the 15 per cent commission that was about to land in his bank account when we handed over the keys and exchanged with our buyers. That couldn’t possibly be it. Oh, the cynic in me.

‘John,’ I said, doing that little head tilt I’d perfected years ago.

We went through to his office, where a couple half our age sat smiling.

‘So, you didn’t run for the hills, then?’ I said, trying to be funny.

You know what it’s like in this country when you are trying to sell a house; you never know, right up until the final minute, if it’s actually going to go through or fall apart. His knee was bouncing up and down. Nervous energy. I’m not surprised. He was about to sign on a dotted line and instruct his bank to put him into a lifetime of debt, all for the sake of the view.

Coffee and tea all round, very civilised, a quick read through of the contract, us swearing there were no outstanding loans secured against the place, all that sort of stuff, and lots of nervous smiles while we waited for the cash to hit our bank before we walked out of there. All told, it took about forty-five minutes, which gave the movers a decent head start.

We shook hands, we smiled, we nodded, we wished them well and hoped they had as much joy in the house as we’d had, which felt a bit like one of those ancient curses, everything considered.

‘Can I just ask … why would you sell up? I don’t know how you can walk away from a house like that, it’s the stuff dreams are made of.’

I winked at him and said, ‘It’s haunted,’ which earned a playful slap around the back of the head from Naz.

‘Don’t you listen to a thing he’s got to say,’ she grumbled, not able to keep the amusement from her voice. ‘The loveable idiot thinks he’s funny.’

I didn’t say what kind of ghosts.

We were on the road again an hour after we’d closed the front door, our bank balance considerably healthier than it had been even after the agents had siphoned off their hundred and ninety-five grand, and the various fees had been covered.

It was more money than I’d had in my life, even when things had been going very well and Hollywood had been throwing money at me for options and renewals, and foreign publishers had been sending those regular cheques that kept us in bread and water.

For a good while The Devil’s Debt had been the gift that kept giving.

There were always new audiences discovering it, new formats that meant it crested the eBook boom, then it had its own audio revival when a beloved actor – one of those with the voice, you know, the kind of timbre and tones us mere mortals would have killed for – recorded it. Every few years it looked like the film or the TV show might happen, but the rights would lapse before anything did. Nearly fifteen years ago now, one of those hot young scriptwriters was paid a million to write a truly dreadful script of it. Believe me, it was no bad thing that crime against cinema never happened.

Naz put the radio on.

We have wildly different tastes in music, but we have a deal when it comes to travelling: one hour my station of choice, the next hour hers, and so on. So, for the first hour away from the south coast, we had a car full of Spin Doctors, Gin Blossoms, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, while for the second it was Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega, Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple. The thing is, after so many years together her taste had blurred into mine and mine had blurred into hers, so we were both quite happy letting the other play deejay for a while.

We hit all the usual bottlenecks and tailbacks, turning the seven-hour drive into a nine-hour one, but even that was okay, because the drive itself had become a rite of passage. The car was our cocoon, and when we clambered out of it on the other side our marriage was going to be a beautiful butterfly instead of the ratty caterpillar it had been. At least that was the miracle I’d sold myself.

We ate a surprisingly edible meal at a service station halfway, and the coffee wasn’t half bad, either. Not sure the same could be said for Naz’s tea. We talked a bit, about nothing and about everything. About what it meant to leave everything behind and be rootless, and of course I saw the parallels to what Naz had been through once before, a child fleeing Iran before the revolution, but I kept telling myself this was all different. This was running to something, not away from something.

We went from A roads to motorways back to A roads, then B roads, and up, through the redbrick cities of the north, and on, skirting Amble and Alnwick until we finally reached the national park and the country roads that wound through impossibly tight switchbacks and hairpin bends towards The Cheviots, Kielder and, eventually, home.

The street signs all promised some great names waiting at the other end, like Crawcrook and Guyzance, Powburn and Ulgham, Great Tosson and Mindrum. And somewhere, in the middle of all of them, our farmhouse, which had been christened Slewfoot by the previous owners.

The wheels thrummed over the cattle grid that marked the edge of our land.

Our land.

Home.

The place where we were going to grow old together.

We’d taken possession last week, meaning there had been a huge bridging loan hanging over us, paid off now, and had given the keys to the movers this morning. It made everything so much easier than trying to drive the length of the country before the estate agent’s office closed and go through it all over again. All we had to worry about was not killing ourselves on the unfamiliar roads which, given the sheer number of blind corners and lethal left turns where the only thing you could see was the bank of green hedge, was easier said than done.

But here we were.

The farmhouse came into view. I still couldn’t believe it was ours. There was the main house, which was easily three times the size of the beach house, then there was an old farm workers’ cottage on the edge of the property, a couple of barns and a garage for the machinery. Not that Slewfoot was a working farm, nor had it been for at least a decade.

The movers were parked up outside. The lights inside were already on, and the guys were carting stuff out of the back of the truck and following Naz’s carefully written labels to make sure they ended up in the right rooms.

Naz killed the engine and we clambered out. For a second we must have looked like the world’s most unlikely aerobics lesson as we worked the kinks out of our spines and got the blood flowing through our veins.

It was nearly eight o’clock, still light, but getting dark without the city lights to brighten up the sky. It was a good ten degrees colder than it had been when we’d set out this morning, and the wind was every bit as savage as the north wind doth ever blow.

‘Better get used to it,’ I said, wrapping my arms around myself in place of a jumper.

Naz just shook her head, but she was smiling as she said, ‘You big wuss. Come on, let’s get you inside.’

‘How’s it going, guys?’ I called as we walked towards the house.

‘All good, Mr Langley, almost done here. Maybe another twenty minutes and we’ll be out of your hair.’

‘Music to my ears. I’ll get the kettle on.’

‘If you can find it in all the boxes,’ he said.

‘Have no fear, she’s got a system,’ I told him, nodding towards Naz.

‘Ah, they always do, right up until they start unpacking and it’s all gone to hell,’ he grinned, riffing on that Mike Tyson quote about everyone having a game plan until you hit them in the head.

Inside, boxes were piled up everywhere. I noticed half a dozen stacked up in the hall that were labelled study, and were meant to be upstairs, but obviously hauling five thousand books up that narrow staircase was too much to ask. We went through to the kitchen where another dozen boxes were stacked up in one corner, while the oak refectory table was pushed up against the wall and buried under chairs.

It took a while, but we found the first of three boxes marked kitchen equipment, and in it, the kettle, mugs and the fixings for the good stuff. Decaf for me, a teabag for her. Just added boiling water. Five minutes later we were leaning against the wall outside, surveying the extent of our domain with corkscrews of steam rising from the mugs in our hands.

‘Not bad,’ Naz said. She could have meant the view, the drinks, the fact that the day itself hadn’t broken us, or any number of variables in between. I nodded like I understood intuitively what she meant.

‘Not bad yourself.’

‘Hope you don’t mind me asking,’ one of the removal men said as he came out of the house cupping his hands around one of the chipped mugs we’d packed especially for the occasion, ‘but are you that Matthew Langley?’

Naz raised an eyebrow and quirked her lips into the ghost of a smile.

‘It depends what you mean by that Matthew Langley,’ I said.

‘He’s being humble,’ Naz said before I could offer up an alternative reality of Matthew Langleys.

‘I loved your book,’ he said, with an embarrassing amount of sincerity. ‘Brilliant.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Read it when I was in school, loved it.’

‘Ah, right.’ He must have been in his early thirties now, and that little reference to school days had inadvertently reminded me The Devil’s Debt had been written a lifetime ago. ‘Glad you liked it.’

‘Loved it,’ he said again, emphasis very much on the loved.

‘That’s enough, now, lad,’ his boss said, coming out of the house. ‘Anyone would think you fancied him.’ Which earned a laugh from the rest of the team, who were somewhere inside the house but close enough to hear.

‘It’s all good,’ I promised him. ‘Sometimes it’s nice to be remembered.’

‘Aye, I imagine it is,’ the boss said, taking up a place on the wall beside us.

‘You boys done?’

‘Everything’s in place. We’ll drink up and be making roads.’ I don’t know if it was a local phrase, or something unique to him, but I rather liked it. Making roads. ‘Hope you’re very happy here, folks. It’s a beautiful place.’

‘And no water anywhere to be seen,’ I joked.

‘Not true, there’s a pond round the back of the property,’ he told me. ‘Saw it on the way in, when there was better light.’

‘Ah,’ I said, but of course I knew about the pond. There were actually three of them, two larger, one quite small. The larger ones were dominated by bulrush and spike-rush, while the smallest one cultivated bur-reed. They were home to moorhens and coots, and during migratory seasons, I was promised, we’d see all manner of visitors to the property. ‘Long day for you boys?’

‘Up at four, so yeah, it’ll be good to sleep in our beds tonight.’

‘I can imagine.’

He lifted his mug as though toasting us, then disappeared back into the house to put it in the sink.

It took them ten minutes to get their things together and move out, leaving us alone.

I put my phone on the kitchen table.

No signal.

‘This is it, then,’ Naz said. ‘The new start starts here.’

I nodded. ‘Well then, we better get it started properly.’

I pulled Naz into my arms, and we stood there in the kitchen for a full minute just kissing. It was a good first kiss for the house. Start as you mean to go on and all that. She pressed up hard against me, like she was desperate for that connection and couldn’t get enough of it, and I pressed up against her like she was a stack in the middle of the ocean and I was clinging on for dear life.

We broke off the kiss and she led me upstairs, ignoring the boxes and everything that was waiting to be unpacked, and not bothering to lock the door because there was no one to come knocking.

She led me by the hand across the landing and down the hall to what we’d decided would be our bedroom, because of the huge plate-glass windows that opened onto a French balcony, and offered an endless view of the Northumbrian moors. The bed was there, but the mattress was on the floor, beside the box springs. Naz was in no mood to make the bed. She clawed at my shirt, pulling it over my head and sank down onto her knees on the mattress, pulling me down beside her.

The sex was good.

Familiar without being dull. It was safe. There was no picturing some exciting stranger in her place. Naz knew me. She knew what weakened me and what broke me, just as I knew what had her back arch and her eyes flutter up inside her head as her fists clenched into the mattress beneath her. It wasn’t like we reinvented sex, but in that half an hour or so we reinvented ourselves. It was the first time we’d been together since she’d confessed. It had been important we do it tonight, not wait for whatever felt like a better, less physically or mentally exhausted time, because if we put it off, we’d keep putting it off and eventually we’d be strangers to each other.

I grabbed a couple of blankets and lay them over Naz, not wanting her to get cold. She lay there looking up at me, and for just a second it was the same as it had always been, her and me against the world and nothing else mattered. So maybe we would get through this after all.

I knelt beside the mattress and leaned over to kiss the top of her head, brushing aside the sweat-matted fringe that clung to her skin.

‘Lie next to me,’ she said, holding out a hand. ‘Everything can wait until tomorrow. I want to fall asleep feeling you next to me.’

How was I meant to say no?

I crawled onto the mattress beside her, and pulled part of the blanket up over me, holding her until her breathing changed and all of the tension went out of her body and I knew Naz was asleep. Then I waited some more, not closing my eyes because I didn’t want to know if he had made the journey north with us.

***

I eased out of our makeshift bed, careful not to wake her, and padded gently down the stairs.

I didn’t know where anything was, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need anything.

I opened the front door and slipped out into the night, naked. It didn’t matter, no one was going to see me out here. It was cold, but that didn’t matter either. I told myself it was invigorating. Fresh. I’m not the best liar; it was fucking freezing.

I stood there for a few minutes, just looking at the world.

It was something my dad used to do with me when I was little. He’d stand me on the windowsill, holding me around the waist, and say the same thing every night: ‘Let’s look at the world.’ It was our little ritual, and every now and then I retreated back into it, needing the comfort of its familiarity.

‘Penny for them,’ Naz said, coming up behind me.

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘You didn’t. So, my money not good enough for you, mister?’

She was smiling into my neck, planting little butterfly kisses there.

‘I’m not sure they’re worth an entire penny,’ I admitted.

‘Let me be the judge of that.’

I looked up at the night sky. ‘It’s so full of stars,’ I said, like that had been what I’d actually been thinking about, not him. He was going to drive me out of my mind if I let him. That much was increasingly obvious. Not knowing was worse than knowing, I think, because for me he became everyone rather than someone; a villain with a thousand faces. ‘You don’t notice it when you’re in the city,’ I said, like we’d ever actually lived in the city, but she knew what I meant. We’d had an entire town spill out back from our clifftop vantage point, twelve thousand people all told. Here, there was us. It was a different world, and looking up at it, a different sky; everything just. . .