That Summer He Died

by Emlyn Rees

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

On the surface, James Sawday's life couldn't be any better. Writing investigative pieces for a glossy men's magazine, he gets to travel the world. And when he gets home, there's Lucy: smart, funny, seems to love him. She could even be the one. But when James's editor sends him to the seaside town of Grancombe, to cover a murder - the third attack by a serial killer who specialises in chopping off his victims' hands - James finds himself sucked back down into a world he's tried all his adult life to forget. Ten years before, during a hazy, drug-fuelled summer, James was one of a group of teenagers who stumbled on the mutilated corpse of local artist Jack Dawes. And then the second killing happened - the one that still gives James nightmares. Now James has got to dig up everything he's worked so hard to bury. And what he's going to find out could cost him his sanity. And even his life.

Release date: April 4, 2013

Publisher: C & R Crime

Print pages: 249

Sample

When the LAPD, alerted by reports of a gun shot, broke down the door of Peter Headley’s apartment at ten minutes before ten o’clock on the morning of Friday 14 August, they discovered him slumped in an armchair, facing the television.

On the table to his left was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a glass containing ice which had not yet melted, a silver Zippo lighter engraved with his name, a crystal ashtray with the singed butt of a Marlboro cigarette resting on its rim, and a computer printout, three columns wide and thirteen rows deep, detailing names and dates and places.

His right hand lay on his lap, wrapped around an antique Luger pistol. An undried fresco of brain and blood and bone covered the wall behind his head.

On top of the television, a digital camera had been positioned, pointing at the chair. Its red record light was on.

James Sawday stopped typing, looked up from the screen of his laptop and checked his watch: twelve-fifteen. His hand squeaked against the cab window as he wiped the condensation away and gazed outside.

The warehouses, hotels and car parks of Heathrow airport had been replaced now by the imposing façades of Knightsbridge department stores. The traffic was boot to bumper, but still a blessing compared to the gridlock he’d grown used to in LA. The weather, though – he watched the rods of October rain pummelling the pavement and pedestrians – he would have traded in for LA smog without a second thought.

He rubbed his eyes, screen fatigue or flight fatigue – he wasn’t sure which was affecting him worse – making him regret his decision to report into the office before going home.

Twenty minutes later, the cab pulled up in a street off Soho Square. James paid the driver, stashed his laptop and dragged it with him in his battered courier bag.

By the time he reached Hinton House, his white ‘The Black Keys’ t-shirt had turned grey with rain. The wet soles of his trainers squeaked as he crossed the marble tiles of reception to the lifts.

On the way up to the fifth floor, he checked his reflection in the mirrored wall. He looked wasted, like he’d been out on a week-long bender. A crop of two-day stubble patterned his jaw and dark pouches protruded beneath his eyes. His hair, darkened by the rain so that it no longer matched his soft brown eyes, hung down over his forehead in long lank curls.

Even with a tan, his complexion, which normally led people to place him nearer twenty than thirty, was dull. He looked like he needed a hot bath, a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. He looked like he needed someone to look after him.

Just like the kind of man, in other words, who Peter Headley would have invited home and tended and cared for, propped up with a pillow and covered with a blanket, before picking up a baseball bat and beating his skull to a pulp.

James shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the thought, but the thought wasn’t having any of it, and stuck to him like a leech.

Headley, although deceased, had been living in James’s head for the best part of two weeks now, since he’d gone over to LA to research the grim lifestyle that had led to the serial killer’s suicide two months previously. The sooner James put the article to bed and evicted the dead murderer’s spectre, the better.

He stepped out of the lift, crossed the two yards of chequered carpet to the double glass doors and punched the code into the key pad. The lock buzzed and he pushed the door open with his foot and stepped inside.

‘Hello, you’re through to Kudos. . .’ Marcus answered the phone in reception, glancing up from his desk at James and rolling his eyes as he finished reciting the company’s official business greeting ‘. . . the uptown gentlemen’s forum and guide to modern life. . .’

James dumped his suitcase next to a rainforest of potted plants and put his courier bag on the reception desk. While he waited for Marcus to finish with the caller, he checked out the framed covers on the wall – ten editions in all, since Kudos had been launched back in January.

He picked up a copy of the new October issue from a rack and lingered over the cover shot of Emma Watson for a couple of seconds, before flipping it open and checking out what people had been up to since he’d been away.

‘Welcome back,’ Marcus said then, fixing a grin on him. ‘Good time in Californ-I-A?’

‘Not bad.’ James was rummaging through the papers in his bag. ‘Even picked you up a souvenir. . .’

Marcus got to his feet and leant across the reception desk. ‘Let me guess. A Raiders cap? A bag of crack? What was it you were doing out there? Oh, yeah, the Headley piece. Shit, if it’s a dismembered penis, you can stick it up your—’

‘Not funny,’ James said, locating the book he was looking for.

‘Pretty gross, was it?’ Marcus asked, the mischievous sparkle in his eyes doused.

‘Gross doesn’t come close. Even writing it up makes me want to puke.’ James handed the paperback over. ‘But this has got nothing to do with it.’

Marcus smiled. He was one of the few people James knew who still preferred paper books to electronic, and was a sucker for a thriller.

He read the title out loud: ‘Hunted. Any good?’

‘No idea,’ James said. He didn’t really go in for crime fiction himself. The real world was already plenty scary enough. ‘But it is signed. The writer was staying in the same hotel as me. I met him at the bar.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘A lot balder than in his author photo.’

Marcus put down the book.

‘Norm said he wanted to see you as soon as you got back,’ he said.

James glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘He in yet?’

‘Is he ever out? He said something about a new assignment. He seemed pretty excited about it.’

‘Great.’ Gathering up his bag and suitcase, James headed down the corridor into the swarm of bodies and buzzing voices. ‘More work. Just what I need.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the trouble with being good,’ Marcus called after him. ‘There’s always going to be more.’

Norm Gattis was pacing up and down by the window of his office, taking in the view of Soho. At twenty-nine, only two years older than James, he was the youngest magazine editor in London. Dressed in artfully creased handmade jeans, cowboy boots so beaten it was a wonder they hadn’t pressed charges, and a t-shirt covered with a faded print of Jack Kerouac’s face, he was talking – or, rather, shouting – into his cell phone, sucking on an electric cigarette like he was planning on inhaling it whole.

‘I need tits! Tits and ass,’ he yelled. ‘Did you even see how many copies those shots of the future Queen of England sold? Bare back and legs at the very least. But nipples if you can get them. Nipples sell more copies and ramp up the site hits too. So ask round the photo agencies, OK?. . . Yeah, of course the sleazier, the better. She’s bound to have done some skin work to kick-start a career like that. . . No, no one’s gonna give a shit about her being into Zen Buddhism. Not unless she’s into Tantric sex too. Does she chime when she orgasms?’ He noticed James, nodded him towards the sofa. ‘No? Well, screw that, then. Screw her if you’ve got to. Just do your job. Dig some dirt. Why else do you think I’ve sent you halfway round the bloody world at my expense?’

Norm glared at his phone screen, swiping his finger across it like he was slitting someone’s throat as he cut the other caller off.

‘Let me guess who it is you’re after,’ James asked. He named one of the actresses from the new Bond flick, the one who was shot in the film because Daniel Craig had got the shakes.

Norm grinned, but not kindly, more ferally. ‘Can’t keep anything from you, can I, sleuth? Like having Miss bleedin’ Marple on the staff. I should have sent you out there instead of that useless prat Lee Rickman. Calls himself a journalist. Bollocks! Way he’s acting at the moment, he couldn’t find dirt up a tramp’s arsehole.’ Norm pulled his desk drawer out. ‘Shut the door and pull the blind down, will you?’

James did as requested and returned to the sofa as Norm cut a couple of fat lines of coke on his desk and snorted the first one up.

‘Want some?’ he asked.

James shook his head.

Norm did the other line, rocking his head back and pinching his nose as his eyes began to water. He closed his desk drawer.

‘’Course not,’ he said, ‘because you don’t, do you? Never did get round to asking why. You just say no, the same as with pills, but you’ll still smoke yourself stupid with weed. I mean, what the fuck is all that?’

A girl’s face. . . a redhead. . . a face James would never forget. . . hovered now in the forefront of his mind.

‘Just because,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but “just because” what?’

The redhead. . . James remembered her eyes. He pictured them staring. . . she was staring, because she could not blink.

‘Because I’m mad enough already?’ he suggested.

‘Or maybe because if I stuck anything more stimulating than my finger up your nose, you’d end up scrabbling round the floor of a nut-house, thinking you were a gerbil called Clive?’

‘It’s possible.’

James forced the image of the red-headed girl from his mind.

‘You look shit, by the way,’ Norm said.

James studied Norm’s own dishevelled appearance and decided to take this as a compliment. ‘Thanks.’

Norm walked over to the fridge and took out a bottle of beer, flipped the top against his nicotine-stained front teeth, spat it on to the floor and drank. He waggled another bottle at James, who again shook his head, this time thinking of the cool sheets and soft mattress waiting for him back at his flat.

‘You wanted to see me,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ Distracted, Norm ran his hand back through his greasy mop of hair, then focused. ‘Oh, yeah. How was LA?’

‘The same as ever. Insane people paying insane prices to indulge in insane activities.’

‘And Peter Headley?’

‘Peter Headley was too insane even for LA.’

‘Gonna make a good piece?’

‘Gonna make a sick piece.’

‘There’s a difference?’ Norm said. ‘Sick is good. Sick’s what our readers love. When can you have it on my desk?’

‘End of the week.’

‘Cool.’

Norm pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, flipped the lid and smelt inside, before thinking better of it and sucking on his electric cigarette instead.

James’s bed was still beckoning. ‘Marcus said you’ve got something for me,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ Norm was rubbing at his watering eyes.

‘Maybe a rise?’ James suggested.

‘No chance. Haven’t you heard? There’s a recession on. . . and. . . ’

James phased out as Norm’s chapped lips continued to move rapidly.

‘And magazines have been hit hardest of all. . . With so much content free online these days, it’s harder and harder to get people to subscribe to any mag’s print or electronic versions, leaving the future of fledgling publications like Kudos balanced on the edge of a knife. . .’

James had heard all of Norm’s arguments before.

‘. . . meaning that you and me, mate, we’re lucky to have bloody jobs at all right now,’ he finished.

‘So if it’s not a rise I’m here for, I’m guessing it’s an assignment?’ James suggested. ‘I mean, I know it’s unlikely, you considering doing anything other than rewarding me after I’ve spent the last fortnight sifting through data and photos on dismembered bodies. . . but it is possible, I suppose.’

Norm clicked his fingers. ‘Well deduced, Marple. It is an assignment.’ He rifled through the spread of magazines and photos and newspapers on his desk. ‘What d’you know about Grancombe?’

James hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Typical tourist town. Down on the coast. Buckets and spades. Overcrowded in the summer. Dead in the winter.’

‘That’s the one. Only not so typical. Not unless you fall for the Tourist Board line anyhow. Some murders there nine years ago. Serial stuff. Sick stuff. Like Headley, only a lower body count. You remember?’

No.

No.

James felt for a moment like he would fall. He walked over to Norm’s fridge and took out a can of Coke. He drank quickly, washing down the nausea that had risen in his throat.

‘Yeah,’ he said then, crossing to the window and staring out. ‘Long time ago. Old news.’

As James turned back, Normslid an iPad across his desk. ‘Not any more, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘This broke while you were away.’

A tabloid site filled the iPad’s screen. Its headline read RETURN OF THE GRANCOMBE AXE KILLER, like some crappy billboard advert for a fifties B-movie.

But it wasn’t these words James’s eyes settled on. It was the eyes of the victim in the photograph. It was the eyes of Daniel Thompson that bored into his own.

James’s mouth opened involuntarily, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, once more forming the word ‘No’. He watched the iPad shaking in his hands. The photograph looked like it was about to slide into animation. . . Daniel Thompson looked like he was moving. . . like he was rising up off the page, inflating from two dimensions into three.

His hand was reaching out for James.

No.

James closed his eyes.

Nothing.

He remembered nothing.

Daniel Thompson meant nothing to him. Grancombe meant nothing. None of that meant anything any more.

‘You all right?’

Norm’s words came at James like an alarm breaking into sleep. It took him whole seconds to open his eyes and remember where he was.

‘For someone who doesn’t do any gear, you’ve got the shakes pretty bad.’

‘Too many comp drinks on the flight,’ he mumbled. He forced his hands to be still as he looked back down at the iPad. He swiped across its screen, wiping Daniel Thompson’s face from existence.

He read the text of the article that took the photograph’s place:

Almost a decade after Kenneth Trader’s body was discovered in the woods above Grancombe’s South Beach, the Grancombe Axe Killer has struck again.

The body of Daniel Thompson, 27, was found yesterday morning by Tony Monckton, a tourist, while he was walking along the picturesque clifftop.

Thompson, who had been a known associate of Trader’s before he was murdered, was lying less than fifty feet from where Trader was found.

The print blurred. James felt his grip weakening on the iPad. Jesus, he thought. How can this be happening? After all this time?

‘I’m not doing it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’ He looked Norm in the eyes. ‘I’m not covering the story.’

‘Why the hell not?’ A combative sneer settled on Norm’s face.

But James didn’t care. He needed out now. He glanced over at the door handle, a childish part of him wanting to flee. But he wasn’t a child any more, was he? Instead he frantically groped for a reason to make his boss change his mind.

‘The Headley thing,’ he said. ‘I need some time away from that sort of story. I need something fresh. I need to clear my head.’

‘So get some fucking shampoo.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Look, I can relate, yeah?’ Norm said, trying to look serious now. ‘We’ve all covered nasty stuff and we’ve all got freaked out. But you get over it. You get over it and you get on with what comes next. And I’m not even asking you to profile the killer like you did with Headley, OK? I mean, they haven’t even caught this Grancombe creep, have they? So it’s not like there’s going to be any more psych shit that’s going to start messing with your head.’

‘I already told you: the answer’s no.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s bullshit.’ Norm’s sneer was back in place. ‘Because this is perfect. We can run the Headley piece alongside one on the Grancombe Axe Killer. You know, as in American versus British? Like who’s the sickest, right?’

James felt his in-flight breakfast preparing for take-off.

‘You make it sound like a sports fixture,’ he said. ‘People died. Real people.’

People like Daniel Thompson. . .

‘All I’m asking is for you to get your arse down to Grancombe and hang out there for a week. Talk to the pigs and the locals and the tourists, and find out what it’s like living with the knowledge that there’s a serial killer on the loose.’

‘I’m going home,’ James said

‘Sure, fine, I get it. You’re tired. So go and get some sleep. Then when you wake up, we can talk about this again. When you’re thinking more clearly. . .’

James didn’t answer. He was already out through the door, eyes focused on his feet as he marched down the corridor.

‘Just think about it,’ Norm barked after him. ‘That’s all I’m asking. Just think about it and––’

James didn’t hear any more. He was already in reception. He was opening the door and he was not looking back.

*

If James had had anything left in his stomach to throw up, he would have plastered it across his bed when he woke around eight that evening.

But since he’d got home and had only just made it to the kitchen sink, where he’d introduced a new kind of American fast food to Britain, he hadn’t been able to hold anything down. So, here in his bedroom, nothing but air came up now.

Forget it.

Don’t get drawn in by the undertow. Don’t think about it.

Bury it again.

Bury it deep.

That’s what he told himself, but that image of Daniel Thompson’s face staring into his own after all these years wouldn’t leave him, no matter how much James begged.

Ghosts. Ghosts return to haunt the people who could have made a difference. Ghosts come back for the people who could have kept them alive.

Only the guilty believe in ghosts.

Only the guilty can’t make them go away.

James stumbled through to the bathroom, shut himself behind the glass door of the shower, and took a beating from the water. He scrubbed at his skin with soap and brush. But, even as he did it, he knew that nothing was going to be strong enough to disinfect his mind, or leave him feeling clean again.

He dried off and dropped the towel on to the floor, walked naked from the bathroom back to the bedroom. He passed the windows overlooking the King’s Road, careless of what other people might think if they saw him.

This wasn’t about him any more. This was about who he once was. This was about an eighteen-year-old boy who’d left this very same flat nine years ago and moved to Grancombe for the summer, a boy who’d seen too much and had chosen to forget, a boy who hadn’t believed in the power of ghosts.

Not like he did now.

He rifled through the courier bag on the chair by the window and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d picked up after leaving the office, snapped the cap and drank.

The liquid yo-yo-ed in his throat for a few seconds, then settled, warming his stomach like a hot water bottle. His breathing slowed for the first time since he’d woken and he settled down by the radiator, rubbing his back against it. He drank again. And again. And then he rolled a spliff, closed his eyes and let the high carry him away.

Later, stoned, he found himself staring at his wardrobe. He got up and crossed the room and opened it, ripped the fallen clothes away from the base, uncovered a suitcase and jerked it out. It smelt musty inside when he flipped the catches. He stared for a twenty-four-hour minute at its contents.

He dug out the envelope full of photos from beside the discarded digital camera beneath the jumble of papers. The snaps weren’t in any particular order. But all were from that summer he’d spent in Grancombe.

There was one of him lying on a bench on the sea front. It was a sunny day. He looked at peace, midsummer-dreamy, even dead.

Next came a load from a party on South Beach. He checked the faces and remembered whose eighteenth it was.

Then there was Daniel Thompson, a snap of him knee-high in water, chucking up into the dusk-blooded sea, lager can in hand unrepentant.

James quickly slid the photo to the bottom of the pack, looked instead at one of some girl Dan had been seeing at the time, posing like a catwalk model on the rock plateau outside Surfers’ Turf.

James hadn’t seen her for years – he continued to flick through the deck of snapshots – hadn’t seen any of them for years, not since he’d caught that dawn train back to London nearly a decade ago.

He flicked over another photo and froze. Suzie. There she was, sitting next to the fire, feet buried in sand, dark-haired, even more beautiful than he’d remembered. She hadn’t been looking at him, hadn’t known he’d existed. He felt as if a sponge was expanding inside his throat. The photograph fell to the floor.

*

The next morning, the first thing James noticed was that his mouth and tongue felt furry. He peeled his lips off the carpet and the rest of his body, muscles protesting at every inch, followed. He wiped some stray carpet fibres from his tongue and backed up to the bed, sat down on it and held his head in his hands.

He looked round and couldn’t believe what a tip his room was. Rogue Rizlas, scratched and discarded iPods and broken cigarettes lay strewn across the floor, like debris from a rock-and-roll air crash.

The other thing James couldn’t believe was that he actually felt better. Spiritually, that was. Physically, things couldn’t have been much worse. But spiritually things were definitely looking up.

The ghost of Daniel Thompson, if not exorcised, had, at least for now, retreated back into the shadows. He was a memory again, nothing more. And with his departure, the ice had melted from James’s spine.

He went to the bathroom and showered and shaved. He studied himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth and pronounced himself fit to re-enter the human race, albeit as a rank outsider in the running.

He dressed, then collected up the photographs from where they still lay scattered on his bedroom floor and shut them back in the suitcase, returned it to the wardrobe and locked the door. He walked through to the kitchen and fixed himself breakfast.

He sat peering at the wall through the steam of his coffee, steeling himself for the rest of the day.

Forget.

Forget everything.

Right?

Because that’s what had worked for him right up until Norm had thrust the newspaper article about Dan’s murder into his hands. And that’s what would work for him now as well.

If the past was a foreign country, then James was determined to remain an unwavering xenophobe: he’d wear his Union Jack boxer shorts with pride, turn up his nose at the first whiff of garlic, and administer a good kicking to anyone who spoke a different language.

If that was what it took to remain an island, to reassert control over his memories, then that’s what he would do.

*

That was also what he’d told himself in the months following his departure from Grancombe, after he’d fled first back here to this flat in London, and then on to Edinburgh University, where he’d rented a flat in New Town and had registered for his fresher year in English Lit.

And denial had proved good for him.

It had let him move on.

It had worked.

Sure, not at first. For most of that first bitter Scottish winter his nightmares had persisted, half-drowning him in sweat-soaked sheets, trailing him to the bathroom in the middle of the night, lurking in the shadows in the morning for whole minutes after he’d awoken, leaving him gripped by the possibility that the past had the power to infiltrate the present, making him desperately question if he’d ever find peace.

But, with time, the morning hallucinations had ceased and had melted away with the winter snows, trickling down the gutters out of sight.

And then, as he’d increased his involvement in university and the here and now, his nightmares had started to lose their solidity in his mind and had turned watery too.

He’d come to recognise them as memory, not reality. And finally, as he’d come to believe the lies he’d taken to telling others – about how he’d spent his gap year between school and university staying with a relation and writing a novel that he’d never managed to find a publisher for – he’d stopped thinking at all about what had really happened.

He’d taught himself to forget.

Ignore something long enough and it will cease to exist. That had become his philosophy, his survival mantra. And that’s what would keep him sane now. And he wasn’t about to go changing it just because Norm thought there was a good story to be found.

Don’t ever look back.

Norm could find someone else to cover Daniel Thompson’s murder, someone for whom it would just be another job and a jaunt to the coast rolled into one.

Norm could send some other investigative journalist down, who wasn’t going to find himself investigating his own past.

James got up and pulled on his coat, collected the bag containing his research on Headley and his laptop.

Bury yourself in your work, he told himself. Bury yourself so deep you can’t see out any more.

*

As James walked down the short hallway which led to the front door of his flat, he noticed the answerphone’s red eye winking at him.

He checked his watch: plenty of time before he had to be in the office. And, after the way things had gone yesterday, he doubted if Norm was going to begrudge him a lie-in. He picked up a pen from the table, poised it over the notepad and pressed play.

‘Hi, gorgeous,’ Lucy’s voice crackled out of the speaker. ‘If you’re there, pick up. Hello? Hell-o? I’m waiting. . .’ There was a five-second pause, during which he could hear her breathing. ‘Guess I’ve missed you. Sorry. Didn’t think you were leaving for Heathrow till later. Must’ve been wrong. Whatever. Shit.’ Another pause. ‘Oh, well, you’ll be back when you hear this, so I’ve probably missed you more than I should by now. And I’ve probably been texting you or Skyping you insanely.’

James smiled. They’d done all that. And more than once.

‘And I hope you had a good time and didn’t get too freaked out,’ Lucy’s voice continued.

Another smile. Jeez, this girl could talk for England.

‘And I hope you found time to have some fun, too. And. . . and call me. Give me a call and let’s fix up a time to get together. Just give me a call. . .’

The machine clicked on to another message. His best friend David this time: ‘Hi, James. It’s me. You’re in LA, so I thought I’d call you in London. Logical, huh? Just a cheapskate, really. I can’t be arsed to pay the call charges. And you never check your bloody email. Anyway, it’s about my birthday. And you’d better pick me up a present in duty free. . .Anyway, the birthday. The big two six. I. . .