A Season For Everything by Matthew Fairman (ready player one ebook TXT) 📕

‘Now calm down Mrs Gream, he’s not going to get very far. Steve, see if you can follow him and call in a car to try and head him off. He’s not going to get very far tonight in this weather. I’ll check inside and make sure everything’s OK.’

The kitchen door was wide open. The first thing that Hollis noticed was that both the whiskey bottle and the boots were now gone. She walked into the living room holding her sidearm. The light was on and the TV was on standby. Nothing looked out of place. On the mantle piece was a cheap gold carriage clock. Next to it was a photo of a young man and a young woman. They were standing next to one another. Each of them stood astride a bicycle. Their clothing was dated, maybe by eight or ten years. It was an unexceptional looking living room. She went upstairs and checked the other rooms. She looked in the wardrobe. Then she checked the bathroom, the cupboard above the sink.

‘Well he definitely lives alone, thats for sure.’ She called in on the radio the house address. She got back the details of a Mr and Mrs Earnest. Nothing previous or unusual in either of their histories.‘So where are Mr and Mrs Earnest?’

When she came downstairs Steve was standing in the living room looking at the photograph on the mantle piece.

‘You didn’t find him then?’

‘Disappeared like a ghost, I got a patrol vehicle checking the area. If they can’t find him then I wouldn’t get your hopes up. It will be up to the forensic team to dust over the place.’

‘I don’t think that that’s going to be necessary some how.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you were just chasing a Mr Beaton Arnold Earnest. That’s Mrs Earnest on the mantlepiece.’

‘You mean that he lives here?’

‘Yep, I don’t know why he’s running away but I think we should come back and ask him why. Somethings got him all spooked up.’

‘I better go and speak to our friend Mrs Gream and try to soothe her fears, wait for the patrol car to come back here. They might still want to look over the place. I’m not sure there’s much more we can do here tonight. It’s unlikely that the will be back. There’s me thinking that we were going to have a quiet night of it and now we’ve got all that lovely paperwork to look forward to.’

Beaton sat in the dark corner of the garage and tried to think through what his next move should be. He had no idea what exactly had happened at the quarry, and he could do little to explain how the police could have become involved so quickly. The more he drank the less sense it made and the less sense it made the more he felt inclined to drink until at last, overcome, he finally slept.

Thursday 22nd

His back was stiff and he was frozen through from the cold. He still felt a little drunk from the whiskey, he took the bottle in his lap and threw it towards the far wall. He hugged himself and tried to rub some warmth into his cold flesh. It seemed that waking up in the freezing cold dark was becoming something of a regular habit. The translucent powdering of snow at the base of the door created a pale blue bar of light. Lying on his side, he scooped a hole into the snow with his right hand. It made his fingers numb so stuffed his hand into the crook of his arm pit until the feeling returned. Leaning on his left shoulder he peered through the hole. He could see the fences and the upper stories of the neighbouring houses. Above their rooftops he could make out a scrap of blue sky. He decided that he wouldn’t move until he had at least formulated some kind of plan. He knew that he wasn’t going to go back into the house. The police were sure to come back to speak with him and he was keen to avoid them until he at least had some idea about what they wanted. He was hungry too, he couldn’t remember his last square meal. ‘I’ll go back to to the Quarry.’ The idea seemed like sheer madness at first but the more he mulled it over the more it made sense to him. ‘I got food and heat there and at least I can see if the police have found the body.’ The body, he half hoped that it was not going to be there at all but he knew that of all things he might be called, delusional was not one of them. He remembered vividly, the feel of the broken neck beneath the soft skin of the throat. He continued to lie on his side staring at the sky and seeing as though no better ideas were coming to mind he decided to go with only half decent one that he had. Like a fox leaving its den, he pulled himself free from the gap beneath the door and dusted himself down. It was a bright morning and there were a quite a few people up and about on the street. Beaton reckoned that it must have been a Thursday. Time had become a little jumbled lately.

The old canal was filled to its brim with fine a powdery snow. A sunken depression in the surface was the only indication as to where the tow path ended and the dried up watercourse began. Nobody had been here since yesterday the path was unspoilt beneath a good few inches of snow. The thick white clumps stuck to his trousers and piled up around his ankles as he waded through. A robin chirruped from a tree top and bounced weightlessly from one fine limb to the next. It settled on a pale brown stalk of dried cow parsley that was perforating the surface of the snow. Jerking its tiny head around like a clockwork toy its tiny black eyes drank in the starving landscape. It flew towards the woods, bobbing and weaving and was gone. Hungry cold, and confused by its first winter. ‘Do birds ever think that their world is coming to an end?’ Beaton wondered to himself.

Under the tangled canopy of the copse the snow was less dense and Beaton climbed the rutted track that led up towards the meadow. From the high valley ridge he looked down on the town that was steeped in a blessed white. It was a beautiful sight to behold. He sat beneath a yew tree on a collapsed dry stone wall and listened to the church bell of St Steven’s. They chimed eight times and he looked at his watch. He set the dial to the hour and wound the spring. The tiny needle jerked into life and slowly did its rounds beneath the shattered dome. ‘I suppose that its not such a strange thing to think but the town looks better when you can’t see it anymore.’ He gulped in deep mouthfuls of fresh cold air that made his eyes water. It was a peaceful spot, but his thoughts became drawn to the body beneath the meadow and he started back on his way. From the meadow he returned to the the Quarry and the shadow of its surrounding trees. He had to be careful not to get too close to the edge of the bluff. Great protuberances of fresh snow clung to the overhangs ready to fall. It was difficult to see what was solid ground and what wasn’t. The boulder field below the cliff face was as silent as the grave. The tops of the white rocks that poked free from the snow were painted by the lichen with splashes of yellow and pale green. They lay scattered and strewn about, half sunken higgledy piggledy rows like bleached mussel shells on a beach.

He found his raincoat and the spare gas canisters where he had last left them, behind the rock. The twine was still tied onto the root system of the old dead tree stump. It was just the way he had left it. He picked up the twine. This simple piece of string that was connecting his past to his future. He certainly didn’t want to face up to the reality of his situation but Beaton reasoned that not knowing would ultimately be worse far. At least he could make informed decisions about what had done. He followed the line until he reached the end that was tethered to the ground by the old chisel. It’s rusted head was still firmly rammed into the hard earth. Feeling his way, he climbed into the niche on the large flat rock which was covered by the old blanket. Kneeling forward, his body craning over the edge towards the floor, he gently patted the ground from left to right to try and find his missing things. He found the screw cap to the torch handle and put it in his pocket. All the while he kept his eyes screwed tight, as if pretending that it wasn’t really dark at all. His hand fell on something rubbery, it was rounded on one side and flat on the other. He squeezed it, it felt like squeezing a tennis ball except it wasn’t a tennis ball because there was something hard inside of it. He leaned a little forward and tried to gauge the size of the object. It kept getting bigger and bigger. Once he had made out the heel and put his hands around the ankle he knew for sure what he had found. He fell backwards, pushing himself into the wall away from the body. He was breathing hard, his initial thought was to start running again but he knew that he could not. Beaton sat and thought, he thought and thought and thought until his head was hurting. ‘The police, they must not know yet. They wouldn’t leave a body here, but what did they want then? Maybe work had rung them, told them I was missing. Yes that must be it. Nobody must know about this yet. But soon, but soon someone will be missing and then they will start looking.’ Beaton started to think about who could be lying on the floor in front of him. If he looked then he could know for sure but he couldn’t face the thought of seeing the face. In his fantasies the body had always been faceless. He did not feel the need to know. ‘Maybe its just an old vagrant who lives down here, someone that no one will miss.’

After some time he eased himself from the ledge and stood. He lightly used his foot to kick along the edge of the body to see where exactly it was lying. He Picked up the blanket and laid it over the body and sat back down. Covering the body had not made him feel any better. ‘Your going to have to do more than that Beaton’. He searched for the canvas bag and once he had found it he replaced the batteries in the torch. The legs of the body from the knee down protruded from under then end of the blanket. It looked comical in a weird way like the whole thing was a bad joke and the person might suddenly sit up. A weird wave of excitement washed over Beaton at the sight of the corpse. He started to clear the rocks around the body until he had cleared a wide flat space. Switching the torch off again he pulled away the blanket so it was lying on the clear floor alongside the body. He tried to lift the dead weight with his foot and roll it onto the blanket but it wouldn’t budge.