Free Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace Page B

in reds and yellows, reds and yellows that plucked me up and dropped me back on a hill above a burning gypsy camp, the face of a young girl with brown curls crying out into the night while another little girl lay on a mortuary slab with wings in her back. I swallowed hard, wondered what the fuck I was doing here and pushed open the glass kitchen door.
    The bungalow was laid out exactly the same as Mrs Sheard’s. A little light coming through the glass front door at the other end of the hall added to the candle, illuminating a thin hall with a couple of drab Scottish landscapes and an etching of a bird. The five other doors off the hall were all closed. I set the candle on the telephone table, rummaging through my pockets for scraps of paper.
    In the Lair of the Ratcatcher …
    I’d have no trouble selling it to the nationals. A few photo graphs and I’d be set. Maybe a quick paperback after all. Like Kathryn had said, it practically wrote itself:
    6 Willman Close, home to Graham and Mary Goldthorpe, brother and sister, killer and prey .
    Inside the hall of the Ratcatcher, I took out my pen and picked a door.
    The back bedroom had been Mary’s. Enid Sheard had said before that Graham had been particular about this, insisting that his big sister have the big bedroom for privacy’s sake. The police had also confirmed that Graham had telephoned twice in the twelve months prior to the events of 4 November, complaining of a Peeping Tom at his sister’s window. The police had never been able to substantiate his claims, or had never tried. I felt the heavy dark curtains and wondered if they were new, if Graham had bought them for Mary, to keep out Tom and save her from the eyes he saw.
    Whose were those eyes that moved across his sister’s body? The eyes of a stranger, or the same eyes that now stared back at him in the mirror .
    The curtains and all the other furniture seemed too heavy for the room, but the same was true of Enid Sheard’s next door and my mother’s. There was a single bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with a mirror on top, all of them big and wooden. I set the candle down by the mirror beside two hair brushes, a clothes brush, a comb, and a photograph of the Goldthorpes’ mother.
    Did Graham come into this room while she slept, taking strands of yellow hair from her brush, hair like their mother’s, to treasure and to keep?
    In the top left-hand drawer was some make-up and some skin creams. In the top right-hand drawer I found Mary Gold-thorpe’s underwear. It was silk and had been disturbed by the police. I touched a white pair of knickers, remembering the photographs we’d published of a plain but not unattractive woman. She had been forty when she died and neither the police or myself had turned up any boyfriends. It was expensive underwear for a woman with no lover. And a waste.
    Graham watched her as she slept, her hair upon the pillow. Quietly he slipped open the top right-hand drawer, burying his hands deep in the silk contents of her most private drawer. Suddenly Mary sat up in bed .
    The bathroom and the toilet were together in the one room and smelt of cold pine. I stood on a pink mat and took a quick piss in Graham Goldthorpe’s toilet, still thinking of his sister. The sound of the flush filled the bungalow.
    “ Graham? What are you doing?” she whispered .
    Graham’s bedroom was next to the bathroom at the front of the house, small and filled with more heavy inherited furniture. On the wall above the head of his single bed were three framed pictures. I rested a knee on Graham’s bed and brought the candle up close to three more etchings of birds, similar to the one in the hall. Graham’s pyjamas were still under his pillow.
    Graham froze, his pyjamas stuck to his body with sweat .
    Beside the bed were stacks of magazines and files. I put the candle down on a bedside table and picked up a bunch of magazines. They were all transport magazines, about either trains or buses. I left