1991 twilight, p.1
(1991) Twilight, page 1
Critical acclaim for Peter James
‘A well-paced thriller that delivers maximum emotional torture’
Chicago Tribune
‘Grippingly intriguing from start to finish’
James Herbert
‘Too many horror stories go over the top into fantasy land, but Dreamer is set in the recognisable world … I guarantee you more than a frisson of fear’
Daily Express
‘A thought-provoking menacer that’s completely technological and genuinely frightening about the power of future communications’
Time Out
‘This compulsive story is a tale of the search for immortality … I cannot remember when I last read a novel I enjoyed so much’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Gripping … plotting is ingenious … in its evocation of how a glossy cocoon of worldly success can be unravelled by one bad decision it reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities’
The Times
‘Peter James, Britain’s closest equivalent to Stephen King’
Sunday Times
‘The suspense holds on every page, right to the end …’
She
By Peter James
Dead Letter Drop
Atom Bomb Angel
Billionaire
Possession
Dreamer
Sweet Heart
Twilight
Prophecy
Alchemist
Host
The Truth
Denial
Faith
Dead Simple
CHILDREN’S NOVEL
Getting Wired!
Peter James was educated at Charterhouse and then at film school. He lived in North America for a number of years, working as a screen writer and film producer (his projects included the award-winning Dead of Night) before returning to England. His previous novels, including the number-one bestseller Possession, have been translated into twenty-six languages. All his novels reflect his deep interest in medicine, science and the paranormal. He has recently produced several films, including the BAFTA-nominated The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, starring Robert De Niro, Kathy Bates and Harvey Keitel. He also co-created the hit Channel 4 series Bedsitcom, which was nominated for a Rose d’Or. Peter James lives near Brighton in Sussex. Visit his website at www.peterjames.com.
TWILIGHT
Peter James
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Victor Gollancz
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © The Peter James Partnership 1991
The moral right of Peter James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 409 13347 6
This ebook produced by Jouve, France
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Praise
By Peter James
About the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
To Joe and Lilly
Chapter One
Tuesday, 16 October 1990
The first hint came less than an hour after the funeral cortège left the small cemetery behind the church. Three muffled thuds from the partially filled-in grave. It was the verger who heard them, although one of the pall-bearers would admit later that he thought something had moved inside the coffin, but had not wanted to make a fool of himself by saying so.
The verger was a widower, sixty-seven years old, a diligent and not impressionable man who carried his private grief in the slack of his face and sometimes envied the dead in their graves. On that particular afternoon he came through the rear gate, as he always did, and hurried down the brick path through the cemetery, anxious to prepare the church for the following morning’s communion service and get home before the rain started.
He cast his eyes down respectfully as he passed the fresh grave, and the wreaths and sprays of flowers laid around it, and felt the prick of discomfort new graves always gave him, bringing back the pain of his wife’s funeral seven years before. Since her death other people’s tragedies seldom touched him. This one did, for some reason; perhaps because he had known the girl all her life; perhaps because of her age; or perhaps simply because she had been so pretty and so lively it was impossible to accept that she was dead.
He stopped suddenly, startled by a sound that seemed at first to have come from the ground, and listened, looking around, wondering if he had imagined it. A branch of a yew tree rattled noisily against the church wall. Above him the marble sky, darker than the tombstones, darkened further.
The wind, he thought, just the wind, and hurried on, his head bowed. As he reached the entrance to the porch he heard it again.
The first spots of rain were falling, but he ignored them and listened carefully, trying to hear above the sound of his own wheezing. He walked slowly back through the lines of headstones of the tiny cemetery, approaching the new grave warily, the way he might have approached the edge of a cliff, and stopped at a safe distance, staring at the dark rectangle and the neat mound of raw, chalky earth beside it that the gravedigger would finish shovelling in tomorrow.
Sally Mackenzie. Or Mrs Sally Donaldson as she had become. Twenty-three years old. Sparkling with life, always had time for everyone. Christened here; had been a Brownie, a Girl Guide, then had won a place at university where she met her husband, Kevin, a sharp, confident young man, in insurance, someone said. They had been married here barely a year ago and he could remember their wedding day, the husband beaming with the pride of a man who had won the greatest prize on earth. Yesterday that young man’s face had been twisted into numb shock, everything that was good and happy wrung out of it by a tourniquet of grief.
It was the way it had happened, people said. Sudden, so sudden. That made it even worse, if that was possible, they murmured. The verger was not sure whether sudden death was any worse than long lingering death; whether it was any better for the person who was dying or the people left behind. Merciful release they had said when his wife died. For her, not for him.
A red sweet wrapper scudded along the path in front of him. He listened, motionless, ignoring the rain. The wind blew again; the cellophane around a spray of flowers rustled, and he was aware of the intensity of their colours: whites, reds, pinks, vividly alive against the raw earth and the dry grass and the autumnal shades of the beech hedge that bounded the cemetery. A tag fluttered and he bent to read it. ‘To Sals, with all our love.’ Another, on a huge bouquet of crimson roses, flipped itself over, tugging capriciously on its leash of green string. ‘To Sals, for ever. Kevin.’
A lone pigeon raced above him and the branch of the yew rattled again on the church wall. The patter of rain increased. Tomorrow the verger would collect the flowers and take them to the hospice in Brighton at the suggestion of the girl’s husband. He watched the dark rectangle; only a thin layer of soil covered the coffin so far. The earth was still hard and crumbly after the long dry summer, and a few chunks had fallen away from the sides of the grave. Bits of chalk rattling on to the coffin roof, that was all it had been.
He turned and hurried into the shelter of the porch, past the notice board with its thumb-tacked signs, JUMBLE SALE, COFFEE MORNING, CHURCH ROOF FUND, turned the iron ring of the oak door and went inside the small church, closing it with an echoing clunk behind him. It was silent in here, and still. His eyes glanced routinely at the stone font and the neat stacks of hymn books and the faded frescoes on the wall. Christ stared mournfully down from the stained glass above the altar. Tablets on the wall near the door contained a roll of the local war dead. A wooden rack beneath it held badly printed booklet histories of the church and parish; thirty pence each. There was a box for the money.
He walked down the aisle to the pulpit and pulled the yellowing bakelite numbers of the hymns sung at the funeral off the indicator on the wall – ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘Jerusalem’. As he tidied away the kneelers, prayer books and service sheets left by the mourners, and listlessly mouthed ‘And did those feet in ancient time,’ he did not hear the frantic burst of muffled thuds that again came from the grave of the girl they had buried that afternoon.
Chapter Two
Tuesday, 9 May 1967
Harvey Swire sat pensively on the bench in the locker room that smelled of stale sweat, latrines and boot polish, a short eighteen-year-old, with straight brown hair and small grey eyes set deep in his pudgy face. He was overweight and unfit, and sport bored him. He had a small, slightly high-pitched voice that had earned him the nickname Piggy which he had only succeeded in shedding in recent years.
He was always distant, aloof, wrapped in his own thoughts, in his own world inside his head. His mother had been his only close friend in life. She had nurtured him through his childhood sickliness, protected him from his father’s scorn, believed in him and loved him and understood him. She had died five months ago, aged thirty-eight, from a heart attack.
She had been beautiful and he had been proud of her, had loved it when she came to school to collect him and he could see the heads of other boys and their parents turn. It was different when his father came. They had never got on with each other, and since his mother’s death their relationship had deteriorated further.
One day he would understand that his father resented him because although he had not inherited her beauty, there was so much of his mother’s looks in his face. And because he had lived and she had died. There were a lot of things Harvey Swire would one day understand.
He began to tie the laces on his cricket boots, oblivious to the clatter of studs on the stone floor and the banter of conversation going on around him, thinking about the letter that had arrived that morning and was in his jacket hanging on the hook above him. Angie. He hadn’t expected to hear from her again, after what had happened. Part of him felt disgusted by what he had done. Embarrassed. He could still see clearly the expression on her face, feel her flinching, and his face reddened. He stared at the ground, at his boots. Part of him thought, ‘You deserved it, you bitch.’
He wasn’t sure why she angered him so much. She’d been good when his mother had died, comforting, caring, genuinely upset. She had even managed to make his father smile back at the house, after it was over. But she had not let him go any further than snogging and made even that seem as if she was doing him a favour. Until ten days ago; the last night of his Easter holiday, before returning to boarding school, when he’d forced her to touch him, had grabbed her hand and pushed it down inside his trousers and held it there whilst she struggled, and she’d refused to speak all the way home.
And now, unexpectedly, the letter had arrived; like the ones she always wrote, on small, thick sheets of paper tightly folded and smelling of her perfume, chatty and affectionate in her large looped handwriting, in fountain pen with aquamarine ink.
‘Love you lots, Angie.’ A dozen kisses.
She hadn’t even mentioned it.
He double-knotted each lace. There was the hiss of an aerosol and he smelled a sickly sweet whiff of Brut. Dacre was standing above him, pursing his face in the mirror, checking for spots; his study-mate shook his blond hair off his forehead, sprayed his other armpit, gave a quick squirt inside his jock strap, then tugged on his cricket shirt. Dacre had a thing about smell at the moment. He seemed convinced that the way to score was to smell right.
Rob Reckett came into the room, chewing gum, and farted loudly.
‘God, Reckett, you’re revolting,’ Dacre said.
Reckett responded by pushing his bum further out behind his jacket and farting again.
‘You’re a yob, Reckett,’ Worral said.
‘He’s not a yob, he’s a slob,’ Walls Minor corrected him.
Reckett blew a bubble which popped with a sharp crack and tugged off his tie. A hulking, arrogant boy with a fringe of brown hair that covered his forehead, Reckett claimed he was banging the assistant house cook, a hugely fat girl who, it was rumoured, was willing to ‘do it’ for the asking. ‘Wild for it,’ he’d announced. ‘Put it everywhere; even in her ear. Older women are the best. They’re crazy for it.’
Harvey Swire found Reckett’s description of ‘putting it in her ear’ oddly arousing and he wasn’t sure why. He’d thought about making advances to the girl himself, but she was too fat, too greasy. Her skin reminded him of an oven-ready turkey. He did not want it to be like that, not the first time, not any time. He tried to imagine Angie grabbing him and putting it in her ear. Some chance.
Her letter bothered him, suddenly. His relief at receiving it was turning to anger. Part of him wanted her to be furious with him. To be disgusted. He almost felt cheated that she wasn’t.
‘Jesus, you’re a poof, Dacre,’ Tom Hanson said.
‘Screw off, will you, Hanson? At least I don’t go around smelling like an arsehole.’
‘No, just looking like one,’ Hanson said, opening his locker and laughing with glee at his own wit.
‘Poof in boots!’ Jones Minor said, pulling on his trousers, his brow furrowing as he grinned, making the spots on his forehead break through their thin layer of Clearasyl.
‘If you think I’m a queer what about that new pop group with the high voices? What are they called? You know, Harvey. You nearly puked over their photograph yesterday.’
‘The Chimpanzees,’ Harvey Swire said.
‘Monkees, you wanker,’ Horstead said. ‘God, you’re really thick, Swire, you don’t know anything.’
Harvey tossed his hair off his face and finished the second knot.
‘You’re never going to get to medical school. You have to be intelligent to be a doctor.’
In eight weeks’ time he would be sitting his A-level exams, physics, chemistry and biology for a place at Queen’s Hospital, his father’s old medical school; where his father had graduated top in his year in gynaecology with the Queen’s medal of merit that hung on the wall of his Harley Street clinic. Quentin Swire, a strong, dapper man, who had made a fortune from providing an abortion service for overseas visitors, and had survived a major exposition by the News of the World whom he had successfully sued.
His father had also been to Wesley, where Harvey was now. Quentin Swire had been good at everything here; his name looked down from the honours boards in the halls and corridors. Cricket. Football. Hockey. Scholarships to university.
‘There’s a new Beatles LP coming out,’ someone said.
A voice in mock falsetto screeched, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’
‘I think the Beatles are really infra-dig,’ Worral said.
‘Bugger off, Worral, they’re groovy.’
‘Pink Floyd are a million times groovier.’
‘I’m going to get tickets for Bob Dylan when he’s over in August. You coming, Harvey?’
‘Dylan’s cool,’ Dacre said.
Harvey watched Reckett pull off his trousers and stained underpants in one go. Reckett had an enormous circumcised cock; he wondered suddenly what happened to people’s penises when they died. Someone had told him that hanged men died with an erection. Reckett swirled his cock around several times like a bandolero before stuffing it inside his jock strap.
