Chapter Eight
There was nothing to prepare me for the bitter cold of Scotland in February. I know it’s colder the further north you get, but Scotland is part of the U.K right? How bad could it be? I was totally unprepared for our first investigative excursion. The moment I got off the train I felt everything me tense up, the icy wind hit my bare hands and face with such an unrelenting force.
I was then terrified about what we were doing, if I couldn’t even handle the weather, how was I going to handle anything else? I was so unready for any of this, and that fact staggered me momentarily.
I wasn’t in the best of moods anyway when I we arrived in Glasgow. I was stretched and weary from lack of sleep, the constant buzz of the train doors opening was beating against my temples, playing on a loop. There were patches of brown sludge and solid, frozen snow littering the streets and the sky was ash grey. It seemed a dreary and industrial place to me, like any other ready made town centre. A group of teenagers in tight jeans were playing on skateboards, I wondered for a fleeting moment if they had been Tony Calister’s friends.
Lisa had been silent and thoughtful for hours, she sat on the train with her arms folded, occasionally sleeping, often glancing at the clock. I’ve never been very good at making small talk, especially on this kind of trip, so we had barely spoken.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked as my teeth clattered. I hoped her answer involved a warm hotel room.
Lisa was clutching an A to Z of the city, ‘we’re visiting Tony’s school,’ she said. She had probably been planning this for the entire journey. ‘I’ve got his locker number,’ she said with her eyes glinting.
I didn’t even ask how she had gotten his locker number, in all honesty, the thought of sneaking around a deserted building excited me too much. These were the kinds of things I used to daydream about.
‘Won’t the police have already searched his locker and taken everything?’ I asked.
Lisa smiled slyly, ‘everything they can take, she said mysteriously. When I stared blankly at her she rolled her eyes. ‘You remember Anita Sands?’
Then it made sense. Anita Sands had been a girl at our school, she had leukaemia. At St John’s there was a plague on the wall for her and her achievements in Mathematics. We had lit a candle and had a two minutes silence in assembly. Angelica’s locker was right next to Anita’s, she said how sad it made her feel every day just to look at it, and the stickers and graffiti that decorated it.
Those Backstreet Boys stickers and the various names scribbled out in love hearts were evidence of a young girl’s life, it was the only vandalism in the school that the caretaker would never scrub away. It’s probably still there now.
‘It should be revealing,’ Lisa said, ‘we already know that he was an attention seeker, this is his advertisement to the rest of the school.’
She was right, of course, and because she was so often right, I later found myself standing next to the intimidating gates of Haverley College, Secondary School. It was hidden from the main road, and this secluded location gave me the shivers. It was Saturday and the stillness of the tennis courts and running track was the same stillness you experience in a historical sight or a graveyard.
School has changed a lot since I was there, all I can remember is a beaten wooden fence. At Haverley College there was a gate around nine feet tall, solid glittering steep bars topped with twisted metal spikes. Luckily the CCTV system was broken, but there still remained the problem of getting inside.
Lisa jammed her foot in-between two of the bars, it was tight enough to hold but she could wriggle it out. I watched her launch herself up this way, wedging her feet a little higher and supporting herself on her hands. She avoided the metal spikes by going higher than she needed to until she was just balanced dizzyingly on her toes, then she gracefully side-stepped the spikes and climbed down the other side.
I stared at her with my mouth open. ‘Army cadets,’ she shrugged, ‘your turn.’
I stared up at the gate, it seemed to be laughing at me in its cold metal voice. I had no choice other than Lisa’s method, although my feet were significantly wider than hers, and I required a lot more wiggling. I was almost completely stuck more than once. The edges of the bars began to feel sharp, and the higher up I got, the more I had to hold on. There were thin indents all over my hands.
This was the classic spy work I had dreamt of, I should’ve felt like James Bond but I just felt slow and awkward, and increasingly sweaty. This meant I kept slipping down, my heart leaping to my chest every time. The top of the gate was a worry for me, having the anatomical problems which Lisa didn’t. But somehow I managed to squeeze past, I could survive with the tiny rip in my jeans.
Lisa looked half asleep when I touched down on the floor, I wondered how long it had taken, it felt like I had been climbing for years. I was happy to see that there was a rip in her jacket, so she wasn’t perfect after all.
We found a door around the back of the school, a door that was half buried in climbing plants, lost in the dark grey stone. It would be easy to break into as the wood was cracked and peeling at the key hole was large and rusted. I got another thrill of excitement when I wiggled one of Lisa’s hair pins in the key hole and the door creaked open, I used to practise that on the doors in my old family house.
We had entered a woodwork room, it smelt of sawdust, a scattering of which seemed to cover all the heavy, dangerous machines which were glaring menacingly at us. The dated, peeling grey lino echoed our every step ten fold, it was cold and eerie inside the building, every glimmer off the displays of silver paper seemed to be someone moving silently behind us.
Classrooms with bright numbers above the doors lined the corridor and in the large hall wooden benches were pushed to the side before a large stage, painted sets scattered across it. The cafeteria still smelt of Friday’s lunch. It was next to the cafeteria that the lockers were located, they were spread across both walls. Lisa pointed to number 137 with a triumphant smile.
It was covered in Graffiti, and I might have even guessed whose locker it was even if Lisa hadn’t known. There were gothic crosses scribbled all over it, and inside were lines of dark poetry and bleeding love hearts. There were thick dents made with keys, names scratched into the grey paint. There was one design repeated inside and out in permanent marker, at least ten times. It was a skull, a basic design, but on the skull’s forehead was written the initial M.
Lisa gave a little gasp as she pointed right into the far corner of the locker. In swirling Victorian print were the words ‘In death we love.’
*
‘So it’s all a coincidence? The words are a song lyric.’
We were sitting in a greasy spoon café, we were barely touching our coffees and the waitress hovered over us, her eyes narrowed on the disregarded menu at our table.
Lisa picked up her mug then set it down again, she looked at me with contempt. ‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ she said, ‘it’s a lyric for a hundred songs, a hundred amateur poets have probably used it.’
‘So it is a coincidence,’ I said, ‘he copied it out of a poetry book and thought it would make a cool tattoo.’
Lisa stared off into the distance, the way she did when she didn’t want me to know her thoughts. I glanced at the newsletter on the table while her eyes glazed over. There was a piece about a young man, twenty-two, who had recently died from a heroin overdose. I was just reading something about a rehab centre in France when Lisa snapped out of her trance.
‘But where’s the connection?’ Lisa asked wearily, ‘Angelica never mentioned those words, ever.’
‘There really is no other connection to the murders though,’ I said.
‘Except the blood loss,’ Lisa reminded me. She was right, but at the moment it felt as if we had nothing else to go on, we sat in strained silence.
‘There are other things I need to know too,’ she admitted, ‘about Heimlaug Gunderson as well. About their behaviour before they died.’
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked, taking a sip of my cold coffee, just as I saw the waitress about to approach us.
‘If Tony learnt those words from his killer, and not from a song line, then there should be evidence of someone he knew, somewhere…’ she trailed off. ‘Do you know why I picked this weekend to come here?’ She asked seriously.
‘No, enlighten me.’
She glanced at her watch, ‘It’s Tony Calister’s funeral today.’
I stared at her, this didn’t have much significance as far as I could tell, unless she investigating all this death had driven her to such macabre behaviour. Then something clicked slowly in my mind. I stood up so quickly my chair scraped with a painful sound on the floor, several people turned towards me.
‘No,’ I whispered, gaining command of my voice. ‘It’s immoral, no.’
Lisa snorted at my choice of words, she remained calmly sat in her chair. ‘When are we ever going to get an opportunity like this again?’
‘I’m not gate-crashing a funeral,’ I hissed under my breath.
Lisa jolted, ‘what are you talking about?’ She looked as shocked as I imagine I did, ‘I was talking about taking a look in his house, because we know all his family are going to be away for at least a few hours.’
I sat back down at the table, everyone looked away from me and got on with their breakfast. ‘It’s still immoral though.’
‘You remember being a teenager,’ she shrugged, ‘they’re better at hiding things than the C.I.A. It might be stuff like Porn, his supply of weed, but you never know, we could find something useful.’
I hesitated, this wasn’t like looking at police files, or reading graffiti, this was breaking into a dead boy’s life, in his private sanctum. It was wrong on every level, but I was hooked on the pull of new evidence, something no one had discovered. Lisa smiled wide, and for a moment she looked just like her sister, and I couldn’t even pretend to fight it.
It was instantly clear which room was Tony’s. There was a large poster of some rock star hanging over the door, he had long black hair covering his face and tattoos down his arms. As a teenager it would’ve been two fingers up to the clean beige interior of the house, now it was an unchanging shrine to a dead son.
There were elegant cross designs and pentagrams carved into the white paint of the door, some etched in with blank marker, they cast a dark cloud over my mind and heart, this was his life, the kind of boy he was. I looked out over the neat house, homemade curtains and pot puri in glass bowls.
The walls of Tony’s room were painted black, it gave the already tiny space the feeling of a dungeon. The walls were covered with more pictures of brooding rock stars, a hundred pairs of eyes watching Lisa and me with distaste. More symbols and crosses were carved into the bedposts and a few scraped out of the black paint.
Lisa was already digging around in drawers and pulling shoeboxes from under the bed. ‘Help me,’ she motioned.
We pulled out school records, doctors certificates, photo albums filled with drunken smiles. Most of the shoeboxes under his bed contained C.Ds, music that he was now embarrassed to own, some childhood things, Dusty Action Men and broken sports car models.
I was picking through photo albums when I discovered an older shoe box, squat and broken from all the weight on top of it. My stomach contracted in excitement when I looked inside. There were piles and piles of handwritten papers, song lyrics painstakingly copied in gothic designs, a few famous poems. Under all this there was a simple dog-eared notebook, dirty and partially scribbled over in black marker.
‘Jackpot,’ I whispered, scared by how fast my heart was beating.
Lisa dropped the pile of clothes she was rummaging through and grabbed the notebook out of my hands. She gasped, it was a diary, she handed it back to me tenderly, like it was buried treasure. She was not even trying to hide her grin.
‘The pain is like a knife twisting through me, tearing though blood and bone,’ I read, I looked up at Lisa, ‘wow, this kid was really messed up.’
Lisa shrugged, ‘weren’t you angry as a teenager?’ She asked. I couldn’t admit that if I was angry as a teenager it was only because of her sister.
There were pages and pages of the same dark words, until about halfway through the diary, where the words became numbers. The numbers were pushed tightly together to indicate double figures in some places, with large gaps between them. This went on for at least twenty pages, right through the rest of the notebook.
I had to bite my lip to stop from laughing, I tossed the notebook into Lisa’s hands. She rolled her eyes and smiled slyly, ‘teenagers are so predictable,’ she said.
She had already started to decode the message, ‘M kissed me today,’ she read, ‘it felt like waking up.’
I remembered the locker, the skull and the letter M, repeated so many times.
Lisa was unimpressed, ‘I figured that was the Gothic version of a love heart,’ she said. ‘This code is too obvious, even for a teenager, it looks like-’
‘He wanted someone to read it,’ I finished for her.
‘Wait,’ she said, and she pointed to a series of numbers that were repeated over and over, at least five times, just on the first page.
9 14 4 5 20 8 23 5 12 15 22 5
‘I think I can guess,’ I whispered, looking in her eyes. We had found another piece of the puzzle, another clue, the feeling was so exhilarating it was like being drunk.
A door in the background slammed shut and we both jumped. I stared at Lisa, panic stricken for a moment. I heard a woman screaming and wailing desperately, a man’s voice was trying to calm her, all I could make out were harsh screeching tones and heavy grunts.
Lisa ran to the window, she motioned to me. The funeral party was back, but there was only one car, and I only heard those two voices. Downstairs had been plates of sandwiches, wrapped in plastic, glasses set out on the worktop, everything ready for a party.
I didn’t have time to wonder, I saw what Lisa was really pointing at, there was a jutting garage right under Tony’s window, we could easily jump from there to the ground, this jolted me further, I thought about the interview room and the consequences if we were to be found.
The wailing was getting worse, doors were crashing all over the house, heavy footsteps storming through rooms. I heard glass breaking. Even though we were directly above it, the screaming words were incoherent, muffled by heavy tears and what sounded like the plates of sandwiches being thrown across the floor.
And then one clear shout broke through the chaos. ‘HIS BODY!’ the heavy Glaswegian accent cried out like nails on rust, ‘WHERE IS TONY’S BODY!’
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