The waiting room, p.1
The Waiting Room, page 1
CONTENTS
The Waiting Room
Copyright
Dedication
Strange Meeting
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
About the Author
By F. G. Cottam
THE
WAITING ROOM
F. G. Cottam
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
The right of F. G. Cottam to be identified as the Author of the 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 written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 848 94614 9
Book ISBN 978 1 444 70421 1
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK Company
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Strange Meeting
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’
‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with the swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .’
Wilfred Owen, 1918
Chapter One
Through the wide two-way mirror on the wall of his office, Julian Creed observed his visitor and tried to imagine the impression being imposed by the artefacts surrounding him. The man sat patiently in one of the low-slung leather chairs facing Creed’s hardwood desk. He was dressed in a sober suit and wore a tie. Against the wall to his left, there was a cabinet housing the trophies garnered by a successful media career and he glanced at this with narrowed eyes. Above it, there was a shelf of Creed’s bestselling books and his eyes rose to read the titles on their spines. To the right of where he sat, pride of place on the far wall was occupied by an old news picture Creed had had blown up and enhanced to increase the contrast and detail it showed. He grunted with satisfaction now as his visitor got to his feet to examine closely this framed image. It had been taken almost thirty years earlier on a choppy sea in the South Atlantic by a foolhardy Fleet Street veteran of conflict, leaning out of a helicopter and using a telephoto lens. It showed the upturned faces of three young soldiers clad in combat fatigues and webbing and smeared with camouflage cream. They were each carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle and were aboard a rigid inflatable boat.
The picture had been taken during the Falklands War and Creed had been nineteen years old and had passed SAS selection only a tender fortnight earlier. Behind the mirror, he sipped at potent coffee in the paper cup he held. His features looked no different now, he thought, from how they had then. The skin was still taut over strong facial bones. He had allowed himself to gain no weight. Regular exercise had kept the muscles toned. A few grey hairs were the only real difference. He had come through a dozen subsequent conflicts unscathed before leaving the service. And then the real adventure had begun, in his civilian life.
He considered that his visitor would by now be sufficiently intimidated and impressed. Creed had observed his hauteur on a security screen as he stood waiting in the building’s foyer on arrival. He had emerged, tall and oddly familiar and impeccable, from the rear seat of a white Bentley when the big car braked smoothly at the kerb. He would be humbler, fifteen patient minutes on. It was time to enter the room and meet the man and discover what someone so wealthy and private could possibly want with the nation’s most celebrated ghost hunter. Creed tossed his empty cup into a bin in the corridor and strolled towards his office.
The man turned from the picture. It occurred to Creed that he too had aged well. This was not common in his profession. Drugs were not kind to the metabolism. Usually, they grew bloated and dishevelled and their flamboyant clothes sadly anachronistic, though there were austere exceptions to this general rule.
‘Martin Stride.’
He held out a hand and Creed shook it. ‘I know. I bought the first and second albums. I’ve got all the stuff that charted on my iPod.’ He grinned. ‘I’m standing in front of a legend.’
Stride gestured back towards the picture on the wall. ‘That war seems so long ago. At least, it does to me.’
‘It’s ancient history,’ Creed said, ‘and it was fittingly barbaric. The parachute regiment fought with their bayonets fixed. And they used them, too.’ He gestured for Stride to sit. He sat in the opposing armchair. He did not want the imposition of his desk between them. He thought it interesting but not surprising that Stride had deflected mention of his own hugely successful career.
There was a moment’s silence between them. Creed had granted the appointment without his PA having discovered whatever the matter was that Stride had come here to discuss. He had been unwilling to explain it over the phone. He had simply said that it was both important and urgent. Creed had cancelled a scheduled meeting to see him today. It was up to him to open the conversation proper, to reveal whatever it was that was troubling him. But he seemed to be struggling both to overcome a natural reserve and to find language appropriate to what he wanted to say.
‘I am a huge fan of your series.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s required viewing in our household.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘It must be quite something, to possess a psychic gift.’
Creed hoped the small smile he indulged at this compliment a sufficiently modest expression. ‘It can be a curse as well as a blessing, Mr Stride.’
‘Martin, please.’
‘And please call me Julian. Why have you come to see me today?’
Stride got out of his chair. He went across and looked at the Falklands photograph again. In his own chair, Creed shivered. But this was nothing to do with his psychic gift. The photograph was black and white. It had been a cold and monochromatic war. That said, the dead had worn their fatal wounds in colours vivid enough.
Stride spoke, still facing the picture. ‘I’m not delusional,’ he said. ‘Back in the day, we once headlined in front of three-quarters of a million people in Rio de Janeiro. We sold out the Hollywood Bowl for ten consecutive nights. For a couple of years it was as though we owned the world. It’s a strange existence, Julian. It can mark and ruin you. But I neve
Stride paused. Creed remained silent. He judged silence the best means of coaxing his visitor out of his reticence.
‘I have a young family now. My son is eleven and my daughter just eight. I am very happily married. We live on the Kent–Sussex border. Because I value my privacy, I’ve purchased any land I’ve been able to around the house I bought a decade ago. It now stands at more or less the centre of a fairly substantial estate.’
Creed considered. He thought that ‘fairly’ in Stride-speak probably meant ‘very’. ‘I take it this is an old house?’
Stride turned from the photograph and nodded. ‘Parts of it are very old. It was originally built in Norman times as a manor house. There’s a chapel that might be even older. It looks Saxon to me. But the house is not the source of my concern, Julian.’
Creed got up. He went to his desk and pressed a button on his phone. ‘Let me organise some tea or coffee and then let’s sit down properly and talk. Try to relax a little. You came here because you are troubled. I am sure that I can help. Merely talking about it will help.’
‘I’ll just have water, thank you.’
‘Still or sparkling?’
‘Still,’ Stride said. He smiled, but without humour this time. ‘There’s enough sparkle in the tale I have to tell.’
He did not know much about the abandoned railway line. The piece of his estate across which it had run was land he had owned for about ten years. The rails themselves had long been torn up for scrap. The sleepers had been dug out of the earth and taken away. The gravel bedding under them had been overgrown and obliterated by thorns and weeds and wild grass. All that remained amid this verdant eruption was a crumbling island platform and on that, a derelict waiting room.
The waiting room was Edwardian. With its roof of russet tiles and mock Gothic arched windows, it looked incongruous, there in the wilderness of bushes and trees where it now found itself. But its explanation was mundane enough. The line had been closed in the early 1960s as part of the infamous Beeching cuts, when the motorways had started to be built and the car and lorry had started to supersede the railways as the nation’s staple means of transportation of people and of freight. Beeching had seen the future. And the future ran on rubber tyres on ribbons of straight road and was fuelled by petrol engines.
The waiting room was not a listed building. Stride could have had it demolished. But he had not seen the point of that. He had no urgent need to domesticate his land, to press it into profitable service. Its purpose was seclusion. It was there to put him at a remote distance from people he did not know and had no wish to meet. He did not need to farm. He had earned his livelihood and fortune in the days of his celebrity and commercial success. The royalties still rolled generously in. The waiting room did not obstruct ambitions for the ground on which it stood. And when he had it surveyed, the structure itself was sound. It posed no hazard to his children should they choose in the course of their roaming adventures to play in it. Its walls and roof were not just intact, but sturdy. It was a charming oddity. And his children naturally liked it, inventing a purpose and history for it, as children are apt to do. It was sited half a mile from the house, a distance that made it properly exotic in their young minds.
The waiting room lay to the east of the house, to its rear. One evening about a fortnight prior to seeking his meeting with Creed, Stride had been gathering windfalls in the orchard, which was situated a few hundred yards on from the kitchen garden. The orchard was small and ancient and the apples of a unique variety. They were good to the taste, but tart enough for baking too. They ripened in early September. A brisk easterly breeze was persuading them from the trees and Stride had gathered half a large basket full. It was dusk. And he felt the easy contentment of being engaged in a pleasant task. There was the sound of ripe fruit falling to the earth in dull staccato thumps. There was the rustle of the branches and the whisper of the breeze and the harsh cry of a rook. And borne on the wind, there was suddenly the faint, insinuating rumble of a long train pulled by a steam locomotive.
‘It was a sound I recognised from films I’ve seen,’ Stride told Julian Creed. ‘I may have heard it in life as an infant child and carried the audible memory. But I knew unmistakeably what it was I was hearing, just as I knew it was impossible.’
Full darkness was approaching. The sound began to fade. It was not as though the train was receding in distance, though, so much as fading altogether, as though being forgotten, falling away through time. That was fanciful thinking, of course. Stride had generally confined the fanciful inclination of his mind to the creation of melodies and song lyrics. Walking across the ground towards the source of the sound, over ever wilder terrain beyond the old fence that bordered his orchard, he wondered if stalled creativity wasn’t the cause now of this aural hallucination.
The sound had faded completely. There was not silence, because there was never silence in the country early on an autumn night. But so familiar were the sounds on his domain to Stride’s ears that they might have well as been silence. The strangeness had gone. It had left no trace. He stopped. He had almost tripped on the sinuous root of something breaking the surface in the gloom. By starlight, he was close enough to see the black bulk of the waiting room on its island platform, still and silent and serving its forgotten line. He began to debate with himself the point of continuing on. He was more intrigued, truly, than afraid. But the ground under his feet was hostile in the gathering night. So he paused and considered and stared at the motionless shape, blacker than the darkness, ahead of him. And the breeze soughed, easterly, into his face. And he sniffed boiler coal and steam and engine oil burdening the air. This spectral cocktail of odours provoked a shudder in him. Then the air was clean again. He turned back towards his orchard and home, fighting the instinct simply to flee.
He groped amid the orchard trees for his basket of windfalls only because Monica would ask after them, intent on baking pies for their son’s school fête. His instinct was to hurry home and lock the door securely behind him and shut the windows and build the fires and turn on every light. He considered himself a restrained man generally and did most things not before a degree of calculation. What imagination he possessed had been profitably channelled into his music. He was given neither to daydreams nor nightmares. He thought that he was probably too happy and secure for either affliction. But regaining his home, he was sure he had just endured the sounds and scents of something otherworldly. He hefted the apple basket at his kitchen door and mouthed a silent prayer to a God he didn’t believe in that there would be no repetition. If there was, he would be obliged to tell his wife.
Two weeks passed before anything else that could be described as strange occurred in the Stride domain. When it did, it happened in the music room. Autumn was coming reluctantly to the south-east of England. Most days it was still as warm as it had been in the middle of August. It was a Sunday. Eight-year-old Millie Stride had enjoyed a picnic lunch with three of her schoolfriends at a grassy spot by the stream that ran through the estate in the shade of a weeping willow a few hundred metres from the house. Her friends had been ferried aboard their Range Rover back to their various homes by Monica at around five in the afternoon. And Millie had watched a bit of television and then gone to the music room to practise piano.
She had inherited her father’s talent for music. And as is so often the case, she had inherited it in a much more concentrated form than he had ever enjoyed. She was gifted both at performing and composing. He did not know how far she would progress with either. Neither he nor Monica was the sort of parent who would push their child, or worse, put her on show. She would go with it only as far as she wished to. But at the age of eight, she was enjoying piano very much and Stride liked to watch her play, thrilled by her accomplishment, gratified by the obvious pleasure it brought her.
The music room was very grand. It was part of the early eighteenth-century, rococo additions to the house and was large with four narrow, rectangular windows that reached from low sills almost to the high and ornately plastered ceiling. The floor was of polished oak boards and the acoustics of the space superb, if unforgiving. Stride recognised the tune even before opening the door. His daughter was playing a sentimental favourite from the trenches of the First World War. She was playing ‘Roses of Picardy’. He knew that a British Army officer had penned the song in 1916. He knew that the great Irish tenor John McCormack had recorded it after the armistice. He did not know where on earth his daughter could have come across it. She read music. But they did not have this score, he knew, in the house. He did not think it was something she could have become familiar with on the radio. And she was surely too young to be studying such an awful period of history at her tender age at school.
