Troll Read online

  It’s not like it was hard to find out that I’ve got a fear of spiders. I went on about it all the time, it was in my blog, it was on my profile. It was me, part of me, and it always had been. Oh God, I thought, I told him, I told Josh. I told him all about it, only he never existed because he was the troll and Josh never actually existed. And this spider was so big and it was coming towards me and I couldn’t move, my arm was locked to the wall and I was screaming, screaming, I’d never been so scared, and I was crying and screaming and the spider was just there, there in front of me, a couple of metres away. Just looking. It could get to me in seconds, two seconds, that’s all it would take. My wrist was bleeding and blood was running down my arm from where I’d cut through my skin with the plastic cuff, but I couldn’t feel any pain.

  The spider didn’t move and I remembered, I’d been panicking so much I forgot, I remembered what the troll said. About the combination. If I could work it out, I could get away. What had he said? Do you believe in fortune? The lock had six dials, which meant it needed six numbers. He’d said work it out. Like it was something I should know, something I’d got the clues for. And then the spider, that huge spider, scuttled towards me and I screamed and it ran close to me, it was so quick, and it climbed up the wall, climbed up the bricks, and it was above me, next to me and above me, just there, just looking down at me, and I didn’t dare move but I needed to try combinations and I was just crying, crying like a child, crying and crying and right then, there, that was the first time ever in my whole life I think I had really, truly, honestly wished that I was dead.

  forty-nine

  ST BASIL’S WAS A BIG VICTORIAN BUILDING THAT HAD BEEN unsympathetically added to with red-brick extensions, looking like parasites clinging to their host, ugly and unwelcome. It was at the end of an uneven drive that had probably once been smooth but had long since lost the battle against the weeds, the tarmac cracked and crumbling. The drive was lined with trees, and Fortune could imagine them in summer growing over the lane, creating a leafy tunnel. But right now they just looked skeletal and grasping, uncut branches brushing the top of Lee’s mother’s car, reaching for the windows.

  The orphanage was in the heart of Essex, a couple of miles outside a Hollywood producer’s wet dream of an idyllic English village. It even had a duck pond in the centre, with actual, real-life ducks gloomily swimming in it. At the bottom of the drive Fortune had passed a sign that looked like it had been there a long time, telling him that St Basil’s was for sale via Seymour Estates, call this number. Beneath that sign was another that read Private Property, but it didn’t say to keep out, and Fortune wouldn’t have done so in any case. He passed the ruins of a red-brick building, the roof sagging, the chimney broken. Halfway up the drive, he emptied the car’s ashtray out of the window, leaving a cloud of ash in the air behind him.

  He exited the tunnel of trees and drove up through overgrown green grounds to the grand facade of St Basil’s. Up close he could only think of school, parents dropping off tearful kids for another term of miserable boarding. Only the kids here hadn’t had parents. Well, he corrected himself. One of them had.

  He had bought a heavy-duty torch at a hardware store, something that could equally light things up and knock people down. He also had a pair of bolt-cutters and a sledgehammer, which he hoped would get him through most obstacles, the first of which was a chain securing the handles of the double doors leading into the orphanage. He cut it, the crack of the metal snapping loud in the empty landscape. There were no other cars, no signs of life, not even birds, as if the entire estate had been quarantined and abandoned, its secrets too grim for the real world to accept. Fortune wasn’t a superstitious man, but still, he wasn’t relishing looking inside.

  The doors were locked as well as chained, so he swung at the lock with the sledgehammer and they opened reluctantly, stiff with age and lack of use. He half expected a storm of bats to fly out, a cadaverous seven-foot butler not far behind, silver platter in hand. It was dark inside, the only dim light coming in through too-small diamond-paned windows. The entrance hall was paved with huge stone flagstones and was empty except for a dust-covered piano and, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, a stripped-down moped. Fortune recognized it, a Honda Cub 90. He called out, ‘Hello,’ and waited as his voice echoed up the staircase in the centre of the hall, down corridors, into rooms. Nothing. Nobody came out, there was no distant maniacal laughter or organ music. Still, he couldn’t help but think that if any place was likely to be haunted, it was here. The walls felt as if they were holding their breath, deciding what to do, how to deal with this undesirable interloper. If the troll was here, he didn’t want to be found.

  He searched the downstairs rooms, which were large and mostly empty and looked like they might have been classrooms, one room with a desk, another with a stack of chairs in one corner. Everything was covered in dust, and it was cold, very cold. He found a corridor that led past toilets to a kitchen, where two vast old butler’s sinks were set into a heavy oak counter, a great Aga squatting sullenly opposite, a massive and heavily scored oak table between them. There was no evidence that anybody had been there recently.

  Fortune walked back to the entrance hall and climbed the stairs to the first floor, walking down corridors lined with doors, these rooms full of bunk beds that, stripped of blankets and in this light and cold, made Fortune think of the Gulag. He probed with his torch into the dark corners, half expecting to discover a pale face, covering its eyes in terror. Further along there were bathrooms, showers on one side, rows of toilets without barriers opposite, so that the boys would have had to empty their bowels while their peers watched and washed. Fortune didn’t know why, but it was this detail, more than anything else he had so far seen, that disturbed him the most. He thought of the restrooms in his office in Dubai, their hush and discretion and comfort. Sometimes the differences between one human’s condition and another’s seemed so extreme, the gulf between them so wide, that they might as well be different species. Yet his son had sat on these toilets, had suffered these indignities. Probably at the same time as Fortune had been enjoying the most generous comforts the Western world could provide. The thought seemed so enormous that he couldn’t quite comprehend it, didn’t have the emotions to fully appreciate or process it. How many tears had been shed in this place? A shower, a river, a sea of them. A grief beyond imagining.

  He found nothing on the first floor, so he climbed to the top floor, his chest beginning to feel tight, not finding enough air to satisfy his heart or lungs. He started coughing and had to sit on the stairs until the fit passed. The place was full of dust. It was probably that, the reason his coughing was getting worse. It must be that.

  Walking along the murky corridor, he noticed for the first time that the dust was so thick on the floor that his shoes left marks, like they would in a sprinkling of snow. There was another set of marks next to his. Somebody else had been here, recently. The troll. He turned off his torch, holding it like a club, and called out again, ‘Hello?’ Again there was no answer. He followed the marks, slowly, edging along as if he was approaching the edge of a crumbling cliff. They led to a door at the end of the corridor, a wooden door, panelled like all the others. It was closed. He called out again, through the door, and waited. Still no answer. He knocked on the door with the torch, a loud sound in the silent corridor, then looked behind him fearfully, fighting a feeling that some ogre was creeping down the corridor, stealing up on him. But there was nothing there.

  He tried the handle, round, brass, and it turned. He pushed the door open wide, still standing outside in the corridor. The room was dark and he couldn’t make out what was inside, but there was something, something hanging and twisting in the disturbed air from the opening door, deeper in the room. Not one thing, many things, indistinct and faintly moving. He took a step back, aware that his heart was beating loudly, pushing hard and painfully against his chest. He turned the torch on and shone it into the room, playing its beam all ar
ound.

  His daughter was hanging, head lowered, arms dangling by her sides. She was pale, very pale, and there were so many of her, ten, fifteen Sophies, all turning and twisting forlornly in the dark room, suspended from the ceiling on rope. The figures were full length, and black and white. Fortune walked into the room, among the hanging effigies, as if he was walking between lines of forgotten washing. All the figures were the same, her form neatly cut out from life-size photographs. She looked as if she was sleeping. Fortune gazed at her, at his daughter, at how serene and beautiful she was, this young woman he barely knew. He felt a deep rage, an impotent fury that someone could do this, to him, to her, play with them so maliciously, be so precisely cruel.

  He pulled every figure down, laying the stiff paper forms on the floor. He did not think his daughter was dead. If she was, then what was the purpose of this? But he did think it was a message, about what was going to happen to her. Revenge, for the death of the troll’s mother. For her suicide, and all that had happened to him after. He understood. He got it. He spoke the words into the empty room. ‘All right. All right, okay. I get it.’

  He walked back downstairs, down to the hall, picked up the sledgehammer and bolt-cutters and stepped out of the main door, into the light. He walked back to his car and returned the tools to the boot. There was a bench underneath one of the building’s front windows, and Fortune sat on it and lit a cigarette. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke into the cold air, watching it slowly disperse, not a breath of wind. The troll wasn’t here. Something was, some malicious vestige of what had happened, unquiet remnants of the misery and pain and fear that had occupied this place. But no troll. He had two days left to find him and his daughter, and he was out of ideas.

  A distant sound disturbed the quiet, a car engine, getting closer and closer, which meant that it must be on the drive, must be coming towards him. He stood up and dropped his cigarette as a four-by-four appeared, a white one. It stopped face-on to him, ten metres away, and he could see a man behind the wheel, wearing a cap, his face hidden. The man cut the engine but stayed in the car, watching Fortune, face dark under his cap. At last he opened his door and climbed down.

  ‘Help you?’ he said.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Fortune.

  ‘No,’ said the man, walking towards Fortune. He was big, the man, in his twenties, wearing some kind of uniform, rent-a-cop style, blue shirt, combat trousers, boots. He stopped, four feet away. ‘No, you don’t ask the questions. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Says Private Property,’ said the man, lifting his chin and nodding behind him. ‘Didn’t see the sign?’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘Ignored it.’

  ‘I suppose I must have done.’

  ‘So, you shouldn’t be here.’ The man looked around. ‘You here alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Got a name?’

  Fortune nodded. ‘Most people do.’

  The man smiled, not amused. His face was pocked with acne scarring and Fortune suspected that he had been bullied at school, taken his frustration out in the gym. Going by the size of his arms, there’d been a lot of frustration to vent. ‘Want to tell me it?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  The man sighed. ‘I could arrest you.’

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ said Fortune, evenly. ‘We both know you don’t have that kind of authority.’

  The man looked past Fortune’s shoulder. ‘Did you cut those chains?’

  ‘No.’

  The man smiled again. ‘I’m going to call the police.’

  ‘I’m leaving anyway.’

  ‘Criminal damage,’ said the man. ‘Trespass.’

  Fortune didn’t have time for this. ‘How did you know I was here?’ he said.

  ‘Motion camera,’ said the man. ‘Your car tripped it, got a nice clear shot of you parked up.’ He said it proudly, as if he had invented the technology himself, something that, judging by his vacant smile, Fortune doubted. But he sensed an opportunity.

  ‘Clever,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see it.’

  ‘Weren’t meant to,’ the man said, triumphant in his camera’s hidden cunning.

  ‘Is this place still for sale?’

  ‘Still,’ said the man.

  ‘How long’s it been on the market?’

  ‘Years,’ said the man.

  ‘A place like this?’ said Fortune. ‘Not been snapped up by some footballer?’

  The man smiled again, the kind of look people wear when, for once, they are in possession of knowledge somebody else doesn’t have. ‘You don’t know about it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘This place.’

  ‘No.’

  The man nodded, paused, a long pause. Fortune willed himself to wait out his absurd portentousness. ‘Bad things happened here,’ he allowed, eventually.

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Used to be an orphanage. The boys, they …’ He paused again, this time to consider his phrasing. ‘They did things to them.’

  ‘Right,’ said Fortune, patiently, and said again, ‘What kind of things?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Beatings, torture. Some people say, you know …’

  ‘No.’

  The man shrugged again, shifted his weight uncomfortably. ‘Sex things.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fortune, nodding. ‘God,’ he added, fairly unconvincingly.

  ‘I know,’ said the man. ‘So people don’t want to buy it. Say it’s haunted.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said the man. ‘Tell you what, though, wouldn’t catch me in there.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind admitting. And I’m no coward,’ he added, quickly.

  ‘Won’t catch me in there either,’ said Fortune. ‘That kind of history’s bad for business.’

  ‘What kind of business?’ said the man.

  ‘I scout properties. For clients. I have a client, a hedge fund manager, who wants a big place around here. I thought of this, but now you’ve told me that …’

  ‘So you haven’t been in?’

  ‘No. And I’m not going to now, either. Not worth my while, a place like this.’

  The man nodded, considered. ‘Still going to need your name,’ he said.

  ‘Harry,’ said Fortune. ‘Harry Marsh. But,’ he added quickly, to head off any demands for proof, ‘I’d rather you kept this quiet. My job’s to be discreet. You understand? If people know who I am, what I do, the asking price …’ He pointed up at the sky. ‘It suddenly goes that way.’

  He wasn’t too sure he understood what he’d just said himself, but the man considered for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right, but you need to leave.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Fortune replied, ‘I was just on my way.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you to go,’ the man said. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘Sure.’ Fortune nodded. ‘You’re doing a fine job.’

  He turned and walked to the car. He started it up and turned around, heading towards the drive, giving the man a brief wave as he passed. He might have got away with that, but he still had no plan. He drove back through the tunnel of hopeless, leafless trees, their branches this time seeming to reach out to his car in silent supplication. As if to beg him not to go. As if to tell him that he shouldn’t be leaving, that there was still work for him to do here. But the troll wasn’t there, not any more. He was someplace else. The only problem was, Fortune had no idea where.

  fifty

  WHAT WAS IT HE SAID TO ME? WHAT DID THE TROLL SAY, before he left? Just before he left, he said … Think. Think, Sophie, but I couldn’t think because there was a spider and it was above me on the wall and it was huge, it was huge and I couldn’t think, I couldn’t think at all. My arm was greasy with blood and it hurt, it stung, and I could barely see for tears, could barely breathe for all the blubbery snot. I was crying like a child, a mess. I couldn’t think. What had he said?
/>
  Do you believe in fortune?

  That’s what he said. Do you believe in fortune?

  I looked at the combination. Six numbers. I thought of the, what was it? The second time I was taken to the Games Room? My birthday, backwards, that was the game. Game? Please. Using my left hand, I reached awkwardly across my body, my fingers slipping on the tiny wheels. I couldn’t get them to move, I couldn’t control them. What was it? Come on, Sophie, your birthday, backwards. Nineteen ninety-eight … 8, 9, 9, 1. July. 7, 0. Shit. No. Too many numbers. Okay, okay, stop. Think. Ninety-eight. Forget the nineteen. 8, 9, 7, 0. Twenty-four, so, oh Jesus, how hard could this be? 4, 2. Done. I pulled at the lock. Nothing. It wouldn’t open.

  I looked up at the spider. It hadn’t moved, like it was waiting. Watching. Watching me cry and sniff and try to remember when I was bloody born. I tried again. This time, the right way round. 2, 4 … what next? 7? No, come on, Sophie, you need six numbers. So 0, then 7. Then 9, 8. Done. Pull. Nothing. It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t open, and I pulled and the plastic cuff bit into my wrist and the blood was running down my arm and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get enough air into me, it was getting darker and darker and darker. I closed my eyes and tried to focus. Calm down. Breathe. Breathe. But I couldn’t keep my eyes closed because there was a spider on the wall and it was right above me. Stop. Calm. Breathe. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

  Do you believe in fortune?

  Okay. Okay, you can do this.