Catchee Monkey

By Malla Duncan

“I began screaming before I hit the hallway. Terror drove me, hampered me. My feet felt like blocks of lead, my legs moved as though I was travelling through water. My heart felt as though it had swelled to the size of a football and was stuck at the base of my throat. One gut-wrenching thought pulsed through my fright. It couldn’t be happening to me. Not really. It must be a dream. I raced for the front door which seemed like a mirage at the end of a tunnel where gravity had lost grip, taking me ever forwards to something I would never reach.”

~Catchee Monkey~ is a dark romantic suspense thriller set in England and Sri Lanka. A unique contemporary murder mystery, it is driven by tension and intrigue, a delicate balance of deception, jealousy and revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Malla Duncan
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987005229

Malla Duncan

Malla Duncan lives in Cape Town and writes across a variety of genres from 'women-in-jeopardy' to romantic adventure, children's fantasy and humorous books for African children. Her suspense novels are fast-paced, contemporary full-length stand-alone reads which introduce ordinary, flawed women characters caught in extraordinary circumstances.

Book preview

Prologue

Someone waved a square of darkness against the light, ‘Is this yours?’

The object was dangerously close to connecting with the spread of pain radiating across her right cheek. She struggled to focus. There was pressure, then pain. Light and dark. It took her some moments to understand why she couldn’t see properly – only one eye was working, the eyelid lifting and falling as though some magical force was at work.

The square came inexorably closer; brown leather, stitched and sloppy. She knew those handles. ‘Yes,’ she began, but couldn’t finish. Something dry was forced into her mouth and it took a couple of seconds before she realised it was her tongue stuck high against her palate. She could taste blood, the pulpy sense of raw flesh.

Why did this woman have her bag?

‘Nothing in it, love.’

Her mind flickered through trivia and horror. There had been everything in it – her money, cards, keys, a book she remembered on the last Czar of Russia; inconsequential things it seemed when set against other memories of falling, suffocation and darkness…

The bag shook again in front of her, open now like a gaping mouth, the zip hanging. In a scatter of memory she remembered an icy liquid pouring over her head in a relentless baptism. What had happened? The question broke in her damaged mouth; all she could manage was a gurgle at the back of her throat where blood pooled as if she had swallowed a large spoon of it, warm and salty and sucking away her life. Her singular vision fixed on the ruined shape of her bag as though the answer to everything lay in its twisted, leathery seams.

A clash of something…metal? A door banging?

A man’s voice boomed irritably: ‘What’s happening here?’

Darkness moved over her; she felt breath on her face as though she was sheathed in raw skin, the lightest touch burning through exposed nerves.

‘Nothing in the bag, Doctor. No identification.’

Someone leaned on the bed and sensation came sharply: scents and colour, her own hand flailing in a white, desperate claw, and the flash of a blue ring. Terror shook her with the force of an icy chill.

‘Good God,’ said the man. ‘How long has she been here? Theatre Four. Move.’

Above the squeak of wheels, the woman said: ‘Can you speak, love? What’s your name?’

Her name? The question raked her, filing through memory with the jerky sequence of strobe lighting in a dark room – and then, at last, one clear element, and her voice rattling loose as a box of bones in the back of her throat, ‘Margaret. My name is Margaret.’

At 5 pm Myra put her head round the door.

‘I’m off, Dr Heffe. Was there anything you wanted?’

‘Nothing that can’t wait. Good night, Myra.’ He watched her as she left, admiring the jaunty scarf and lace-up boots. Myra was nothing if not efficient. She’d been his Front Office Manager for five years now. The term secretary, she had told him, was out of date.

Heffe smiled to himself and shuffled the papers on his desk. He hesitated as one page slipped and a photograph came into view. He paused, fingering the paper. After thirty years of practice, he still came across patients who engendered a sense of unease, people who engaged positively in every way and yet still managed to evade honesty. No matter how agile or sly his questions, they guarded their bitter secrets.

He brought the lamp closer. The island of light shrank in focus, darkness creeping to the perimeters of his desk. There it was – something indefinable just behind the planes of the unsmiling face – just beyond his grasp. He turned the picture, hoping to catch that elusive element shallow as a membrane just below the surface. Perhaps there – just there – a ripple of light in the dark eyes.

Part One: London

Chapter 1

‘Don’t be silly,’ Frank said, trampling over my excuse. ‘You can walk to the pub. It’s Friday – our team-building darts night. You’re expected to be there. And in any case, it’ll do you good.’

Frank Merring had too many opinions about what would do me good. He thought I was too thin, too quiet, and perhaps lonely. I know he thought I was odd. I could see it in the way he looked at me with that unsettling mix of speculation and wry amusement.

Of course I could walk to the pub – my flat was only three blocks away – but I would have to pass alleys, darkened doorways and the occasional derelict shop. There was a vacant lot scattered with empty cans and broken glass, graced by a single tree that threw its shadow like a bony hand against a blank wall.

That Friday evening, in the grey drizzle, it sharpened my breath. If I’d been eight years old I would have refused to pass by. Fear has a way of infusing the natural with dark probability. But nevertheless, that moment of childish imagination delayed me by three seconds.

When I reached the zebra crossing at the next block I was behind a girl with long blonde hair and a briefcase. She stepped off the curb with confidence, hair swinging. I watched in horror as a car skidded. Wide-eyed, she turned to stare at it. Then the thump – and her body collapsing like a string puppet in the sparkling rain.

People ran, but I couldn’t move. My mind was locked on that look on her face seconds before the car struck her. That recognisable fear.

Familiar, irrational anxiety overwhelmed me. If I hadn’t stopped to let the spooky shadows of an old tree rill through my bones, the girl spread-eagled in the gutter would have been me.

Ever the optimist, Frank had ordered two glasses of white wine. ‘Thought you’d changed your mind,’ he commented.

I swung a mane of wet black hair over my shoulders. ‘There was an accident.’ I told him about the girl on the road.

His eyes darkened. ‘Badly injured?’

‘Broken arm and bruising, they said.’

I had difficulty getting the words out. For one surreal moment I could feel the hard wet surface of the road against my cheek. My hands were steady but inside I was shaking like an old clock restarted, looking for familiar rhythm.

He looked at me with concern. ‘You look a bit green around the gills.’

‘I keep thinking it could have been me.’

He hesitated a moment, then patted me on the shoulder. ‘Bit of rain. Accidents happen.’ His smile was a little forced. ‘Glad you came anyway. What would I have done with this other glass of wine?’

But I couldn’t respond. The incident had nudged thoughts buried sly as a virus in a bloodstream; the old conflict of childish curiosity and restraint. Unfathomable rules broken in tearful secrecy. And the terror of retribution. I thought of my parents. Don’t talk to strangers, don’t swing too high, don’t walk in the rain. I opened my mouth and something slippery slid out.

‘I used to be afraid of the rain.’

I knew it was the wrong thing to say. I swallowed, staring at Frank with the right amount of chagrin to let him know I’d said a daft thing. Frank watched me with his restful eyes as though he expected nothing less. Frank was so normal. A big, comfortable man with a slight stain on his shirt, a sloppy jacket, his thick brown hair falling untidily over his forehead. He raised his glass in mock salute.

‘What sort of rain did you have in your town, then?’

We were sitting at a table tucked away in a corner, watching our colleagues as they lined up for their first game. Beside me the bar counter ran an overhang of shiny old wood. The walls were covered with pictures, stamps and what looked like old lading bills; a chic untidiness that reminded me of my father’s rigid house rules of order and matching colours. Safety precautions in every regulated line. I thought of the girl crossing on the neat white zebra stripes. Fear in the midst of safety.

I took a sip of wine, winced as the icy splash hit the back of my throat. ‘As a kid I was always scared. The rain, the wind, crowded shops, lifts.’ What was I saying? I took a moment. Then said, ‘I was afraid of the dark.’

Frank grinned. ‘Aren’t we all?’

He looked solid, warm, protective. A safe house. I let my eyes find and lock with his.

I said, ‘I think it was the house really.’

He leaned forward. I had the feeling he wanted to take my hand. In the dim light his eyes looked stony green.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

The house where I grew up had shadows everywhere – curled in corners, sucked into cracks. The old wood looked peppered with black eyes. It was a whispery house, full of draughts and creaking stairs. My room was on the top floor. There was a fireplace and a sloping roof and marks on the walls where generations of children had stuck pictures. High windows cut a moonlight grid on the floor.

At night, the scrape of a twisted foot could be heard in the wind above the creak of the wood. A rotten face with a lickety-red tongue would leer from cracked beams across the ceiling. My father had warned me about the bogeyman. He came for any small girl who didn’t eat her greens or made too much noise. And he always came in the dark. I learnt fear is a colour – a wash of grey. It was imagination that created vivid possibility.

One night my father appeared in my room with a whip.

Frank was aghast. ‘He whipped you?’

‘The whip wasn’t for me. My father told me that if I continued to scream, he would whip the bogeyman to a bloody pulp right there on the bedroom carpet.’

‘God-awful thing to say to a child.’

‘It worked. I never screamed again.’

‘I should imagine you never did much of anything again.’

Frank’s wry comment wasn’t far off the mark. After the bogyman incident, perceptions changed. Simple things became complicated. I expected bad things to happen: doom-laden portents in the wind, the worst in people, death in a storm.

I was twenty-two when my parents were killed in a car accident as they drove back from their annual holiday in Scotland. A rainy night, an unlit road. A test of fate. The shadow of imminent catastrophe had been vindicated. In its wake the inconsequential blossomed: would my laundry shrink in the wash; would I miss a bus and not get home; would I get stuck in a lift.

Frank was looking at me in fascination, as though I was some exotic creature whose purpose he couldn’t quite fathom.

I felt a defensive mix of umbrage and embarrassment. ‘You think I’m odd?’

‘Of course you’re odd, darling. Completely crackers. You’d have to be to work at Maypole.’ He gave me a conspiratorial grin – which didn’t fool me in the least – finished his drink with a flourish, checked his watch and shifted to the edge of his seat.

‘Well, I’m off.’ He paused. ‘Would you – I mean – would you have a drink with me sometime? I mean without the others?’ He indicated the group at the dartboard. ‘No hurry – ’ he added as I opened my mouth ‘ – just a thought.’ He waved away my response as if he was too nervous to hear it. His ears had turned bright red.

I watched him as he stopped to wish our team good luck with the darts game. Frank seemed to take up more space than other people. Now he was leaving, I missed his presence already. Around forty and divorced, I was sure he was too old for me. The idea of a drink with him slid to the back of my mind but didn’t disappear. I owned him loyalty as much as obligation. He had considered me good enough to join Maypole Designs as a graphic designer and had become a mentor as much as my boss, assuming a confidence in me that I struggled to find for myself. I had strived to make a good impression, often working late whenever Frank asked me. I would walk home to a pot of soup and buttered toast before falling into bed. Keeping busy was a salve. It was what I wanted – and as far from childhood as I could get. Escape from Alcatraz.

Without Frank’s presence I felt I didn’t need to spend the entire evening. After two unsuccessful games I thankfully surrendered my darts to my disappointed team, dragged on my coat and made for the door.

‘Want an escort?’

Pete Ellington from IT was smiling at me. He had dark hair, china-blue eyes and an engaging grin. And a wife who worked in the sales department.

‘No, thanks, I’m fine. I’m just around the corner.’

‘Long as you’re not around the bend, love!’

I caught their laughter as I went through the door. The rain had diminished and I walked home in a light shower, raindrops sneaking under my collar. I kept to the lighted areas, following shadowy edges, avoiding alleyways and inky doorways. I wondered whether my parents’ caution, ingrained in me from the time I could walk, had made me sensible or just afraid.

As I entered the main doors of my block and headed for the stairs, a shape struggled against the light ahead of me. There was the sound of ripping paper and a ripe expletive. I stopped and looked up at a tall, rake-thin woman standing in a scattering of apples on the stairs. Her hair was a blonde pincushion of tiny spikes. She turned to look at me, large hoop earrings dangling in silvery glints.

‘Bloody bag’s broken!’ she said.

Automatically, I reached down and collected the apples rolling at my feet.

She gave me an appraising look, the bony length of her leaning against the wall as though she was too fragile to stand without support. She said, ‘You’re very kind. Would you mind – I mean would you like to come in for coffee?’

‘Thanks, but I only drink tea.’

She gave a throaty giggle. ‘Don’t do tea leaves.’

The door to her flat swung open on a strange scent of incense and wood fire. She indicated a large wicker basket beside the door and I dumped the apples. I straightened and we stood a moment, eye to eye.

‘I’m Nina,’ she said. ‘Nina Brewster. I’m an astrologer.’ She was watching me, looking for derision.

Her pale hair contrasted theatrically with her black eyes and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She looked ethereal, as though she should be holding a séance or some other-worldly ceremony in a grove of oaks. I’d never met anybody who believed in astrology – let alone made a living out of it. Her flat was draped in eastern tapestries, the walls decorated with moonscape pictures, bowls of droopy flowers everywhere, a huge sundial under the window, a pile of washing on a couch. An old-fashioned bureau in the corner was littered with pens and paper.

My eyes fixed on a complicated star chart. ‘You work out what’s going to happen to people according to the alignment of the planets?’

‘I don’t do those columns.’

‘How does it work, then?’

‘I help people make decisions.’

I looked at her with respect. ‘I need help with decisions.’

Her eyes were shiny dark. I noticed she was leaning against a table, one hand splayed for support. There was strange moment when I thought she smiled, but I wasn’t sure.

‘So the month, the day and the time you were born can affect every aspect of your life?’

Nina was enjoying my amazed ignorance. ‘Life is hugely complex. A thousand choices await you. That’s what makes readings so different for different people.’

‘But if everybody knew this, then surely nobody would take the wrong job or marry the wrong partner.’

‘There’s no wrong and right.’

We were sitting in her flat discussing my reluctance to believe in cosmic influences. It was a Saturday afternoon and rain was pelting down. Nina had made muffins with icing and star-sign biscuits. I had eaten all the Aquarian ones.

‘You need a pattern of events to see the connection.’ Nina made a sweeping motion with her arms as if what I needed to see was bigger than the room. ‘It’s about balance and energy.’ And she stood, feet spread, arms lifted skywards with the presence of a priestess before a pagan altar.

‘Doesn’t astrology denote a static universe?’

She smiled. ‘An educated critic.’ And found a pen.

A mass of tiny lines and numbers slowly defined my life, so uncannily accurate I had nothing to contradict.

Until she said. ‘You suffer from anxiety.’

‘It says that – on that?’ I pointed at the squiggles.

‘You have elements that I see as uncertain at this time.’

‘Bad things?’

‘Not necessarily.’

I noted the slick of humor in her eyes, like moonlight on water. Nina believed change was possible through a click of a button; a different drawing and your life could be transformed.

Nina was the only friend I made outside the office. I began to spend more time in her flat than mine. She was often surrounded by people who viewed her as a sort of guru on life, asking her advice on what seemed to me trivial issues. Nina would preside at these gatherings in flowing garments and dramatic jewellery, looking every inch the clairvoyant or séance queen, clearly motivated by an adoring audience. But no matter how much time I spent with her, the idea of distant heavenly configurations having an effect on my life never quite made its mark on me.

Perhaps my ‘hanger-on but never a convert’ role eventually rankled because one evening she said pointedly, ‘You should get out more. Sitting here with me can’t be very exciting for you.’

‘You don’t get out yourself.’

I could have bitten my tongue. Nina gave her time magnanimously to people but rarely talked about herself. Beyond dramatic poses in front of clients, she could be very quiet, offering a vacant look if she didn’t agree with something I’d said. She was a chameleon, arty and expansive one moment, silent and withdrawn the next.

Now she gave me a contemplative stare.

‘It’s a Libra thing,’ she said at last.

‘What? Working to death for people who are worried whether their son will go to university or their husband have an affair?’

‘No, withdrawing when things become too adverse. We’re gentle people, us Librans.’

The curiosity I felt so often in her company, peaked. ‘What adversity have you faced?’

There was that ripple of light in her black eyes.

‘I studied medicine but never finished.’

She was fallible, as mortal as the rest of us.

‘Why was that?’

‘I met a man.’

She said this as though it was a fatal error from which she would never recover. Her mouth lifted in an ugly attempt at a smile. ‘I suppose I was equally to blame really. I gave up everything on hope eternal.’

Sometimes I thought Nina saw life as darkly as I did. Feeling a little out of step, I said flippantly, ‘Obviously he wasn’t in your stars.’

‘Oh, he was actually. But I never saw it. Love is really blind.’

It took me some time to understand Nina was only comfortable with people who trusted her knowledge of things unfathomable and futuristic. In the beginning, I would ask her to join me for an evening in the pub or a movie, and she would refuse, her eyes holding mine as she waited for the inevitable attempt at persuasion; a moment filled with questions I couldn’t ask.

So when she suggested we go out to dinner one evening, I was astonished.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Dress up,’ she said crisply.

‘Why?’

‘It’s a secret.’

‘You don’t have to do this for me, you know.’

A ghost of a smile touched her lips.

‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s a celebration.’

‘For what?’

‘You’ll see.’

Chapter 2

A misty rain permeated the air, gathered by sudden gusts of wind that smacked wetly into my eyes. I cursed the fact that I had dressed to impress rather than in line with weather. I had a warm jacket but it wasn’t enough, underneath I was shivering in a shimmery, plum-coloured evening dress.

When I reached the restaurant there was no sign of Nina. I glanced at my watch. I was a few minutes early. The maitre d’ drifted towards me with a gracious indulgence as though my singular presence was unexpected but nevertheless he would put himself out to accommodate me.