The Magpies by Mark Edwards

Author:Mark Edwards [Edwards, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
ISBN: 9781483911892
Goodreads: 17726978
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2013-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘What?’ Jamie was taken aback by the question.

Mike leaned forward across the desk, his face framed by two computer monitors. ‘I said, What are you going to do about it?’

Jamie fell silent. He held a ballpoint pen between finger and thumb, tapped it on the edge of his keyboard, stared blindly at the screensaver on his monitor. All around him people tapped away at their keyboards, had important telephone conversations, wandered to and from the coffee machine. The server in the corner hummed noisily; the fax machine bleeped. But Jamie was oblivious to it all.

What was he going to do about it?

He had come into work this morning with the need to talk to someone, to pour it all out, to get it off his chest. He didn’t expect catharsis, just some relief. Last night, at 3 a.m., Lucy and Chris had played extracts from War of the Worlds – the seventies ‘rock opera’ – not at full volume, but just loud enough for Jamie to hear it and for it to come seeping into his dreams. He had woken up and jumped out of bed in a state of shocked disbelief and stared at the floorboards. When he was eight or nine, his parents used to play this album late at night after he’d gone to bed. And as a little boy with a large imagination, he had lain awake, convinced that the Martians were coming for him. The album came with a booklet of paintings, in which men and women ran screaming through the Victorian streets, pursued by a Martian death machine; red alien liquid bubbled between once-glorious buildings; a priest held up a cross before an unimpressed Martian who fired off a death ray to obliterate him. All these images of horror and destruction floated before his eyes, along with a few original ones, conjured up by his pre-adolescent mind. In the end, after a week of nightmares, he reluctantly told his mum why he had been so tired and unhappy recently and, filled with remorse, she had binned the album, making him promise that he would tell her if anything scared him in the future. He shouldn’t be ashamed, even if he was a big boy now.

Maybe I should phone her now, he thought. Tell her I’m afraid. Afraid because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

How on earth had Lucy and Chris known? They had managed to pinpoint how the Newtons knew about Kirsty’s arachnophobia – they’d mentioned it at the dinner party – but how did they know about Jamie’s old fear? He racked his brains. Had he mentioned his fear of that music to them? No; no he hadn’t. He’d never mentioned it to anyone. Not even Kirsty. In fact, he had practically forgotten that album existed. In the early nineties, someone had released a dance mix of the War of the Worlds music, and he found that it didn’t scare him any more – not in the sweaty centre of a heaving, lively nightclub, anyway.

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