Argleton, Chapter 11: Fimden
Despite the risk, Matt visits the third phantom town.
Read Chapter 10 first or start at the beginning.
“So this is Fimden,” Matt said to himself, wishing Charlie was there with him.
He looked at his mobile phone and hesitantly turned it on. Once it had booted, he turned the GPS off, feeling slightly silly and paranoid for doing so, and waited for the wifi finder to announce available networks to join.
It didn’t. He wandered around a bit, aimlessly searching for signal. He tried to picture the satellite photo he’d studied the night before and looked for landmarks to help pinpoint the right spot, but it all looked so different on the ground. Reluctantly, he opened GeoMaps and turned on his GPS. The app sprang to life and zoomed in on his position, superimposing a blinking blue spot on the satellite photo. He trudged through the drizzle to the right co-ordinates.
Once he was positioned, he looked down at his feet to discover them planted squarely in a cowpat. He sighed. Charlie would have been laughing at him right now. More to the point, Charlie would have spotted it and warned him away from it.
His wifi sniffer picked up a signal, this one weaker than the others. The SSID was Mid Fen. OK, he thought, bit of poetic licence there, given the Fens are a good 50 miles away. Now, what can I do with F-I-M-D-E-N?
He typed in ‘Mend if’. The dialogue box on his screen vibrated side to side, as if shaking its virtual head in disagreement. Charlie would have had this one figured out in no time, he thought, as he tried to rearrange the letters in his head.
Dim fen. Another little shake.
Fend mi. ‘Mi’ isn’t a word, but what the hell, they’d used it before, so it was worth a shot. It didn’t work.
Find em? No.
Find me. A pause whilst the dialogue box considered things. He waited. A dribble of drizzle trailed down the side of his neck, inside his waterproof jacket. The British summer was yet again proving its mettle.
A small radio-signal icon popped up in the task bar of his phone. For the third — and maybe final? — time, he was connected via wifi whilst standing in the middle of a field. It was weird, he thought. Perhaps a little too meaningful, a little too blunt. ‘Find me’ was a challenge, a poke in the ribs, an almost irresistible tease.
He pointed his phone camera at his feet, took the photo and uploaded it. The signal was weak and it took ages, as it had before. He waited, eager to walk back to Saxmundham, find his guest house and get warm and dry.
His phone made its ‘photo uploaded’ noise and he turned it off. He felt disconnected himself now, the adrenaline that had flooded his system was wearing off. He wondered why he’d come in the first place. Why hadn’t he listened to Charlie? Tomorrow he would go home, and that would be that. She’d had been right, he thought, as he thrust his phone into his pocket and set off through the soaking rain. This was all just getting too creepy.
§
Matt was glad to wake the next morning. Dinner had been fish and chips from the nearest takeaway, but the lack of a TV in his room and his decision not to turn his phone on had made for a long, tedious evening. The B&B had been nice enough, the owners warm and friendly, but he hadn’t felt relaxed and had struggled to sleep.
Saxmundham’s narrow roads were lined with a mishmash of architectural styles. A old grey rose-covered cottage, almost clichéd in its quaintness, stood next to a by-numbers 80s housing development that felt soulless in its predictability. On any other day, the sunshine and flowers and low-rise buildings would have made an enjoyable change, but instead Matt found it claustrophobic and oppressive. There were few people around, for which Matt was grateful. He didn’t want to be seen.
He walked up Station Approach, reaching the level crossing. The derailed train was gone and the station, where he should have alighted yesterday, was still closed. The railway lines were cordoned off as investigators searched for evidence further up the tracks. Matt looked the other way, eastward down the tracks where a car passed over another level crossing.
Across from the station was an old pub, The Railway, a red and yellow brick building now closed and unloved, its windows blocked with sheet steel. It looked like it would be more at home in an inner city slum than in this picturesque Suffolk town. A blackboard that had once proclaimed special ales or menus now pointed punters towards The Cooper’s Dip further along the road.
The station’s brick and off-white rendered frontage was forbiddingly silent. In the car park was a portable bus stop sign, with ‘Rail Replacement Bus’ written on it. Matt was ten minutes early for his train and hoped that the bus was scheduled to leave at the same time. He had a 22 minute wait at Ipswich for the Peterborough train and if he missed that, it would add at least an hour to an already long journey.
He tried not to look at the ticket agent who was sitting on a folding chair with his portable ticketing machine, tried not to look at the station, tried not to look guilty for absconding the scene of an accident. But he had nothing to add to the investigators’ story. Nothing believable, anyway.
He desperately wanted to get his phone out, check his email, check his social networking sites, call Charlie. But he didn’t dare. They were clearly using it to track his whereabouts and the risk was just too great. When I get back to Manchester, he thought, I’ll go to one of those dodgy little mobile phone shops and buy a couple of unlocked, unregistered SIM cards. We’ve got old phones we’re not using.
As he waited for the bus, he turned all the events so far over in his mind. He couldn’t believe he’d been quite so stupid.
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