by William Shaw
Seven years dead; it takes seven years to make a declaration of presumed death. ‘That’s why they’re getting married. They never found the body, so Tina couldn’t marry again until now.’
Curly didn’t answer.
‘How long have they been lovers then?’
Curly turned his head and looked at her for a while. ‘You’ve got a bad mind, Alexandra Cupidi,’ he said eventually.
At that moment, as if she knew what they were talking about, the dead man’s mother turned her head to the left and stared at them, unflinching. In those eyes Alex recognised that dangerous kind of emptiness. She was beyond caring what anyone thought.
The younger bride, Stella, stood, picked up a bottle of wine and approached Alex with a glass. ‘I wanted to say thanks,’ she said. Her eyes were an extraordinary bright shade of blue. ‘You were cool. She could have hurt you.’
‘Not a great thing to happen on your wedding day.’
She handed Alex the glass and poured wine into it without asking if she wanted any. ‘Well, it’s a day we’re never going to forget, at least.’
‘Sorry about your guests.’
‘We wanted to get rid of them anyway. We’re on our honeymoon now.’
‘Here?’ Alex looked around. This wasn’t the sort of place people usually came on their honeymoons.
‘We’re staying over there.’ She pointed to a low, pale-blue bungalow, the far side of the new lighthouse. ‘A whole week. Mostly in bed,’ she added with a mischievous smile.
Over her shoulder, Tina sat alone at the end of the table, wedding dress already grubby at the hem. Stella had shrugged off the attack; Tina still looked shaken, her face pale and her eyes red. ‘I can’t wait,’ said Stella.
When Alex looked towards the pale-blue bungalow with white-framed windows, she saw also the flashing blue lights of an approaching police car.
Three
It was an unmarked vehicle, a green Skoda, blue lights flashing through the grille. It was coming to take Mandy Hogben into custody. Even at this distance, coming down the straight track, disappearing between houses and patches of scrub, Alex could see that there were two people inside. As it rounded the corner near the old lighthouse, slowing for a gaggle of tourists who loitered on the single-track road, Alex recognised one: the driver.
‘Here they come,’ said the CNC officer, sounding relieved to be about to have the woman off his hands.
The Skoda pulled up next to the CNC car, and a small, neat young woman got out. ‘That her?’ she said, looking at Mandy Hogben sitting alone radiating hatred.
No hello or anything. Which was odd, because Detective Constable Jill Ferriter was Alex’s colleague and her best friend. That corporeal sense of unease was back; a dream-like feeling that something was still very wrong. It wasn’t the woman in grey.
Something was still setting off bells in Alex’s head. She scanned the horizon looking for anything else that felt out of place that would explain this conviction.
‘This is Detective Sergeant Cupidi,’ the CNC officer was saying, suddenly eager to talk to this younger, so much prettier policewoman. ‘She’s the one who apprehended the alleged assailant. Perhaps you two know each other already?’
‘How come they’re sending you out to something like this, Jill?’
‘We were just down the road, doing . . . something.’ Jill’s voice was unsteady, her face pale.
‘Doing what?’
‘Some bad business,’ said Jill quietly.
At that point, Jill’s passenger, a uniformed officer, opened the passenger door, leaned out, and was sick onto the compacted shingle next to the car.
‘Is that Colin Gilchrist?’ asked Alex. She looked from one to the other. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Like I said, dead bad business.’ Jill looked shaken herself.
‘What bad business?’
Jill walked to the back of the Skoda. ‘Listen, Alex. You’re supposed to be taking time off from all this. We’re only here for that one. Don’t ask.’
‘What’s been going on? You look genuinely like shit.’
‘Drop it. Just not now, love, OK? Please.’
Jill opened the boot and pulled out a tactical vest for herself and another for Gilchrist, but when she realised Alex was standing next to her, Jill slammed the boot shut, though not before Alex had seen what else was in it.
Inside the boot was a clear plastic bag stuffed full of used white forensic coveralls and blue overshoes. Blood had soaked into the blue fabric of the shoes, turning it a deep brown. There were patches of blood on the coveralls too. Alex had been to too many crime scenes. That’s why she was on sick leave. For their forensic clothing to be that stained, there would have had to have been a great deal of blood.
Jill was already opening the CNC car door and leading Mandy over towards her Skoda. The woman got in the car without any protest at all. Afterwards Jill called over to the CNC officer. ‘You got the witness details?’
He nodded; held the weapon in a gloved hand. ‘You’ll be needing this too,’ he said, holding up the machete. ‘Evidence. Can I stick it in your boot?’
Jill looked at the weapon and baulked. ‘Oh. We can’t take it.’
The man looked confused. ‘You’ll want it though.’
Jill looked as much panicked by his statement as by the sight of the weapon.
Alex stepped forward between them. ‘They can’t take it with them,’ she explained. ‘She’s right. They can’t have the weapon inside the vehicle with the suspect for obvious reasons, and they can’t put it in the boot either because there’s a danger of cross-contamination of evidence.’
The man blinked, confused, holding the weapon between finger and thumb.
‘They have . . . some stuff in their boot already, from another case. They’ve just come from another serious crime scene.’
She looked at Colin, who gave the smallest of nods.
‘You’ll have to arrange for someone else to collect it.’
Jill looked gratefully at Alex, then got into the car next to Colin, who hadn’t said a word the entire time they had been there.‘Come by later,’ called Alex as she started the engine. ‘I need the company. I’m going mad out here with nothing to do.’ Which was more than half true, she realised.
Jill said nothing. She put the car into gear and all three drove away. Where the car had been, lay the small splatter of Colin’s sick.
If she hadn’t been off work, Alex reflected, it would have been her witnessing whatever they had seen, and whatever they had seen had not been good.
She watched the two brides leave, hand in hand, walking unsteadily across the uneven shingle towards the low pale-blue cabin, picking their way uneasily between the gorse and the sea kale.
They had left her with the bottle of wine. After maybe twenty metres, Tina stumbled and fell. Stella bent and took her arm, hauled her up. After another few yards, Tina stopped, hitched up her dress and Stella bent her legs to allow her to jump up onto her back, and carried her all the way to the bungalow.
Curly said, ‘Fancy a couple more at the Pilot?’
He was drunk. So was she, she realised. The day was scarily empty. She could stay and drink like she would have done when she was a younger officer on the force in London. She hesitated and said, ‘No thanks, Curly.’
She turned and made her way down the track towards her house, hair blowing in her face as she walked.
It was stupid, drinking at lunchtime. She was supposed to be straightening out her head, not messing with it. The afternoon had become a blur.
By the evening she was sat on the sofa with the TV on, sound down, and was struggling through one of the books her mother had left behind on her visits. Her mother went through two or three novels a week. Alex was trying to fill the empty days off work, but reading books took her forever and she found it impossible to believe in a
ny of the stories.
Alex gave up, looked up at the silent television and saw a young woman holding a microphone outside the gates of a large house. There was police tape across the gates. The caption underneath read New Romney, a town a little further up the coast.
‘Oh,’ she said out loud, and remembered the bloody coveralls in Jill’s car.
She scrabbled around, looking for the remote control as the reporter talked to camera with the sombre face of someone delivering terrible news. Behind her right shoulder, crime scene officers dressed all in white, just as Jill would have been, emerged from the front door. Where was the remote? It had been here next to her on the sofa a minute ago.
She felt a prick of irritation. Normally she would have already known every available grisly detail. All she could guess was that something very awful must have happened in that house, a little way down the coast from her.
By the time she had found the remote, tucked between cushions, the news had moved on to an item about an old people’s home.
Four
Zoë came in late, non-verbal, walking dirty footprints onto the kitchen tiles.
‘Nice day?’ Alex asked her daughter.
Zoë didn’t answer; instead she started opening and closing cupboard doors, then moved on to the fridge in which she found half an avocado. She scooped it out of its skin, methodically mashed it with a fork for two whole minutes, then squeezed a little lemon juice in it and mashed it some more.
‘See any lesser spotted wood pigeons?’
‘No such bird.’
‘A great booby?’
‘Mum.’
‘A little bustard?’
‘Unfunny, Mum.’
‘Where were you all day, then?’
‘Where do you think? I was volunteering at the Wildlife Trust. I told you that this morning.’
‘Did you?’ Her strange misfit daughter who loved wildlife more than people. Alex looked at the small bowl of green mush her daughter had made. ‘I could cook something.’
‘No worries,’ said Zoë, picking up the bowl and walking towards the staircase.
‘Is that all you’re having?’ she called up after her. Zoë didn’t answer; just closed the door to her bedroom behind her.
She had not been a good mother; she knew that. It was a warm evening still; she stepped outside into it. The air was rich with bugs, swallows swooping after them. Her house had been built inside a low shingle rampart that had once been part of a Napoleonic-era gun battery; to the north, smoke was rising. Beyond the hummock of stones, someone was starting a bonfire somewhere on the shingle.
At ten she called Jill on her mobile. ‘Are you home?’
‘Just. The longest bloody day.’
‘Why?’
Jill didn’t answer.
‘You were at New Romney, weren’t you? That’s where you came from. That house where the people were killed.’
‘I don’t think I should be talking to you about any of this,’ said Jill.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the whole point is you’re supposed to be forgetting about all this shit.’
‘What happened?’
‘You’re insane, you know that?’
‘That’s why I’m off work.’
‘You really don’t want to know. Just it was . . . super bad. Super fucking bad.’
‘Maybe it’s you that needs therapy, not me.’
‘The stuff you see, Alex. Nobody should have to see it. Poor old Colin. That was the third time he chucked up.’
Somewhere someone was playing a guitar; it was hard to tell if the music came from nearby or far away. Sound travelled easily across this flat land. They could hear the noise of the drinkers gathered outside the Britannia.
‘And as for you, even when you’re supposed to be off work, you’re arresting people,’ said Jill. ‘What was all that about?’
‘I don’t know. I looked up and there was this woman. I knew she was going to do something. I just knew something bad was going to happen, and then she pulled out a knife. The weirdest bloody thing.’
‘Like a premonition?’
‘Yeah. Like a premonition. And then when I saw you, I knew something else had gone on. Another premonition. Except I don’t believe in premonitions,’ said Alex.
‘How can you actually say that? You just had one.’
‘I believe in the rational world.’
‘I believe in vibrations that only sensitive people can feel,’ Jill said. ‘Like yogis and enlightened people.’
‘I’ve never been accused of being sensitive.’
Jill said nothing for a while. Finally she spoke. ‘How can you actually believe in a rational world anyway? What we saw today . . .’
Above Alex, stars struggled to shine, competing with the orange glare of the nuclear power station.
‘. . . nothing rational about it,’ Jill said.
That night another terrible thing happened. As she lay on her bed, the ceiling fell on her. She woke with weight of debris pressed so hard on her chest that she could not breathe.
The attic must have been full of earth; she could feel its thick wetness crushing her, paralysing her. The smell of it was all around her, dank and rotting, full of unseen creatures. She needed to get up and find her daughter and make sure she was OK, but she was trapped, unable to move any limb.
And then a cool hand rested on her forehead. ‘Ssh,’ said a quiet voice. ‘It’s OK now. I’m here.’
By the time she woke, Zoë was already gone. It was late; she had the feeling that she had slept badly but she couldn’t remember the dreams she had had.
There was a message written on the envelope of an electricity bill:
Don’t forget counsellor @ 11. Z. x
It was a hot Friday morning. Her counsellor had told her that exercise was good, so she was using her bike whenever she could. On the bike on the way to his office, Alex passed the two brides walking hand in hand along the road towards her and gave them a wave, but they were too deep in conversation to notice her. Normally from here she would cycle up the narrower lanes that ran inland among the marshes; today though she rode up the coast road, air cooling the sweat off her.
The other thing that was good about cycling was that it was hard to think too much when you were on a bike. You had to concentrate on the journey, especially on this coast road where lorries were impatient to pass you even on the blindest corners.
—How do I feel today? I’m bored and frustrated. I want to be back at work.
—Do you think you’re ready?
—Honestly? No.
—Why not?
—This is going to sound strange.
—Try me.
—It’s weird.
—Go on.
—You see . . . I keep feeling I can predict the future.
—What do you mean?
—I had a premonition. Premonitions, really. And they turned out to be true.
—Like a superpower?
—Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that something is going to happen, and then it does. Does that sound nuts?
—In my line of work, I’m not really supposed to use the word ‘nuts’.
—But to me it feels nuts because it calls into question everything I thought I was. I am a rational person. I don’t believe in God or higher powers. I’m someone who believes things happen in a causal sequence. My job as a police officer in a crime unit is to understand that sequence. That’s what we do. I understand the order in which things have happened. I don’t judge it. I just need to figure it out. What causes what to happen. But now I seem to have this terrible feeling that bad things are about to happen and then they do. That’s like . . . things have happened in the wrong order. Or even that I caused them to happen because I knew they were going to. If som
ebody told me what I’ve just said, I would assume they were having psychotic episodes.
—But you don’t think you are?
—Would you know if you were having a psychotic episode? Isn’t that the whole point? Yesterday I was absolutely sure something really bloody terrible was going to happen. And . . .
—It did?
—Yes.
—And do you still feel like that? Do you think something bad is about to happen now?
Five
It was not hard to find the murder house, cycling home. It was just north of the village; a police car was parked across the driveway, blocking the entrance. The house was surrounded by high, well-trimmed hedges at the front and to the north, as much for privacy, she guessed, as to keep out the constant winds that winter brought to this flat land. To the south there was a small copse of scrubby willows and ash trees. She slowed on the single-track road and stopped just behind the car.
Dropping the bike onto the grass, she walked up towards the driveway, the pedal cleats on her shoes clicking on the tarmac. A small, tarnished copper sign on the open gate announced the house was named ‘The Nest’. Looking down the drive, she could see that the space to the left of the house was crammed with vehicles. The forensic teams would be inside the house, carefully picking over everything.
‘Can I help you?’ The young constable sitting inside the car had seen her peering past.
‘Pretty grim in there, I expect?’
‘Are you a friend or a neighbour?’ he asked.
‘No . . . just passing,’ she said.
‘Right,’ said the man, looking at her with the contempt coppers feel for rubberneckers. ‘On your bike, love.’
‘On my bike?’ she said. ‘Seriously?’
Instead of staying to argue, she turned away because a gangly young man had emerged behind the large cypress hedge, phone against one ear. It was Colin Gilchrist. Not wanting to be recognised lurking at a murder scene, she picked up the bike and pushed it on up the road.
She had walked about thirty metres the far side of the gate when a Qashqai coming from the other direction pulled up alongside her on the lane.
