The Last Stage

by Louise Voss

It was as if she was refusing to accept Meredith’s fears that someone might be targeting them.

  ‘That Gemma woman, the detective, is coming over to see me as well,’ said Meredith.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Paula sounded almost outraged. ‘Why would they need to tell you?’

  Meredith immediately wished she hadn’t mentioned it. ‘Because I knew both Ralph and Andrea, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m going to go to Norfolk to stay with my sister for a bit,’ Paula said. ‘Jackson’s going away with his girlfriend for a couple of weeks, some last-minute package holiday. We can’t have a funeral till the police release Ralph’s body anyway. DS Davis said it was OK as long as he knows where we are. I’ve cancelled all my clients indefinitely.’

  The rain began to fall, fat drops on the parched earth. Meredith retreated inside the cottage, leaving piles of weeds on the path and the robin’s reproachful stare. She felt inordinately relieved at the news that Paula was taking herself out of harm’s way, and that she was doing it without Meredith having to spell out her fears. Even before all this, she and Ralph had expressed concerns about Paula’s potential vulnerability, seeing mentally unstable clients in the detached summerhouse that was her consulting room.

  It was raining heavily when Gemma arrived, soaked just from the short walk down the steps from the car park. Meredith heard the click of the gate and watched her come up the path, stepping over the uprooted weeds, her normally pleasant face set in a grimace of something that was either discomfort at the rain, or knowledge of the news she had to deliver.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Meredith said, opening the door and forcing a smile. ‘I’ll get you a towel.’

  ‘Thanks. I didn’t think to bring an umbrella.’

  After a bit of fussing around with tea and towels, Gemma finally delivered the news Meredith had been dreading.

  ‘Meredith, I’m so sorry, but the post-mortems showed that both Ralph and Andrea were murdered. Ralph was strangled, and Andrea was hit on the head before she fell into the water. It could be the work of two separate killers, but we really don’t think that’s likely.’

  Meredith stared down at the jagged hole in the back of her hand.

  Black boots, thumping across a van floor.

  Black boots, kicking her in the face.

  The flash of a blade, plunging down towards her.

  Her own screams, amplified by the van’s metal sides…

  They sat in silence for a few moments, then Gemma leaned forwards and said, her voice barely audible over the noise of the rain drumming at the window, ‘I think there’s something you haven’t told us about all this. Am I right?’

  Meredith was going to tell her. She opened her mouth to speak, but the words just wouldn’t come. She couldn’t say it. If she said it; if she said, I think it’s me he’s after, then it made it real. And as for, I had sex with Ralph right before he died; shame mingled with the terror and stilled her tongue.

  In the end, all she said was, ‘You don’t think I did it, do you?’

  Gemma met her eyes. ‘Personally, no I don’t. But I think you have something to do with it, whether you’re aware of it or not.’

  Another long pause.

  ‘Meredith, I know what happened to you; the abduction. I found the details on our system. I’m sorry – that must have been unspeakably traumatic. I know they never found the perpetrator. Which is what makes me concerned that these murders of your friends are new warnings to you. I know it seems unlikely, since so much time has passed – but we can’t rule it out. Perhaps your attacker has been out of the country, or has only just tracked you down…’

  Meredith felt the room tip and sway. She sank back against the sofa cushions and waited for the nausea to pass.

  ‘Surely this has occurred to you as well?’

  They knew. It was real; she couldn’t keep denying it any longer. All she could do was nod, her eyes closed.

  ‘Please help me,’ she said.

  Gemma came and sat beside her, and even though the girl was half her age, Meredith had an urge to collapse into her arms.

  ‘I will. I promise,’ Gemma said. ‘But you have to help us too. I’m reopening your case. We’re going to look again at all the evidence you gave last time, see if we can make any sort of connection. And…’ She hesitated.

  ‘What?’ Meredith braced herself, but Gemma’s next words, when they came, were a relief.

  ‘…I’ve asked my boss if I could base myself here with you for a few days, in my role as Family Liaison Officer. We wouldn’t normally stay overnight, but given how remote you are out here, I think it’s a good idea. Partly for your own safety, and partly so we can have a proper chance to talk. Just you and me. Anything you can tell me, about Ralph or Andrea as well as about you, could help catch this guy, Meredith.’

  Meredith could tell that Gemma was expecting her to refuse immediately, and under any other circumstances, the idea of someone other than Pete staying in her cottage was anathema, but all she could do was nod again.

  ‘OK.’

  30

  1984

  Meredith

  Eighteen years old was far too young to be living in a crumbling derelict apartment block in Willesden Green, sleeping on a stained mattress like a tramp, condensation running down the walls and no heating apart from a brazier we all huddled round in the bare upstairs bedroom we’d made into our living room, since the ground floor rooms were too unspeakable, even for us.

  Later, I came to realise that there was a subconscious element of penance about the squalidness of my surroundings. I told myself I was free; free of exams, school uniform, the oppressive clutch of Mum’s misery, Dad’s empty armchair in the corner. But the truth was that I’d merely tried to run away from my own grief. I’d thought that by putting miles between me and my family’s vast loss, it would diminish its perspective. But in hindsight all it did was add a bucket of guilt to the already potent cocktail of suppressed negativity and unexpressed sorrow. I’d abandoned Pete and Mum when they needed me most – even though Samantha, on the rare occasions I tried to articulate this, merely shrugged and said, ‘Baby, what use would you be to them, feeling this fucked up? You’ll be much more useful once you get your head straight.’ I pretended to believe her.

  I missed Pete, and Dad of course, and I hated that Pete was so angry with me for leaving him with Mum, but it was done. I had failed Dad. They were better off without me.

  Apart from my guilt, the other blot on my hippie landscape was Samantha’s excessive free spiritedness. She hated being in one place for more than a few days at a time and spent increasingly lengthy periods of time at Greenham, which made me itchy with insecurity. Mostly because she never invited me to go with her – although I was secretly quite glad about this, being terrified of getting arrested again; the last thing I wanted was more police officers peering into my knickers. And Samantha was so effervescent with love and affection whenever she came back that I refused to read anything into it more than her desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons. I was utterly besotted. I’d even thought about how we could have children together and which of my fellow squatters we’d ask to be sperm donor – Marsh was the answer; he was gorgeous.

  Despite the privations, I loved living in the squat. I adored the bunch of guys I lived with: mild-mannered twenty-something Goth eco-warriors to a dreadlocked man: Spike, Matty, Marsh and Webbo. Every night the five of us – six, when Samantha was there to share my mattress – sat around the brazier and smoked weed until I wove a hazy web inside my head, rolled up in my sleeping bag and drifted off into a comfortable night’s sleep. Often we would sing – Matty was a really good guitar player and Webbo brought out bongos. Those were the best nights. We wrote music together – mostly rage-filled protest songs, but they were pretty good. The boys treated me like a kid sister and were unfailingly protective, and in return I cooked and kept the squat as clean as I could while they were out busking and working odd jobs for pittances that were then pooled.
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  Feminism? What feminism? I later thought.

  One day after I’d lived there about six months, Marsh shouted up the stairs from the kitchen – we had to come in and out through the forced back door – ‘Come and see what the fuck we’ve got!’

  I raced downstairs as fast as was possible, while avoiding the broken stair treads, hoping it was something really nice to eat. I’d have killed for roast chicken, and Marsh was the only other non-vegetarian, although we both pretended to the others that we were. I was so sick of veggie curry made with chickpeas and tinned plum tomatoes – or, as they were for some reason referred to in the squat, ‘wombat’s afterbirth’.

  But it wasn’t a chicken, or a few packets of sausages he’d foraged from the bins at the back of Safeway. It was an amp, a couple of microphone stands and a bass guitar, all sitting on the filthy, peeling lino of the kitchen floor.

  Marsh grabbed me round the waist and hugged me effusively, stinking of frib juice – as I’d learned to call patchouli oil – and weed. ‘It’s for us! Man, we’re starting a band!’

  He always spoke like that, putting heavy emphasis on certain words as if he had to conserve his energy for the rest of them. I laughed, mentally picturing our motley, unwashed crew in a line-up next to sequinned and styled favourites like ABC and Duran Duran. ‘A band?’

  ‘Yeah man! The landlord at The Five Bells wanted to get rid of it all cos he’s getting a better rig. He said I could take it off his hands if I repainted the bogs for him.’

  ‘Wow.’ I examined the battered amplifier and the random cables and boxes, not having a clue how any of it worked. ‘But how will Matty’s guitar be heard over the top of this lot?’

  Marsh smirked at my ignorance, scratching his long wispy beard to hide it. ‘His guitar’s got a pick-up. We just plug this’ – he held up a long cable – ‘into this and we’re in business. I’ll play bass, and for now we’ll have to do with bongos till we can get a drum kit, but, you know, it’s gonna be epic!’

  ‘Who’s going to be the lead singer?’ I foresaw fireworks – Marsh and Matty were both pretty competitive.

  ‘You are!’

  I laughed, thinking he was joking. ‘No, really. I’ll do backing vocals.’ Then I saw the intense expression on his face. ‘What? You’re not serious.’

  ‘Totally serious! Why not? You’re way more interesting to look at than the rest of us, and you’ve got a great voice! We’ve got, like, ten songs now, plus covers? That’s more than enough for a set.’

  I leaned back against the sticky kitchen counter. ‘Wow,’ I repeated, a slow smile spreading across my face. For the first time I was glad that Samantha was away. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if she’d been in the running. She looked like a red-headed Kate Bush, and her voice was just as good as mine. ‘Cool.’

  I wouldn’t have had this if I’d stayed in Salisbury.

  31

  1984

  Meredith

  Two months later, on an impulse during one of my weekly calls home from the phone box on the corner of the street, I invited Pete to come and watch the band’s first-ever live gig. I was so excited about it, and I suddenly really wanted to see a friendly face in the audience – assuming there would even be an audience. We were playing in the function room of The Five Bells. Every time I’d been in that pub previously, the only clientele had been elderly gentlemen in raincoats hunched on bar stools, grimly sipping pints and ignoring each other.

  ‘Up to London?’ Pete repeated, as if London was a four-day camel ride away.

  ‘Yes, up to London. Don’t, if you don’t want to!’

  ‘Well, I could, I suppose. It’ll be half term. Can I stay on your sofa?’

  I looked out of the phone box window and could see the pathetic excuse for a sofa that even we squatters had rejected as being too disgusting. It was languishing on its back in the front garden, looking drunk, stuffing spilling from its stained cushions. Fortunately, it was highly unlikely that any of the neighbours would complain – apparently the entire street, a once-handsome crescent of redbrick terraced apartment buildings, was a squat. Europe’s largest squat, we found out some years later when it was raided by the police and it was on the local news.

  I hadn’t confessed to Mum and Pete that I was squatting. They thought I was in a flatshare funded by my job in the local leisure centre. I did have a job there as a receptionist, but only one day a week.

  ‘Um … yeah, you can crash at our place, sure. Bring the sleeping bag.’

  I thought it would be better to let him see my current living arrangements when he arrived, rather than whip him up into a frenzy of stress about it beforehand. Pete could be a right old woman at times. But I was reasonably confident that once he’d seen how nice the boys were and how homely we’d made the place, he wouldn’t freak out as much as if I told him outright I was living in a squat.

  He didn’t know about me and Samantha yet either. I decided I’d cross that bridge when I came to it too; and that would depend entirely on whether she deigned to put in an appearance at the gig. She’d better, I thought. She’d been away at Greenham for the past three weeks, but she knew it was our first – I’d made her write the date down in her notebook last time I saw her.

  It would be a lot for Pete to take in, but I didn’t like lying to him and I felt bad that we were already so distant from one another.

  ‘So will you come?’

  ‘I’d like to, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to afford the train. And how do I get to your place from Waterloo?’

  I tutted. ‘It’s not hard. Jubilee line – the silver one – straight here. We’re a one-minute walk away from Willesden Green station. You could always hitch up if you can’t afford the train.’

  ‘Hitchhike?’ Pete sounded appalled, and I rolled my eyes.

  ‘God, Pete, grow a pair! It’s how we all get around.’

  Samantha did, anyhow. She never went to Greenham by any other means, unless someone gave her a lift.

  ‘Mez, you mustn’t! It’s so dangerous. Mum would have an eppy.’

  ‘Oh, put a sock in it, Pete, it’s fine. Look, I’ve got to go, I don’t have any more ten pences. Just aim to be there between one and three on Friday. We have to go and set up and soundcheck about four.’

  I just had time to give him the address, directions from the tube and the name of the pub in case he was late, then the beeps went, and the line was dead. I wasn’t convinced he’d really come, but I hoped he would. I missed him.

  And I wanted him to see me fronting the band. After my initial nerves, I loved being the lead singer. I became someone else in front of that microphone. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have had a field day with it, but it was as if all my grief and rage at Dad’s death channelled itself into my voice and out through the speakers.

  ‘Woah,’ Marsh had said, the first time I screamed out one of the more militant protest numbers we’d written, staring at me as if seeing me for the first time. ‘You’re terrifying.’

  I beamed. I felt like I was seeing me for the first time too.

  There was no mirror large enough in the squat to practise my snarl into, but I did it in the mirrors at work instead. As a member of staff I got free swimming passes too, and I went three times a week to swim and, more importantly, shower afterwards, the song lyrics churning through my head in constant earworms as I ploughed up and down the lane. I took all my dirty knickers into the shower with me once a week and washed them with the same shampoo I used on my hair.

  I did that on the morning of the gig – I wanted at least to have clean hair and pants for my debut. We’d practised so hard for it and, even though I said so myself, we weren’t half bad. Webbo had borrowed a mate’s drum kit, and the pub already had a backline so we had everything we needed. As I dried my hair with the wall dryer in the women’s changing room, my nostrils were filled with the scent of chlorine and my brain with the random to-do list of what needed completing before showtime: write set lists; take Pete for a pint to cal
m him down after he’d seen the squat; shoplift some gaffer tape as we were nearly out; put make-up on; inspect the sheet on my mattress to make sure it wasn’t too revolting, since Pete and I would have to top and tail; fill my oil lamps up so we’d have some light when we got home; buy – or nick – shoelaces for my DMs as the old ones kept breaking…

  I didn’t approve of stealing anything, by the way, and always wrote the purloined items down in the back of my diary. As soon as I had any money, I bought the same thing somewhere else and replaced it on the shelf of the original shop I’d nicked it from.

  I’d wanted to make a banner bearing our name, to put behind Webbo’s drum kit, but I wouldn’t have time for this gig and I didn’t have a spare sheet or any black paint. We’d called ourselves Cohen, which was the name of the people who used to live in the flat before we took it over. Their post still arrived in surprising quantities and we burned it all in the brazier. It never looked like anything interesting.

  I turned the corner into our terrace, these thoughts still chasing themselves through my mind, and was about twenty feet along the pavement before I noticed the tall figure of the woman ahead, shoulders bowed by the heavy rucksack on her back, red hair obscured by the roll of her sleeping bag…

  ‘Samantha!’ I shouted joyfully, pounding towards her as she turned and opened her arms wide, beaming at me.

  I threw myself at her. ‘You came back!’

  ‘Of course, honey – as if I’d miss your first show!’

  Then she kissed me, long and hard, and I didn’t even care that a passing dog walker sucked his teeth at us. It was only when we finally came up for air that I had the thought, Oh shit, now I’m going to have to tell Pete.

  32

  1984

  Meredith

  As debut gigs went, the first twenty minutes were pretty much par for the course. Five people in the audience, all of them connected in some way with the band. A few others stuck their heads around the door of the small function room to see what the racket was, recoiled at the wall of sound and retreated.