by C. J. Skuse
We’re greeted on the second floor by a rather-too-brown office, an aged monkey puzzle, a smell of turps, and a short cross-eyed woman called Mandy whose shoes don’t fit her properly. Neil dispenses with the pleasantries and asks her straight out about the lock-up in John Knapp’s name.
‘Oh, yes, certainly,’ says Mandy, a sweet-natured Scouser who seems so in awe of Neil he could ask her to get undressed and I think she’d oblige. She doesn’t ask for my ID, which is good because I don’t have any on me. Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t be doing this. The police have told Neil it’s all in hand, but they haven’t made the John Knapp connection yet and Neil has, so it’s his collar. He hasn’t said as much, but that’s the impression I get. He’s more animated than I’ve seen him before. And I don’t think he’s had a drink today. He’s focused. Finally as hungry for answers as I am.
Mandy plods over to a large dark brown and taupe filing cabinet in the corner and pulls out the second drawer down, sifting out a file halfway along. ‘Seventeen B, Larkwood Trading Estate. It’s not far from here actually. Go up the high street and turn left at Clarks Shoes, and keep going along until you reach St Bartholomew’s Road. It’s halfway along there, down a little alleyway.’
‘Do you remember the guy who’s leasing it? Have you met him?’ asks Neil.
‘Yeah, vaguely,’ says Mandy. ‘Tall, quite stocky, rough-looking. Said he wanted the garage for his van I think.’
‘What sort of van? Bedford? Camper?’
‘Doughnuts.’
‘Doughnuts?’ I say, homing in on Neil’s face. He’s caught the same drift. He knows what I’m thinking: the doughnut van on the CCTV the night Ellis went missing. It was there, more or less opposite her flat. And it hasn’t been there since. ‘Oh god.’
‘What’s he done?’ says Mandy, sitting at her desk and holding her coffee with two hands like she’s preparing for a juicy bit of gossip.
‘Is there a spare key for the garage?’ asks Neil.
‘No, the leaseholders put on their own padlocks I’m afraid. Once someone leases it, it’s up to them how they secure it.’
‘Okay, no bother. Many thanks for your help.’
‘What’s he done, though?’ she’s still asking as we’re walking out the door. Neil doesn’t say one word to me down the entire staircase. He doesn’t say one word until we’re on St Bartholomew’s Road, breathing out cold air, scanning turnings for the Larkwood Trading Estate. And even then it’s me who speaks first.
‘That van hasn’t been on that seafront for the past four days.’
‘Doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ he says.
‘It means everything,’ I say. ‘What if she’s in there?’
‘Then we’ll find her,’ he says, and at that moment I want him to hold my hand so much but he doesn’t. He slips his hands into his coat pockets and retrieves a pair of leather gloves. He pulls them on.
We turn into the trading estate down the narrow, puddle-strewn alley Mandy mentioned, and it opens out onto a wide expanse of gravelled land, flanked on both sides by garage blocks. They all have corrugated metal doors with their numbers scrawled on them in white paint. Neil keeps walking, so I keep walking. I can’t remember the last time I took a full breath.
We walk quickly until we reach 15a then we slow down – 15b, 16a, 16b, 17a.
17b.
I look around to see if anyone’s coming. Not a soul. For a garage right in the middle of town, it’s surprisingly lonely. The distant main road thrums and I clasp the back of Neil’s arm as he starts unpicking the lock with some implement on a Swiss Army Knife he’s fished from his back pocket.
‘What if he’s in there?’ I whisper.
Neil stands back and bangs on the door so loudly my chest ache radiates outwards, along my arms, sizzling into my hands. The whole estate echoes but no sound comes from within. I can’t stop thinking about The Silence of the Lambs.
Neil continues to pick the lock and finally, with a satisfying clunk sound, the padlock releases and falls to the gravel, landing in a puddle with a resounding splash. He pulls back one of the doors and then reaches inside to release the chain bolt that’s holding the other door in place.
And there it is – the doughnut van.
There are posters on its outer walls for Extra Large Slushie’s £2! Hot dog’s and slider’s! Candy Floss, from only £1.50 per bag! Five hot doughnut’s for £1! Free can of drink when you buy ten churro’s! We serve hot drinks to! Everything comes with a side order of exclamation marks and misplaced punctuation. I’m trying not to focus on how much those extra apostrophes irritate me, trying to keep my brain focussed on the present. The van is the only thing in the garage, we can see that now. There’s nothing and nobody else. Neil bangs on the side.
‘Ellis? Ellis, you in there? It’s Scants.’ We wait. No answer.
He breaks the lock on the van door and slowly pulls it open, holding me back with his other hand. The pervading stench of burnt sugar and cooked onions wafts out, but there’s still no sign of life. Just a small pile of boxes labelled Ribena and Sausages. Stacks of paper cups in plastic wrapping. Catering-size bottles of red and brown sauce with crusty spouts. Small and large plastic buckets of candy floss, blue and pink, lined up along the high shelves. Neil goes in.
‘Anything?’ My heart’s beating like I’ve been running.
He’s rifling through the two under-counter cupboards. He pulls out a black sports bag and settles it in the middle of the van floor. He unzips it, starts looking through. Clothes. Shaving foam. Disposable razors.
‘What is that? What’s in there?’ I say, folding my arms.
‘He’s been sleeping in here, by the looks,’ he says, pulling out a sleeping bag and a thin, stained pillow from the same compartment. He zips the bag back up again quickly, before I can fully see what he’s found in there but I see enough. Unwashed clothes. Razors and shaving cream. Two kitchen knives. A roll of duct tape. A packet of reusable cable ties. Ripped open.
Neil pushes it back inside the cupboard. ‘It doesn’t mean he’s got her. The good thing is it’s still here.’
‘The good thing?’ I cry. ‘What if he’s used it already and put it all back here?’
‘Don’t think about that, Foy.’
‘How can I not think about that?’
I utterly lose it outside the garage block. It’s all Neil can do to calm me down. He locks up and somehow manages to get me back to Ellis’s flat with only two passers-by asking me if I need any assistance.
Once inside, he settles me down on the armchair. I don’t know when he did it but at some point between the garages and here, he’s wrapped his coat around me.
‘Maybe I should go back to the garages,’ he says. ‘See if anyone turns up.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ I say. I don’t want to be here, let alone by myself, surrounded by stark, oppressive lighting and the pervading smell of rotten cabbages and mould. Balls has even removed the lightshade from the one bulb.
Neil sits on the coffee table before me and rubs my arms up both sides. ‘You’re still shaking.’
‘What do we do now?’ He stands up. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere,’ he replies. ‘I’m just gonna have a look around.’ He stands up and disappears into Ellis’s bedroom. Seagulls squawk outside the patio window – someone’s dropped a whole box of chips on the pavement. When Neil comes back in, he stands in the doorway, a quizzical frown on his face.
‘Can I run something past you? Something that’s been tossing around my head since we were here earlier.’
‘Yeah,’ I sniff, trying to hold my hand still.
‘There was a picture hanging on her bedroom wall last time I was here, right? Frida Kahlo.’
‘Who?’
‘Doesn’t matter, self-portrait. Anyway it’s missing. When I arrived here four days ago I found a few scraps of broken glass. Tiny scraps. Some in the bedroom, some in the lounge.’
‘Right, so what?’
‘The picture was in a glass frame, so let’s imagine for a second that the picture fell and broke at some point the day she went missing.’
‘Okay.’
‘Her bedroom window has a crack in it. Now, I can’t remember if it had a crack in it four days ago but the landlord seems to think it’s a new development so let’s assume that crack is fresh as well, right?’
‘Which suggests…?’
‘A forced entry.’
‘Through the bedroom window?’
‘Yeah. Window’s hidden from the road under the fire escape. The lock’s not working on it and the handle spins right round. Suggests a forced entry, doesn’t it?’
‘So you’re thinking Knapp forced his way into the bedroom and knocked the picture off the wall?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not quite. You said her bed was damp, yeah?’
‘Yeah, it was. You said it was cos the whole place is damp.’
‘Well, what if I was wrong and he got in there, expecting her to be in bed but she wasn’t in bed. She was in the bath at the time.’
‘Okay.’
I don’t know where he’s going with this but I’m still shaking so much I can barely focus on his face. He’s moving about the flat from one room to another, like he’s retracing the steps, his long coat sweeping out behind him.
‘He comes into the bathroom, surprises her. She’s in the bath, or maybe she’s just got out of it. She goes to scream but he grabs her by the neck. That’s why nobody heard anything. They struggle.’
I don’t want to think about this but he’s forcing the images into my mind.
‘She manages to get away, runs into the bedroom and tries to shut the door but something’s hanging on it, a coat.’ He points up to the bedroom doorframe where there’s a chunk of wood gouged out. ‘Consistent with a hanger, yeah?’
‘Yeah. But that could have been done any time.’
Undeterred, he continues. ‘Knapp bursts in to the bedroom. Grabs her again. More struggling, maybe against the wall, the picture falls to the floor and breaks.’
‘Maybe she cuts her foot on the glass because she’s barefoot,’ I suggest. ‘And that’s where the blood comes from?’
‘Maybe, yeah. Then he forces her down onto the bed. That’s why the bed was damp. Because she was still wet from the bath.’
‘Oh please, Neil, I don’t want to hear anymore.’
He stops talking. Next thing I know he’s kneeling down in front of me, looking into my eyes. ‘I need you to go back to The Lalique and wait for me.’
‘No. Why?’
‘I think whatever happened to Ellis happened right here. I don’t think he took her anywhere. Do you remember the landlord saying he wanted three things put back right by January?’
‘Yeah, the broken window, he wanted the carpet cleaned and—’ We both look into the kitchen at the same time. ‘Something about the floor.’
Neil walks over to the kitchen and stands in the middle of the rug. ‘There was white lino down here last time I visited Ellis. I know that because I had a go at her about it. It was looking grubby. She said the landlord was going to fit it properly, it was only a cut off. But it’s not there anymore. Now there’s just this rug.’
‘What do you mean?’
He kicks up one corner of the thin, ugly looking rug. ‘It wasn’t bare floorboards before.’
‘Maybe Sandy Balls took up the lino himself when he tidied?’ I suggest, watching him pull back the whole rug into a long roll. Neil walks around on the bare floorboards. A couple of them wobble. They’re loose. And there’s bloody fingerprints on one of them. Neil’s looking at me but I can’t take my eyes off the boards.
And it’s then that the smell registers – a smell that brings bile into my mouth. The smell that’s been in the room all along, but was masked by the damp and the aromas of thousands of cooked meals permeating the wallpaper. A smell that now becomes stronger with the revealing of the bare boards.
My hands go to my mouth and I want to be sick. All I can do is shake my head. Neil comes back to me, holding me firmly by both knees. ‘Go back to the hotel. I’ll come as soon as I can.’
I shake my head again, tears falling down over my fingers.
‘I don’t want you seeing this.’
‘Don’t make me go. I need to stay here. If she’s here, I need to be here.’
He stands. ‘Go into the bedroom then. Don’t come into the kitchen, alright?’
Again, I ignore him and walk behind him into the kitchen. He kicks back the rug in its entirety.
He grabs his Swiss Army Knife from his back pocket and bends down to inspect the boards more closely. Two of them wobble under his touch. I pull my jumper cuff over my mouth and nose. I don’t know if it’s in my mind or if it’s in the room but the smell is even stronger now.
25
We visited the little shop two days before Bonfire Night that last year Ellis was staying with us – the last November I ever saw her – and Old Beattie who worked in there had a surprise for us. Books, books and more books.
‘I’m moving to Australia,’ she says, ‘to live with my son. And I’m getting rid of all my books. You two are my best customers so you get first pick.’
And so we were shown through the back of the shop, the magical place we never dreamed existed, into a rather ramshackle stairwell and up the little steps into a small flat. In one room was a huge bookcase that filled the wall and it was stacked with books by every author we’d ever heard of. Dickens, Shakespeare, Wilde, Austen, the Brontës, and loads and loads of children’s books too.
‘They were my son’s,’ Beattie says proudly, leaning on her cane. ‘You take what you like, girls. Any that don’t go, there’s a van coming to collect them for charity.’
Beattie’s already asked Mum if we would like some books, but Mum says we can only have three each. We ‘have enough books as it is’ apparently. And choosing the three I want is terribly hard. Ellis doesn’t have any problem at all – she chooses a Beatrix Potter compendium which is cheating really because there’s loads of books in there, a picture book called The Reluctant Giant and a pop up Hansel and Gretel. I pick a Roald Dahl treasury, which is cheating really too because it’s lots of books in one but if Ellis can do it then so can I, a book about horses and a treasury of children’s verse.
That’s where the poetry book came from. Beattie’s house.
I still repeat some of the poems to myself every now and again at odd moments in my life – before exams, job interviews, smear tests. ‘Wynken, Blinken and Nod’, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, ‘Matilda, Who Told Lies, and was Burned to Death’, There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly, Never Smile at a Crocodile. They sort of calm me.
I’m internally repeating the Old Woman one now, as I process this latest awful discovery. There is a body under our feet. And it could be my best friend.
‘He must have watched her for weeks,’ says Neil, trying to prise up the first of the two wobbly floorboards with the slotted screwdriver on his Swiss Army Knife. I stand over him, holding the pink Snow White and the Seven Dwarves torch he’s found in one of the bin bags. ‘Right opposite her flat. Right under her nose.’
‘She swallowed the goat to catch the dog, She swallowed the dog to catch the cat, She swallowed the cat to catch the bird—’
The smell makes me gag, as the first board comes up. I stuff my jumper cuff into my mouth and try to concentrate on the smell of washing powder but the stench still gets through – rotten meat and a sickly sweet perfume. It’s making water leak into my mouth. Neil keeps asking if I need to go but I stay and hold the torch, still wrapped in his coat. I can’t feel my own fingernails as they dig into my arms.
‘She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly – Perhaps she’ll die.’
One floorboard is out. Then, with some effort, he pulls up the other one. I can’t lo
ok inside the hole. I just look at Neil.
‘Torch?’ he says, holding out his hand for it. I pass it to him. His forehead is sweaty and his cheeks all red from bending over. He’s opened up a large gap in the boards and ducks his head down inside, angling the torch to illuminate the void. When he comes up, he breathes out long and hard. His face gives nothing away.
I can’t remember any more of the rhyme. It’s stuck in a groove Perhaps she’ll die. Perhaps she’ll die. Perhaps she’ll die. It doesn’t matter anyway – it hasn’t helped. I’m bursting at the seams, ready to lose myself completely to a meltdown. I’m a dam holding in a raging tide. All I can do is pray. ‘Please God, please God, please—’
Neil can’t lie to me. But he can’t tell me the truth either. I start unravelling.
‘Is it?’ I ask, steeling myself. ‘Is it her?’ He still says nothing. ‘Neil, is it her? Please tell me. Is it Ellis?’
‘I can’t see it clearly. It’s wrapped up in the lino,’ he says. He bends over and roots around for a little longer. The waiting is agony.
‘Get her out of there, get her out, get her out! Please, please, please—’
I don’t think my heart can take anymore and I can’t remember taking a complete breath in minutes. When he comes up, he just looks at me.
‘WHAT?’
‘It’s not her. It’s not Ellis,’ he pants. ‘The face is wrapped up but I’m sure from the clothes it’s him. He’s got a big piece of glass in his neck.’
The air leaves my body and I slump against the kitchen cupboards.
‘She’s killed him? John Knapp? She’s killed him?’ I gasp.
Neil turns to me, blinking. He can barely process it either. ‘Yeah, she has.’
26
Wednesday, 6th November (early morning)
There’s a poem by Hillaire Belloc I keep thinking of from the book. It reminds me of Ellis.
