by Jack Benton
Someone else, then?
Slim squeezed his temples. He was missing something vital. He knew it.
45
The next day was Saturday, meaning no buses ran to Tavistock. He walked up the village to his regular vantage point and called Celia, but again received no answer.
His concern was boiling over to outright worry. He’d turned down—regrettably, now he considered it—a pass, but no woman he’d ever known would have stayed angry so long. Not when he was also technically in her employ.
There was so much he needed to tell her. The letters, his suspicion of Nick Jones, the evidence linking the teacher to the Penleven area. Then there were the letters: proof that Amos hadn’t forgotten his daughter, that he had even intended to take her with him.
There was so much he needed to ask too. Where had the family money gone? Who might Amos have trusted enough to leave Charlotte and his current project with while he went overseas?
And while it might hurt to unearth memories perhaps long buried, he wanted to know more about Celia’s supposed state of mind, and her mother’s alleged cruelty.
A clue could come from anywhere.
After exhausting his phone’s battery on the next twenty health-related establishments in his list—half of which were closed due to the weekend—he headed back to the guesthouse.
March had come on without him realising, and before he could make it up the stairs, Mrs. Greyson accosted him to help bring some garden furniture out of the shed.
She rewarded him with another special coffee on the back veranda, but this time her conversation barely strayed from the casual: observations about general village life, her garden, the moor. Slim found their talk so relaxing that he was almost sad when she stood up to clear the tea things away.
Up in his room, Slim pulled the clock out from under his bed and ran his fingers over the carvings as he listened to the gentle ticking.
Unfinished. Amos had carried it off to hide it somewhere safe, but had never returned.
Slim had put Kay’s copy of the note in the same bag and now pulled it out too. Amos had carried Charlotte off with him, but something had happened to the little girl.
Charlotte.
I will first ensure both Charlotte and my current unfinished project are safe…
A clock, as Slim had found, could be buried. But what had Amos Birch intended for the little girl? Where had he taken her?
Over the weeks Slim had built up quite a picture of Amos, Mary and Celia, but Charlotte remained a mystery. He knew nearly nothing about her other than what he had seen on the video.
He sat up. There had to be other clues there. He took the tape he was yet to return to Celia and slipped it into the player.
The grainy video appeared. Slim sat back on the bed, watching the series of home video snippets play. Amos featured most; in the farmyard, in his workshop. Sometimes walking among the trees below the farm. Mary was almost wholly absent save for a couple of interruptions, while Charlotte was a silent, mostly immobile presence in Amos Birch’s arms, or sitting close while he worked.
Slim frowned. There was something he wasn’t seeing. He glared at the screen, wishing he could sort his thoughts into focus.
And then there it was. The elephant in the room; the balloon being waved in front of his eyes that he had been leaning around all this time, refusing to accept it. He let out a deflated cry, reaching for his coat and phone at the same time. He needed to talk to Kay.
He needed to talk to Kay now.
46
‘What the hell time do you call this?’ Kay said, sounding tired and irate at the same time. ‘Can’t it wait until the morning, Slim?’
Slim looked at his watch, but his watch was gone, perhaps left in his room. It was dark, but a clear sky and near full moon illuminated the distant mound of Bodmin Moor, a spectral sea rising up along the horizon, the lumpy tors lost and abandoned boats lifted on its wake.
He didn’t remember how it had come to be night. It didn’t matter.
‘Kay. It’s about that video I sent you. I need to clarify a few things.’
‘Now? I was in the middle of something.’
‘Look, I’m sorry. It won’t take a minute. I just need to know why you found it creepy. It’s a video of a family, isn’t it? A girl, an old man, a mother in a wheelchair, a child. Right?’
‘Jesus, how much have you drunk? It’s going to kill you one day, Slim. Don’t forget that.’
‘Tell me, Kay! Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’
‘You’re as blinkered as an old horse. Yeah, I saw a family. A pretty messed up one. A girl’s voice behind a camera, a middle-aged guy acting kind of awkward in front of it, and a sour-faced crone in a chair, but that other … what’s this about, Slim?’
‘Her name’s Charlotte. She’s the three-year-old daughter of Celia Birch and she’s been missing since the night the old man disappeared.’
Kay let out a long whistle. ‘Oh, Slim. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not a child.’
47
He didn’t remember getting back to the guesthouse, only that it was morning and he was slumped against the wall on Mrs. Greyson’s back veranda, clutching an empty bottle of whisky he had taken from her cabinet. The sun was rising over the trees at the end of her garden, and birds were singing from the rooftop.
He sat up, his vision blurring as his stomach lurched. He reached out, and found Mrs. Greyson’s antique cast iron clock on the veranda beside him, the time saying a little after six-thirty.
It was an effort to get up. It was an effort to get back through the kitchen, to replace the clock on the mantle in the exact same place and to hide the bottle behind a couple of others. It was even an effort to close the front door he had left wide open, at the same moment as a voice came from the top of the stairs.
‘Mr. Hardy?’
Slim muttered something in response but neither his brain nor his ears could be sure what it was.
‘An early morning walk?’
Another mumble.
Mrs. Greyson gave a slow nod. ‘Well, I’ll call you down in a couple of hours when the breakfast things are ready.’
‘Thanks.’
It was a relief to shut himself back up in his room again. He sat on the edge of the bed, head in his hands. Cracks were appearing, threatening his sanity. Even though the revelation
(there was no child there was no child)
was another piece of the puzzle, Slim felt prematurely haunted by whatever else he might have missed.
After a breakfast where every bite left him with the urge to vomit despite Mrs. Greyson’s charitable and surreptitious leaving of a couple of paracetamol under his plate, he returned to his room and switched the video back on.
Unblinkered now, it was obvious. Amos Birch, stooping as he carried her, as though Charlotte far exceeded the weight of a small child, talking to an object which never spoke back. There was movement though; the jerk of her head as though feigning interest, the lifting of her arms, the idle kicking of her feet. The clothes Charlotte wore suggested nothing and hid greater clues, but her skin was too smooth, too pale, and attracted a slight shine from the workshop lights.
A mechanical doll. Perhaps her movements worked on voice command, or through the operating of tiny levers. The video clips never showed her close up, and from a distance her proportions were perfectly aligned to those of a three-year-old girl.
Celia had lied. There was no way she could have genuinely believed that a doll—no matter how lifelike—was her daughter.
Slim glanced up at the suitcase standing behind the door. It would be easy to pack his things and be up-country in a few hours. He would never have to think about the Birch family again.
There was no bus to Tavistock on a Sunday, but if ever there was a day when Celia would be at home, it was now. He packed some things into a rucksack and headed out.
His hangover didn’t appreciate Bodmin Moor, but his battered liver likely did. It was a stupid p
lan, one that could only be devised by a drunkard viewing the world through an alcoholic haze, but he figured the A30 was his best bet for thumbing a lift, and the quickest way to reach it was straight across Bodmin Moor.
It was after lunch before he made it, tired and wet as he stumbled through the door of the Jamaica Inn and immediately ordered a pint and whatever was the food special for the day.
From a layby on the other side of the road he attempted to hitchhike. After a fruitless hour of frantic thumb waving, certain no one would be desperate enough for conversation to pick up what must have looked like a homeless alcoholic, he caught a lift with a farmer from Stoke Climsland. Slim feigned interest as the farmer chatted amicably about the weather and his two working children, before dropping Slim off at the top of a farm lane a couple of miles outside Tavistock.
It was dark by the time he reached Celia’s street, and he felt as though he’d traversed the world a couple of times already as he trudged up to her door.
He was in no mood for subtlety. He made sure no one was nearby, then pulled the bolt cutters from his bag and jammed a protruding hook between the door and the jamb, breaking the lock with a loud crack.
He had read somewhere that the average response time for the U.K.’s police was eleven minutes, so he had just enough time to check if Celia was inside.
A quick flick of the switch inside the door told him the electric still worked. It revealed a neat if plain kitchen. No adornments, no pictures or photos on the fridge or walls, nothing to suggest anyone lived here.
He switched off the light again, preferring to use a torch he had brought. He opened a cupboard, finding it empty besides a few packets of pasta and some unopened biscuits. The fridge was similarly bare, containing a single carton of milk. The sell-by date was the same day Slim had last seen her.
A door opened on to a plain living room. There was no TV. Two armchairs angled toward each other faced an empty coffee table. One looked used, its seat depressed, the arms a little worn. The other looked new. Like the kitchen there were no pictures on the walls, nothing personal of any kind. Slim walked through it, careful not to touch anything, and opened an inner door.
The room was dark, the curtains drawn. The shape of a bed revealed itself as a rectangular black lump, one not straight to the wall but partly pulled away as though someone had needed to get behind it.
And here, finally, were signs of disorder, of clothes strewn across the floor, bottles of shampoo and hairspray alongside empty beer cans and even a cardboard Pringles tube. Scattered across everything were pieces of paper, their corners torn where pins had remained embedded into walls when they were ripped free.
He switched on the light. Several dozen grainy images of a doll’s face stared back at him, taken from a paused TV screen with a camera and then printed and enlarged on a colour copier. Slim felt his stomach lurch. His knees trembled and he squatted before the shock made him fall.
‘Oh, Celia,’ he whispered.
48
Now the parameters of his search could be narrowed, tracking down Celia was far easier.
It took him just three calls to find her. Not a nurse as she claimed, but a patient at Melton Road Private Psychiatric Hospital, where she had been a resident of one kind or another since 1997, the year after her father’s disappearance.
A doctor told Slim—posing as a family friend—that Celia had been an outpatient since early 2006, living in a care-assisted flat in Tavistock, allowed to sleep there three nights a week, and even to hold a part-time job in a local factory.
Her illness: delusional schizophrenia. The doctor explained that since her mid-teens Celia had struggled with an understanding of what was real and what was not. Certain things, he said, triggered or perhaps suppressed by traumatic events, had left her believing aspects of her life were real, when in fact they were creations of her own imagination.
Charlotte. Her life as a nurse. Perhaps even her rape.
‘I need to see her,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Slim’s head spun as he waited for the doctor’s words.
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. A few days ago she was in an accident.’
Slim listened in shock as the doctor recounted that Celia, banned from driving, had overturned a stolen Ford Fiesta while fleeing from police. It turned out she was also responsible for a prior recent theft of a 1994 Rover Metro, a car which had been found abandoned on a farm lane not far outside Tavistock.
Slim squeezed his eyes shut, wishing he could turn back the clock.
‘Where is she now?’
‘Derriford Hospital. The intensive care unit.’
After calling off and steadying his nerves with a can of beer from a corner shop, Slim tried to call Don, to hold off the savaging of Nick’s career, but got no answer. Instead, he called the hospital and asked to speak to Celia.
A little stricter about giving out personal information than the psychiatric hospital had been, Slim spent a few minutes convincing the staff member he spoke to that he was a distant relative. Finally he was put through to a doctor, who told him Celia had suffered head injuries in the crash. She was unconscious, unlikely to recover.
He wandered around Tavistock in a daze. The bench which had been his bed the previous night became his crutch where he sat and drank, descending through levels of pitifulness until a man with a shaggy beard, shabbier clothes, and gummy eyes asked him why he was crying and offered to share a bottle of White Lightning.
Everything had fallen apart. Slim tried to recall if he had helped a single person with his investigation, and came up with a negative. He had been warned away so many times, but he had kept digging, kept cracking his head against the wall which had now collapsed. As a result, Celia, who might have known a modicum of peace before his interference, lay dying.
Amos Birch, he saw now, had done what he could to help his daughter. Traumatised by some event, he had created a mechanical doll to fill a void in his daughter’s life.
‘He built it for her,’ he mumbled to the drunk, who nodded sagely. ‘He built that thing to help her.’
‘Bit much,’ the drunk said. ‘Could’ve just gone down Tescos, bought one of them Disney dolls. Girl must have been messed up a bit worse, if you ask me.’
‘Yeah, she was.’
‘Wonder why, eh.’
‘What?’
‘Ain’t many mothers send a lass mental. Never knew mine, but you know. Must have been some trauma.’
Sure that the drunk was humouring what he likely regarded as a drunken lament, Slim felt another click on the cog slowly rolling him into the dark.
He took a last swig of White Lightning while the drunk beside him babbled on about social services, then Slim sat up. He passed the bottle back, thinking about Charlotte.
There was more. There had to be.
Excusing himself, he headed back into town, hoping he hadn’t missed the last bus to Plymouth.
49
Slim clutched the photocopy in his hands. A single beaded tear slowly spread itself out, burrowing into the paper. It had landed on Celia’s name, and the C was slowly expanding, the ink blooming like an algae spot in a pond.
Merrifield, Charlotte Ann
Mother: Merrifield, Celia. Father: unknown
Born June 19th, 1992.
Died June 19th, 1992.
Cause of death: stillbirth.
Slim read the information over and over. Each time his eyes traced over the brief lines he felt another piece of his sanity stripping away.
And if it was so hard for him, how had it been for Celia?
There had been a baby after all. A tiny little girl who had died in the womb, never to open her innocent little eyes.
Charlotte Merrifield.
Charlotte Birch.
Slim called Derriford Hospital, asking about visiting hours to see Celia, but was told she was still in intensive care, still unresponsive. He was welcome to come to the hospital,
but her room was off limits.
He felt like getting drunk then trying to force his way into her room to say he was sorry, but he was tiring of the mess he was making of himself. There had to be something positive he could do that might actually help.
Amos Birch had taken Charlotte with him when he had gone to hide his unfinished clock from the wrath of his wife. If the clock was buried out on Bodmin Moor, it made sense that Charlotte was too.
Bodmin Moor was vast. Slim would never find it. Unless….
No more buses. He was done with cramped seats, twisting country lanes and long pauses pressed against the hedge while a tractor squeezed past. He had a credit card, so it was time to see if it still worked.
He visited a hardware store to purchase a durable spade then he went back outside and hailed down a taxi.
50
He had to wait until late afternoon, until the shadows stretching over the moor were in a similar position to those he remembered on the day he had found the clock before he could get his bearings. Even though he found the rocky area west of the path where he had tripped, he was still wandering among the stones for a good half an hour, wondering if he would ever find the right spot again, before stumbling across a disturbed patch of ground where a finger of torn plastic bag still fluttered out of the earth.
Here.
He pushed the spade slowly into the ground until it met resistance. Then, using the spade’s head and his hands, he scraped away the peat to reveal the object that had been buried below the clock.
The wooden casket had been wrapped in cellophane which had torn, allowing the water to soak and stain the wood. It still felt sturdy, however, and when Slim pulled the heavy box out of the earth, something inside gave a dry rattle.
The lid had been fitted water-tight. Slim used the edge of the spade to pry it open, his fingers shaking as he lifted it up.
