Safe With Me

by K. L. Slater

  I calculate I can afford to burn far greater quantities than this first batch, which will enable me to get through the backlog much quicker.

  Upstairs, I fill two bin bags and drag them separately out on to the landing one-handed. Naturally, as a postal worker, I’m already aware of the weight of mail but the average person would certainly be surprised by the hindrance of it.

  Mail also carries an importance all of its own in that people value and attach high status to their mail. I feel a twinge in my stomach. It’s regretful I’ve not been able to get these letters to the rightful owners.

  I look back over my shoulder into the spare room and take some satisfaction in spotting a piece of carpet where there had only been cascading letters. Granted, it is a very small clearing but at least it signifies I’m making headway at long last. That feels good.

  I haul the bags awkwardly downstairs and into the kitchen, leaving one by the back door and dragging the other over to the incinerator, piling fresh mail on top of the still-glowing embers. When it is half-full, I sprinkle on lighter fluid as I work to ensure the flames grab hold throughout.

  With one last spurt of fluid on top for good measure, I strike a match and light the paper via the bottom holes. I replace the lid immediately and stand back. After just a few seconds, the odd spark spits out from the base holes of the unit and it’s away.

  As the light increases within and I hear the crackles and splutters as the flames take hold, the warm glow inside me builds too.

  The wind whips up and there is even the odd spit of rain but the incinerator is a substantial piece of equipment and the flames continue their work easily, undisturbed by the elements.

  After a few minutes, I retrieve a long poker from the unused ornamental set on my stone-surround fireplace and take it back outside. The flames seem to have died down again, judging by the disappearance of the glow and lack of noise from within.

  When I lift the lid with a gloved hand, I see with relief that the bulk of the mail has reduced to a thick layer of ashes. I jab around with the poker, and it’s gratifying to see there are no large pieces of unscorched paper.

  I repeat the process. Half-fill the incinerator, stand back and wait and then check through the ashes.

  It all seems to be ticking along nicely.

  After I’ve dragged down another three bags full of mail, I make a cup of tea and stand cradling the hot drink outside, savouring the evaporation of my worries with each load of incriminating paper that burns down to nothing.

  I finish my tea just as the third batch finishes. I figure I can probably do one more lot before letting it cool down completely and binning the ashes.

  I half-fill it again with the contents of the second bin bag, packing the paper down firmly and sprinkling in the lighter fluid periodically to help the flames get a hold.

  The incinerator is very full but the lid goes on easily, and I throw three lit matches in, just to make sure it stays alight.

  Standing back, I wait for the comfort of the crackle and the glow and wonder why I hadn’t thought about doing this before the mail situation got so bad.

  Granted, it is taking a little more time than I had initially hoped, but if I can burn eight to ten loads a day, I should get through the backlog easily by the end of the week.

  Thick tendrils of smoke curl out from under the incinerator lid and stream from the bottom. The crackling and spitting has grown quite loud but none of the neighbours are out as far as I can see and, apart from the hum of traffic and the odd dog barking in the distance, all remains quiet.

  I’d better not pack the incinerator quite as high when I process the next batch.

  I become aware of the sound of a car slowing outside. My heart begins to race but I take a deep breath and tell myself it’s probably only Linda, Mrs Peat’s care assistant.

  The previously pleasant smell of burning now feels quite acrid in my throat.

  Car doors open and then slam shut.

  My head screams at me to go back inside, but my legs freeze me to the spot.

  The cracking and spitting noises emanating from the incinerator seem louder than ever and smoke is puthering out now, top and bottom.

  My fingernails dig into the fleshy mounds on both palms. ‘Please don’t let anyone come. Please.’ I mutter the words aloud as if that might increase their power.

  I hardly ever get visitors and the only unannounced callers are always canvassers who ignore my ‘No Callers’ sign in the front window.

  My heart hammers out a frenzied rhythm which my mind immediately assigns words to.

  If they come. . . they’ll see the mail.

  If they come. . . they’ll see the mail.

  If they come. . . they’ll see the mail.

  The phrase dances around in my head on a loop until I can barely think straight. And that’s when I hear them.

  Voices.

  The gate latch rattles, and I peer around the corner of the house just as two uniformed figures appear at the end of the drive. I have failed to lock up the drive gates behind me in my eagerness to burn the mail. How could I have been so stupid?

  My head feels light and airy, and the features of the two police officers walking slowly blur until everything about their faces looks wrong.

  I glance, wild-eyed, at the overflowing bin bag that is propped up at the back door. I lurch forward, past the sputtering incinerator towards the mail bags. I must get them out of sight.

  The lid of the incinerator dislodges and slides off completely, landing with a terrific clatter and echoing around the bare concrete yard.

  The wind takes hold of its flaming contents and the whole yard suddenly fills with a maelstrom of seemingly millions of tiny grey cinders.

  Chapter 41

  Joan Peat

  The arrangements for when Anna was first discharged from the hospital – or the ‘clinic’ – as that interfering social worker had preferred to call it, had been made while she was still receiving treatment.

  It was decided that Joan would look after her – a sort of informal fostering arrangement – until Anna turned eighteen just over a year later.

  That was the sort of thing you could do in those days. Joan frowned and reached for her knitting bag. You could cut through all the silly red tape and make decisions solely based on what was best for the child.

  Joan had no hesitation when she was approached by social services. There was no question she was the obvious choice to support and temporarily care for Anna. After all, the girl was like a daughter to her. Up until that terrible day, she had spent more time at Joan’s house than in her own.

  But the authorities hadn’t warned her that the person who would return from the clinic would be a very different person to the girl she used to know.

  When the time was right, it was going to be very difficult for Joan to explain what happened to Anna. . . to reveal the horror Anna didn’t yet know about.

  Joan eased out the scarf she was knitting for the church’s Christmas raffle and slipped a few key stitches as she began to click the needles.

  She always got a bit het up when she thought about pretty, carefree Anna, as she used to be before the tragedy.

  It was such an awful shame there was more to come.

  Chapter 42

  Present day

  Anna

  I rush through the thick cloud of smoke and grab all three bags from the doorway.

  I drag them to the end of the small kitchen and throw a couple of tea towels over the top to cover the letters haemorrhaging out through the torn sides.

  Coughing and hacking, I turn back to the door just as the uniforms appear.

  ‘Hello, are you Anna Clarke?’ The female officer offers her hand and bats smoke away from her face with the other. ‘I’m PC Cullen and this is my colleague, PC Storer.’

  They look mismatched. He is relatively short and on the plump side while she is taller and whip-thin.

  ‘Hope we haven’t caught you at a bad time,’ he remarks be
hind a thin fog of smoke and bits. ‘Looks like you’re quite busy.’

  Understatement of the fucking year.

  ‘I’m having a clear-out.’

  I stand by the still-whirling contents of the incinerator, my words slow and faint.

  They glance around the yard and then at each other.

  ‘Might we come in for a minute or two?’ PC Cullen breaks the silence. ‘It’s about the accident you witnessed a few days ago on Green Road.’

  My breathing steadies.

  No one has reported me for burning undelivered mail. They don’t know about the spare room mail mountain upstairs. They are here about the accident, probably as a result of my phone call to PC Brixham.

  ‘I suppose you’d better come in,’ I say curtly.

  I’d already shut Albert away in the front room while I burned outside so we sit at the table in the middle room.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ PC Cullen glances around the room like I might have stashed a husband or a lodger somewhere behind the furniture.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s not a crime, is it?’

  She looks like the kind of person who plays squash after work on a Monday while everyone else crumples in front of the television with a glass of wine and packet of crisps.

  She smiles. ‘Of course not, just curious.’

  ‘I’m trying to find out what that smell is,’ I say. ‘If you were wondering.’

  They both sniff the air, and PC Storer shrugs.

  ‘Can’t smell a great deal apart from burning,’ he says, and his colleague shakes her head.

  He reaches across his puckering jacket into his pocket and pulls out a small notebook and pencil.

  ‘We just want to go over a few details about the accident, Anna, if that’s OK?’

  I glance out of the window and see that the smoke seems to be dying down at last.

  ‘Can you tell us exactly what happened that day?’ he begins. ‘Did you see the accident happen?’

  I take a breath, trying to remember to take my time and make sure I don’t say anything that I might later regret. I don’t want to lie to them exactly, but if I tell the truth, then Amanda Danson is going to find it much easier to wriggle out of her responsibilities.

  I am absolutely certain she mowed Liam down that day due to speed and lack of attention to the road. Yet the police refuse to deal with hunches and intuition. Everything has to have cast-iron proof, regardless of it allowing a low-life like her to escape justice.

  I know how guilty she’s feeling about not paying attention to the road but I can hardly say I’ve been snooping and read her Facebook message to Liam.

  ‘The car was speeding and knocked him off his motorbike,’ I say.

  As I utter the words I see it happen in my mind.

  He looks up sharply from his notes. ‘You witnessed the moment of impact?’

  I nod.

  ‘Can you tell us exactly what you saw, Anna?’ PC Cullen asks.

  I have her full attention now. Her beady eyes have stopped their judgemental scan of the room.

  ‘I saw the car approaching head-on. She was going far too fast and. . . well, the driver sort of bent down a bit and then it happened.’

  ‘Bent down a bit?’

  ‘As if she was reaching for something,’ I say. ‘That’s what it looked like to me, anyway.’

  They glance at each other, and PC Storer begins furiously scribbling away on his notepad.

  This is probably the most exciting thing he has investigated for months. Kids shoplifting and people reporting antisocial behaviour are all that seem to happen around here.

  ‘Are you saying she wasn’t watching the road?’ PC Cullen probes. ‘How sure are you of what you witnessed?’

  I shrug, careful to appear as though I’m reticent to point the finger of blame, yet hopefully remaining convincing enough to give Amanda Danson a massive problem.

  ‘I was at a bit of a distance.’ I’m getting into my stride now. ‘All I know is that her face was there one minute then not the next. Her head seemed lower and near the middle of the windscreen, as if she was bending forward to reach down for something. A phone, perhaps.’

  PC Cullen widens her eyes at her colleague, as if to say ‘told you so’. I’m beginning to warm to her after all.

  At last, he stops making notes and asks me lots of boring technical stuff like how far away was I exactly? How many seconds between initially seeing the car and then witnessing the impact was it exactly?

  I rub at my prickling face like my hand is a flannel. I really need to learn a lesson from this. I have had plenty of time to revisit the scene of the accident and get the story crystal clear in my head and yet I’ve neglected to do so.

  I have been back there a couple of times but not to measure tyre marks on the bloody road.

  I know for certain what happened that day. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t actually witness the bit about the phone.

  I have other irrefutable evidence, not only from the past but from the here and now; Amanda’s guilt-ridden Facebook message, her pathetic snivelling visit to the hospital and the fact she is still going to work and acting as if nothing has happened.

  This is the real evidence that everyone else is missing.

  ‘It’s hard to say exactly what distance was involved. All I remember is that poor motorcyclist, flying up in the air then landing in a broken heap on the ground. It happened so fast, you see.’

  ‘We understand that, Anna,’ PC Cullen says gravely. ‘But you are our only witness of the accident happening, so it’s really important we get this right. What happened next, after the initial impact?’

  I note with some satisfaction that, from what she says, the Mercedes driver behind me must have completely missed the accident actually happening.

  I take a moment to recreate the scene in my head.

  ‘Well, the driver got out of her car and stood looking at Liam lying in the road. She seemed more shocked than sorry.’

  ‘Let’s just stick with the facts,’ PC Storer remarks. ‘She got out of the car, then what?’

  ‘It looked to me like she was thinking about getting back in and driving off,’ I say. ‘Then people started coming out of their houses and then she had no choice but to stay and face what she’d done.’

  ‘How did you get that impression?’ PC Cullen interjects. ‘Did she physically start to get back in the car?’

  I shrug. ‘Not exactly, but—’

  ‘We have to record exactly what happened here, Miss Clarke,’ her colleague chips in again. ‘Not what might have happened.’

  Out of nowhere I start thinking about what’s upstairs, directly above our heads. My neck tendons strain and begin to cramp my shoulders.

  If all the undelivered mail falls through the ceiling now, I will lose my job and could be prosecuted. These two officers might even arrest me and take me to a holding cell.

  My heart wallops away at my ribcage while my old therapist’s voice appears in my head and tries to help me out.

  ‘Calm down. The mail will not fall through the ceiling and in a few days it will all be gone.’

  Still, I feel a desperate need to get them out of the house as quickly as possible.

  ‘You OK, Miss Clarke?’

  PC Cullen is watching me again with her mean little button eyes.

  Then she says: ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘No!’ I almost jump out of my seat but just about manage to stop myself.

  If she sees the bin bags in the kitchen they’ll search the house. I realise too late that I’ve raised my voice.

  I smile and cough. ‘Sorry, I’ve not had much sleep since the accident. I find it hard to concentrate on conversation at times.’

  ‘You do seem on edge,’ PC Storer murmurs, tapping his pencil on his notepad and studying my face.

  ‘It’s because you’re making me remember it all.’ I feel irritated again. ‘It was traumatic. I expect it’s normal to feel on edge, isn’t it?’<
br />
  He gives a quick nod and glances back down at the notebook.

  My breaths are getting shorter and quicker. I need to bring this to an end.

  ‘Everyone was fussing around the driver of the car,’ I say quickly. ‘Liam was lying in the road; I didn’t move him or anything. I just held his hand, comforted him.’

  ‘You waited with him until the ambulance came,’ PC Storer says.

  I nod.

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’ He pauses his pencil eagerly above the paper.

  I shake my head. There is no way I’m going to share the moment where Liam asked me to help him. His words aren’t meant for some grubby police notebook.

  ‘From what I saw it was entirely her fault,’ I say firmly. ‘Liam did nothing wrong; it was her. She was distracted; she shouldn’t be on the road.’

  The air in the room has turned thick and stagnant. My words seem to hang there, out of place.

  ‘Take your time and have a think through what happened again,’ PC Cullen says slowly, sliding a small card across the table. ‘And if you remember anything else, anything more specific, give us a call.’

  I nod and rub at a small scorch mark on the table top. They’ll sit staring at me all day, if I let them.

  ‘If that’s all then,’ I say, getting up. ‘I’ll show you out.’

  They both stand, and PC Storer strolls over to the window.

  ‘Bit windy for burning your rubbish today,’ he says, arching his back and stretching. ‘You’ll have the neighbours up in arms about their washing if you’re not careful.’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see PC Cullen moving towards the door at the staircase.

  ‘OK if I use your bathroom before we go, Anna?’ She points upstairs.

  To use the bathroom, she’ll have to walk past the spare room. I left the door open when I dragged the bags of mail down to burn. She won’t even have to snoop to see the mail mountain in all its glory.

  Instantly flooding with adrenaline, I fly over to the other side of the room and position myself between PC Cullen and the stairs door.