I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  I moved even closer.

  This time, I could see what had reflected back at me from inside the pile: a thin sheet of cellophane, rain-dotted and crinkled. As I angled the light into the space, I caught sight of more, and then more, and then saw that there was a whole collection: twenty, maybe thirty sheets. I realized too that the sheets of cellophane weren’t flat, but conical in shape, and that each one had a label attached to it.

  On each of the labels something had been handwritten.

  ‘David?’ Richard called from behind me. ‘What can you see in there?’

  I dropped to my haunches at the sleepers.

  ‘Bouquets of flowers,’ I said.

  21

  I reached in, my fingers brushing the cellophane of the one nearest to me, and pulled at it. The plastic snapped as I yanked it out through the gap. Inside was a bunch of yellow, red and pink carnations, but they’d just begun to turn: the petals had drooped, the edges fraying and fringed with the faint brown of decay.

  The label, originally attached to the plastic with a staple, gently fell away, fluttering into my lap. When I picked it up and turned it over, I found a handwritten message smudged with damp and earth.

  I miss you x

  My eyes lingered on it for a moment and then I set it down and reached inside again, face pressed against one of the railway sleepers, trying to go further in than before. I managed to grab two bunches this time, one after the other. They were both carnations too – but one was in an advanced stage of decay, the flowers almost black, and the other was well on its way, with only a single red flower yet to rot.

  Both had handwritten labels.

  One said the same thing as the first flowers I’d grabbed – I miss you x – and was written in the same hand, with the same pen. The other was different.

  Please forgive me.

  My chest tightened. Tearing the card away from the cellophane, I held it out for Richard to take a look at and then kept going, pulling more and more flowers out of the sleepers until I had a pile of fifteen in a circle around me. There were still at least as many trapped inside. As I looked around at the ones I’d got out, I saw most of the flowers were long gone – reduced to stems, or gooey slop – but almost all the messages remained pinned to the plastic, and most were variations on the same theme. I miss you. Please forgive me. I’m so sorry.

  ‘Do you recognize that handwriting?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘What about these flowers?’

  He stepped closer.

  ‘Do they ring any bells with you?’

  ‘No,’ he said again, and he looked to me for meaning, for an explanation of what was going on. I tried again to see if I could grab any more of the flowers, but the rest of them had been pushed too far out of my reach and getting to them meant moving one of the sleepers. It wouldn’t be impossible with Richard’s help, but it would be hard and I wasn’t sure it really mattered: given what was written on the cards, and the fact the flowers were there in the first place – hidden inside the spot the woman’s body had been dumped – it already felt like I had enough.

  ‘Do you think the person who killed her left these?’

  I glanced at Richard. It was an obvious question, but I wasn’t sure if he really wanted the answer or not. He looked knocked off balance, and I wondered if I’d made the right decision in bringing him with me. Nothing had jogged his memory, and instead I’d filled the spaces in his head with new images that no one deserved to carry with them.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  It wasn’t a lie, I didn’t know for certain that her killer had left the flowers – but they’d clearly been left by someone battling with their conscience.

  I picked up a couple of the cards.

  They were all the same design – plain on the front except for a faint grey border, and then the logo of the florist on the back. Haggerty’s. It was just one name in an ornate font – no address, email, phone or website – but, when I returned to my mobile and googled the business, I found it in less than five seconds.

  It was based on Upper Thames Street.

  Directly across the road from the Red Tree School.

  Born Ready

  The girls didn’t go up to the Brink the night they discovered there was no gate. Instead, they turned around and ran home, worried that it might be a game one of the adults was playing; a trick to catch them out, an effort to prove that they’d both been disobeying the town rules. In fact, they became so invested in the idea, so paranoid about being found out, that they didn’t return to the hills for another seven months.

  Because they knew that if they were caught up there, they’d have to tell the adults everything: that they’d been going up to the Brink for four years, on and off; that they thought there might be something in the marshland – a monster, or a ghost, or an animal; and that, ultimately, what they’d always wanted more than anything else – the real reason they kept returning – was to find the courage to climb the fence and find out the truth for themselves.

  Eventually, though, Penny grew tired of waiting.

  ‘What if we actually did it?’ she said as the girls walked to school one morning. ‘What if we actually climbed over?’

  Beth looked at her. ‘Over the fence?’

  ‘Sssshhhh,’ Penny said, glancing around at the other kids walking to school, at some of the parents who were with them. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  They walked in silence for a while and then, quietly, Beth said: ‘Are you serious, Pen? You really want to go back?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, I guess. But actually climb the fence?’

  Beth’s voice was a little shaky: excited, anxious, frightened. Deep down, Penny felt the same, her heart racing at the idea of actually going out into the Brink; not just watching it and talking about it, but actually going out there. What if there really were bombs buried under the earth? What if there really was something even scarier than that?

  ‘Pen?’

  ‘I think we should do it,’ Penny said, but although she sounded confident, she didn’t feel it. ‘First, though, I think we should start gathering evidence. Like, when we go up there and we think we see something in the Brink, we make a note of it. If we hear a weird noise, we do the same. We should write everything down and then we might start to see a pattern. It might show us the best time to climb over.’

  Penny could see her sister relax a little when she realized they weren’t going out any time soon. She didn’t admit that she felt the same way as Beth.

  ‘We should write down what the adults say too.’

  Beth frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because most people seem to believe there are bombs out there, right? But a few people like Jack, like that farmer who comes to the house sometimes, I don’t think they believe that there are just bombs out there. I reckon that’s the reason they’re the ones that go up to check on the fence. Maybe they saw stuff when they were up there – the sort of stuff we’ve been seeing. Maybe they’ve seen more than we have. Maybe they’ve actually been over the fence and that’s the reason Jack doesn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘So you think Dad’s scared?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Penny said, but became less certain the more she thought about it. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. If he isn’t scared, what else could he be?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, if it’s not fear, what is it?’

  They were at the school gates now.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Beth said.

  ‘Maybe he’s lying.’ Penny leaned in a little closer to her sister so no one could hear them. ‘There was supposed to be a gate up on the trail, to stop people even going up to the Brink, but there’s no gate. So what if the fence is just for show too?’

  ‘Why would Dad lie to us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Penny said. ‘That’s what we need to find out.’

  They waited another month, just to be
sure, and then started going back again.

  They’d take notebooks with them and record everything – every movement, every sound – and, several months later, when spring came, when summer followed and the evenings got longer, they started taking more risks, heading out before the sun was down in order to see the Brink in the last vestiges of light. They’d never witnessed the marshland in anything other than darkness, but despite being able to get a better sense of how vast it was – the immenseness of what lay beyond the fence – they didn’t ever spot anything.

  Towards the end of summer, they were almost caught coming off the trail by some men stumbling out of the pub, so Penny said they should delay their next visit until the autumn. The wait was excruciating. After a month, as the evenings began drawing in again, Penny was tempted to go back up, but she told Beth they should wait an extra month, just to be sure.

  The night they returned there was rain in the air. Penny was wearing a new windbreaker that Fiona and Jack had bought her for hockey, and Beth was dressed in a thick red coat, frayed at the sleeves, and thick woollen leggings. She also had a pair of mud-spattered, fur-lined boots on, hand-me-downs from Penny. At twelve now, Beth was of an age where she hated wearing Penny’s old clothes, not because she disliked them but because she objected to having to wear second-hand skirts and jumpers. But she loved the boots. She wore them all the time, even inside the house, and Penny’s mum had to make running repairs to them the whole time.

  Penny looked out of the pillbox towards the fence. In the blackness of the marshland, she thought she could see movement, a brief flash of colour, but then it was gone again and she wasn’t sure she’d actually seen anything at all. Even so, she reached into her pocket, took out her notebook, opened it to the right date and made a note of the sighting.

  After she was done, she started going back through the notebook, back over a year’s worth of entries, of glimpses and non-sightings and things the adults said that might have been important but probably weren’t. The longer they’d been doing this, the more she’d begun to believe that there really wasn’t anything out in the Brink at all, and if there wasn’t, it made her wonder why people would say that there was. The two of them had looked out at the same swathe of grass, heard the same noises at night, seen the same hints of movement. Once or twice, they’d still got spooked, but most of the time they’d begun to outgrow any fear. She’d begun to outgrow the story of the landmines too. She’d read up on the Second World War at lunchtimes and after school and she couldn’t find a single account of bombs being laid in this part of the country.

  As a result, she’d talked about her suspicions to Beth, and her sister had started to see the logic in it. They spent long hours thinking about the movements and noises they’d heard over the years, about the stories they’d been told, and the explanations began to seem so obvious: the noises were the wind and the rain and the snow, beating against the hillside, against the grass, against the peat of the bogs; the movement was sheep, grazing in the crags, in the pockets of tussock grass, disguised by the colour of night. There were sheep farms everywhere, animals dotted in the fields that encircled the town for miles and miles in every direction, whichever road you took. They wandered. They found gaps in the boundary line, breaks in the fence, and they escaped to the other side, which was why the two of them had sometimes seen hints of something out in the Brink, low to the ground, a head below the level of the grass. And if there were sheep grazing out there, they should have set off the landmines, but the landmines never detonated. Nothing had ever exploded out there.

  Because there aren’t any bombs, Penny thought.

  ‘I’ve met someone.’

  Beth’s voice made her flinch. It was the first sound – other than the beating rain – that either of them had heard since leaving the house. Penny turned to look at her. In the corner of the pillbox, swallowed by shadows, Beth’s face formed a perfect oval inside the line of her hood. The darkness made her face look like it was detached from her body, a porcelain mask floating in time and space.

  Beth was still physically small for her age, so Penny would sometimes forget that her sister was almost a teenager now – at least, until she spoke. That was when it would hit home again, because there had always been this weird contrast between the way Beth looked and the way she spoke. She appeared young but she spoke with such maturity that, sometimes, even knowing her so well, almost better than anyone else, it took Penny a moment to adjust.

  ‘You’ve met someone?’ Penny said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve met someone.’

  ‘A boy?’

  ‘His name’s Jason.’

  Penny frowned, trying to think about whether she’d heard of a kid in the town called Jason. But then she looked at Beth again and realized what she meant.

  ‘He’s from somewhere else?’

  Beth nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘He came here on holiday.’

  ‘Does anyone know?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Dad would have a shit-fit.’

  Penny looked out through the window in the pillbox, out through the grey tint of the rain to where the long grass swirled like an ocean on the other side of the fence. She studied it for a while, but there was nothing out there.

  ‘Penny?’

  She glanced at Beth. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s it? I thought you’d lecture me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Because I thought you’d lecture me,’ Beth repeated.

  Penny scanned the spaces beyond the boundary fence, half concentrating on what Beth had told her, half concentrating on hints of movement out in the grass.

  Finally, she said, ‘Is he still here?’

  ‘No, he went back last week.’

  Penny didn’t say anything.

  Beth rolled her eyes, as if she saw some accusation in her sister’s silence. ‘Come on, Pen. Have you ever thought about what sort of future you have here? Because I have, and there isn’t one. I’m not staying here for the rest of my life, dating some drone from the school whose idea of a great life is working for sixty years in a cow shed a mile from his front door. No way.’

  Penny smiled, despite herself.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re only twelve.’

  Beth seemed unsure whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. She came forward on the piece of concrete she was perched on and said, ‘So, do you?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Do you want to stay in this shithole for the rest of your life?’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘It’s the most boring place on earth, Pen.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘How do you know? Have you ever been anywhere else?’

  Penny shrugged. ‘Neither of us has been anywhere.’

  ‘Exactly my point.’

  Beth hadn’t meant it as a put-down but, for some reason, it felt like one. Maybe it was because Penny had thought these same things herself: even at fourteen she’d dreamed of escaping. But every time her thoughts got away from her, every time she wondered what it would be like to be somewhere else, to be someone different, she’d think of how sad her mum would be, and then of moving miles away without ever finding out where her dad had gone.

  ‘If you want to get anywhere, you’ve got to take risks, Pen.’

  Penny stifled a laugh. ‘Where did you learn that from?’

  ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like this,’ Beth said, waving a hand around the pillbox. ‘How long have we been sitting in here for? Five years? Six? It’s been so long I can’t even remember. There’s nothing out there, Pen. You said it yourself. We should have climbed over that fence ages ago.’

  Penny looked at Beth, then down at her notebook, then out into the night, into the mist that still swirled like a pale curtain in front of the pillbox. Beyond it, the fence dr
ifted in and out of the dark, as if it were a boat lost at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves.

  Quietly, Penny said, ‘You want to go out there?’

  ‘What?’ Beth replied from behind her.

  ‘I said, do you want go out there?’

  Beth frowned. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was hard to tell whether Beth was frightened or exhilarated by the idea, and after a while Penny thought it might be a mix of both. She moved off her concrete seat, still swamped by the thickness of her coat, shuffled into the space next to Penny, and the two girls watched the darkness, the rain, the grass, the fence. After a time, Penny looked at her watch. It was nine forty-three.

  ‘Are we really going to do this?’ Beth said.

  Penny nodded. ‘If anyone finds out that we’ve been coming up here all this time, we’re in trouble. If anyone catches us out there, we’re in deeper trouble. But if we have something we can fight back with, if we can prove there are no bombs out there, no monsters, no ghosts – which there aren’t, I guarantee it – if we can find out the real reason they put up the fence, they won’t be able to punish us.’ Penny shrugged, turning her attention back to the window. ‘I mean, how can you be punished for finding out the truth about something?’

  Beth seemed to grow in confidence. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’

  Penny grabbed the rucksack, put the notebook inside and zipped up her windbreaker, all the way to her chin. Her hood was still wet from the walk up, and as she pulled it over her head again, it clung to one side of her face like a wet flannel. In her bag were the two torches she’d packed for them. She got one out, the most powerful, and handed the other one to Beth.

  Beams of light criss-crossed in the centre of the room, creating flat circles of phosphorous white on the concrete. It was so bright inside the enclosed space that the light seemed to leak out through the door, into the long grass, like a path showing their way. Penny slipped on the rucksack.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she said to Beth.