by David Mark
‘Because we’re meant. We’re right. You make me feel alive.’
‘I’m a bad person, Jude. I’m rotten all the way through.’
‘No. You’re sweet and loving and clever and there’s a fire in you that … I dunno, it makes me think of an oil lamp … sometimes it’s turned up high and other times it’s down low but you’re always the most spectacular, fascinating person in the room.’
She feels sick. Breathless. Doesn’t know if she wants to kiss him or jump off the edge of the fell.
‘Please, Betsy.’ He turns away from her, gazing out across the valley. Turns back to her, decision made. ‘We can stay here, or we can go. I’ve fought to keep the bastle, to keep the land, but if you want us to start again somewhere else, we can do that. Whatever you want. Wherever you want. We can start a family …’
She looks up, eyes wet. She shakes her head. ‘I can’t,’ she snaps, her hand clutching her stomach. ‘The things that were done to me – I’m all ruined in there. Messed up. I can’t even …’
He places his hands on her cheeks. Forces her to meet his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Betsy. For all that’s been done to you.’ He pauses. Makes his offer. ‘Say the word and I’ll stop every one of them from drawing breath again.’
She shakes her head. ‘Things like that – they scare me when you say them. You look like you would.’
He nods. ‘I would.’
‘Then how can I trust that you’re a good person?’
He grins, relief seeping out of him. ‘It might not seem like a code that fits in to the world out there, but it’s the only code that makes sense to me. It’s really simple. There are consequences for your actions. If I do terrible things, people have a right to try and kill me. And I have a right to fight back. That’s how it’s always been. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to go looking for people to harm. I want everybody to get along. I believe in goodness and kindness and compassion, but I also understand the need to protect that which belongs to you.’
She looks down. Here, now, his words make some kind of sense. Later, she knows she will replay them in her mind and hear the song of a psychopath. ‘Those things I said …’ she mumbles.
He pulls her close. Presses his face to her neck. ‘You can be a nasty sod, but it doesn’t mean you’re bad. It means I’m glad you’re on my side.’ He angles her head so he can look at her. ‘The clothes aren’t Maeve’s. I think you may have worn her dress once but most of that stuff in the chest is stuff she got in a house clearance. I don’t think she ever wore any of it. I’ve dumped some of her stuff in there, just so I don’t have to see it every day, but Maeve wouldn’t have worn that. And if she did, she wouldn’t have looked so extraordinarily gorgeous.’
Betsy isn’t sure how to respond. She feels oddly hurt for Maeve.
‘Was that a real proposal?’ she asks, managing a smile. ‘Only I’d imagined candles? A ring? Maybe a saxophone solo …’
‘That can be arranged,’ he smiles.
She feels bone tired, suddenly. Wants to lie down on the cold ground and pull the heather over herself. Wants all the thoughts to stop, just for a moment.
‘I don’t want to leave the bastle,’ she says. ‘You fit there. You’re meant to be there. And I love it too because it’s so much a part of you. That’s why Maeve left it to you, I’m sure. How bad will things get? With Campion, I mean?’
He considers it. ‘He’ll tire eventually. There are easier ways to make money than sending his bullies to my door. I keep sending them back. And if it comes to it, he knows I have leverage.’
‘You have leverage? And you’re not using it?’ She stops, thinking hard. ‘That man. Moon. Was he right? Do you have a video showing what happened to the girl?’
He shakes his head. ‘I wish I did. I’ve got something else. Something that makes me feel ill but if it ever comes to it, if I have to make that choice, I’ll do what needs to be done.’
‘Be honest with me, Jude. Tell me.’
He looks away. When he speaks again, his voice is quiet. ‘He wants to know what I’m capable of. He doesn’t believe I’ll use what I’ve got.’
‘And what have you got?’
He stares away into the distance, watching the red kite circle in the darkening sky. ‘Would you believe me if I said it was best you didn’t know?’
Betsy makes a face, anguished. ‘There you go again.’
‘Please,’ he says. ‘You have to trust somebody. Let it be the man who loves you to your bones.’
She shakes her head. He’s done it again, she thinks. Mollified you. Turned you inside out. And you’re going to let him, aren’t you? Going to kiss him like it’s all forgotten …
‘Can I still call you Betsy?’ he asks, smiling. ‘I like it.’
She nods. Pulls him closer.
‘Me too.’
TWENTY-SIX
Three months ago
Betsy dreamed of locked doors last night. She woke at two a.m. from a nightmare in which she was trapped inside a labyrinth of sliding panels and portcullises: doors slamming closed and banging open, creating a whirlwind inside her skull. She woke up panting, little half-moon scars scored into the skin of her left arm. She’d reached out for Jude but he wasn’t there. She listened out for him, trying to catch the sound of him moving around the house. Perhaps he was writing her a poem. He’s stopped doing that. She hasn’t really responded to his last few attempts and she can tell that he’s losing enthusiasm. It doesn’t matter how pretty his words are – she just doesn’t believe them. She’d fallen back to sleep long before he returned to bed. Chose to stay unresponsive when he kissed her cheek and left her coffee on the bedside table.
He’s been gone an hour, now. He’s due at Allendale today, lopping branches at the big house where the shooting parties stay when they’re in town. He hates going there for work but they pay well, and on time, and Campion isn’t sufficiently well-connected to instruct the owners not to use him. They’re richer than he is. More influential. Couldn’t give a damn.
Betsy’s sitting up in bed, staring through the deep-set window at a day that carries the first faint traces of autumn. The fell has taken on a gingerbread hue; the birdsong is strangely muted. She sees the occasional wisp of smoke puff past, snatched from chimneys where elderly occupants are starting to feel the chill.
She knows, even without looking directly at the thought, that today will be the day. He’s not going to be coming back any time soon, and she’s put it off for so long that she feels entitled to indulge herself. He can’t really expect any differently, she tells herself. He knows you. What you’re like. You warned him in advance. Of course you’re going to snoop.
And inside, the voice she knows so well: That’s my girl. Do what you do best. Fuck it up for yourself. Make him cross. Make him see what happens …
Twenty minutes later she is dressed in yesterday’s jeans and a slouchy sweatshirt, her hair held back with an elastic band. Her fringe, growing back too quickly, sticks straight up. She catches a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror as she brushes her teeth and has to stop herself from bursting out laughing. She looks a little unhinged.
She toys with the idea of subterfuge. She could tell herself, and him, that she has been giving the house a good clean. Clearing cupboards, sorting through the old items of furniture, flicking through the document folders in the Welsh dresser, all in the name of domesticity. She screws up her face at the idea. It’s her house too, isn’t it? She can damn well rummage if she wants to.
By eleven a.m., Betsy has begun to tire. She doesn’t know what she wants to find. She isn’t even entirely sure what she suspects, but the feeling of being lied to is overwhelming and she fancies that if she can just tell herself that she’s exhausted every possibility, perhaps her mind will settle down. He’s done everything right these past couple of weeks. There have been no repercussions from the incident at the pharmacy. His eye is almost completely healed and if his ribs are bothering him he’s not complaining about it.
He might be drinking a little more, but Betsy is too. Their evenings are becoming quite decadent. They drink sticky spirits, often wrapped around one another in the deep copper bath, or naked in front of the fire. She massages the aches from his shoulders; he kneads the tension from her toes. They make love constantly. He says she makes him feel peaceful. She doesn’t know how to describe what he makes her feel, but it’s something she knows she cannot ever give up. That is why she needs some form of proof: something she can use as a catalyst. Something that will burn what they have to ash.
Annoyed with herself, feeling a bit disloyal, she takes a cup of tea to the courtyard and sits on her favourite seat, watching as the trees shimmy their branches in the cold breeze. Jude planted a garden on the roof of the stables last weekend, bringing up earth from the low field with the digger and depositing it expertly on the flat wooden roof. She’d walked barefoot in the earth and planted seedlings. By spring it will be an explosion of colour. She feels quite giddy at the thought. Spoils it, as she asks herself whether she will still be here.
From time to time she considers picking up her mobile phone. The signal is still terribly sketchy but she can access the Wi-Fi at least. She keeps meaning to call Anya. She misses her, inasmuch as she misses any part of what used to be. She can’t honestly say she feels the absence of Carly.
She leans back against the wall. She’s been through every book in the house, flicking through the pages looking for letters, photographs, some scrap of paper that will feed into her generalized feeling of being left out. There’s no shortage of marginalia in Maeve’s old books but nothing that she can incorporate into a conspiracy. Even the inscription in the old copy of some dull classic had done nothing to pique her curiosity. A passage had been underlined, some dry witterings about the old Germanic tribes and their relationship with trees. She’d stopped reading when she got to the bit about people having their navels pinned to tree trunks and their guts unwound. She’d taken a picture of the inscription on her phone. She looks at it again.
‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.’
Carefully, she types it into her phone and looks it up. ‘If I cannot bend the will of Heaven I shall move Hell.’ It’s a phrase worth knowing, but it means nothing to her.
‘What are you doing, Betsy?’ she asks, aloud, and realizes that the name feels more familiar now. She doesn’t need to act like Liz. Doesn’t need to snoop around, looking for reasons to prick the bubble of her happiness. She could do something useful. Write an article for Bipped, maybe. Contact Carly and ask if she can maybe get some of her old things from Jay’s place. Or she could have a rummage about in Jay’s life. See how he’s getting on without her. She wishes she had a laptop. She feels disconnected, and for the first time in weeks it’s not a pleasant sensation. She needs to check that the world’s still turning.
Laptop, she thinks, sucking on the word like gum. A memory rises. Maeve, tapping away at her laptop, the day she died. The half-open disk drive. He wouldn’t have thrown it out, would he? A laptop has so many memories. He said he had leverage, didn’t he? Leverage Campion didn’t believe he would use.
She feels her pulse quicken. She walks briskly back into the kitchen, suddenly aware that she has been making a hell of a mess while rummaging through the chaos.
‘Laptop,’ she mumbles, as if able to summon it up with a spell. ‘Where would you be?’
She almost loses herself in the voluminous depths of the bridal chest on the landing, still full of the clothes she has been helping herself to these past weeks. She delves to the bottom like a pearl diver, prodding around for anything that might be a secret drawer or concealed entrance, feeling brilliantly clever and faintly stupid at the same time. She feels her way around the roof joists, down the back of furniture, fondling under the bed. In the bathroom, she gets down on her knees and squeezes half of herself into the gap beneath the big copper bath. She finds a silver earring; shaped like a horse’s head, and puts it into her pocket like treasure.
Dirty, tired, sticky with sweat, she flumps down on to the sofa an hour later, deciding that, on balance, today has not been her most productive day. She gives a sigh of exasperation, glaring down at the haphazard wooden floor. He’s done it himself, he said. Old reclaimed timbers that he’d dipped and sanded and laid over a floor of mud and earth.
She angles her head. Follows the grooves between the boards with her eyes. Slithers on to her knees and runs the palm of her hands over the furrows. She can feel a breeze; the flimsiest of drafts, as if a body beneath the floorboards is whispering.
There’s a knife sharpener in the kitchen: a lethal-looking length of steel hanging on a hook beside the sink. She retrieves it and tells herself that this is the last time she’ll be bad. Her pulse quickens. Grunting, she shoves one end in between two boards. Wood splinters. Frays, as if chewed. She puts her weight behind it and gives a yelp of satisfaction as it disappears into the earth. She hauls at the improvised crowbar. The wood creaks afresh. The nails pop. And then she is flat on her back and a board is sticking up into the air and the house is filling with the smell of disturbed earth and dead flowers.
She looks into the hole. She expects to see a skull. She doesn’t know whose skull it will be, but she is so certain that she will be greeted by the sightless eyes of a skeleton, that it comes almost as a shock to see the clear polythene bag, half-covered in dirt.
She’s shaking now. Scared and excited and pleased with herself all at once.
She reaches into the hole and pulls at the bag. It’s not particularly heavy. She peers at it by the flickering light of the fire. Inside, a blue laptop; a charger; a little silver camera. She squints at it more closely. There’s another bag inside this one. Again, it’s clear. It contains two rings, both white gold. Betsy closes her eyes.
She knows that she still has hours to play with. And that there is not a chance that the bag is going back in the ground unopened.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The camera offers up nothing of interest. The battery is dead and she can’t find a replacement AA or a charger to plug it into the wall. The laptop is more cooperative. Twenty minutes after plugging in, halfway down her second cup of tea, the machine gives a musical ‘ta-dah’ and the log-in screen comes up. The username is NewWaeveMaeve. The password icon is blinking. Betsy chews her lip. Tries the obvious ones first, typing in the username as a password, then the word ‘password’ just in case she was a halfwit. Tries JudeCullen and a dozen variations. His date of birth. Thinks of what she knows about the dead woman and plucks words from her limited range of equestrian terms. After twenty minutes she realizes she’s getting nowhere. She slumps back in the chair, staring up at the books that line the ceiling eaves. Pulls out her phone and calls up the image of the inscription on the flyleaf.
Cautiously, she types it in, one letter at a time.
Wrong password.
Cursing, she pushes the machine away. Stares at the blinking cursor like it’s an enemy. Then she types it in again, and sticks a number one on the end. The screen changes colour. She’s in.
The home screen shows a picture of a black-and-white fell pony, silhouetted against a setting sun. It’s a pretty picture but Betsy gives it no attention. She ignores the endless Word documents scattered around the screen and instead clicks on the bottom left corner, plunging straight in to the ‘recent items’ section.
The computer hasn’t been used since the day Maeve died. The last task performed by the computer was at 10.17 a.m. She’d been online for an hour that day. Her browser history seems a lot more grown-up than Betsy’s own. She visited the Guardian. Huffington Post. Read three articles in the New Yorker. Downloaded a recipe for poppy-seed shortbread from a foodie page. Then she’d clicked on a page called POWAtothepeople. Betsy clicks the link. Protect Our Wild Animals. It’s a news page, detailing recent press coverage of anti-hunt activities. It lists, in reverse chronological order, a seemingly endless catalogue of cases showing the widespread disregard for the hunting
ban, going all the way back to 2005. Betsy scans the first few entries.
Hunt Horse Throws Rider in Kent
Police Acting as Private Militia for Hunt
Saboteurs Attacked by Pro-Hunt Thugs
HSE Considering Charges After Beater Blinded
Betsy rubs her face, unsure what she’s looking for. Scrolls down. Tries searching for a specific word. Her first try is Maeve’s own name. It brings up a profile, a piece that appeared in Countryside World magazine in 2014. She chews her lip. Tells herself there is a lot of work to do before Jude comes home, and decides to spare herself the anguish. Instead, she looks at the last task performed by the computer, perhaps an hour before she fell and banged her head and bled into the river where Betsy feels so very much at home.
She ‘burned’ a disk. Transferred a file from the folder on the C-drive and pressed it to CD. Eight minutes long. And then she moved the footage to the Trash.
Betsy opens the Trash. Restores the file and hits ‘play’.
A minute later she shuts it down. She doesn’t want to see this. Feels disgusted with herself. Catches her breath. Opens the laptop again.
Maeve is on her back, by the water’s edge. It’s a hot day. Sticky. Flies are buzzing and she can hear the curlew. And Campion is on top of her, trousers around his ankles, face sweaty with exertion. Maeve has her face turned towards the camera. There are tears on her cheeks but she isn’t fighting. There’s a look of pain and resignation on her face. There’s something curious about the angle of her neck. Betsy feels her stomach clench as she makes sense of it. Campion has a riding crop to her throat – he’s pushing down on her larynx, forcing her to look away from him. She’s pulling out clumps of grass as her fingers clench and contract, clench and contract: dying spiders.
Betsy closes down the laptop. Slips it back in the bag. Unplugs the charger and puts everything back where she found it. Drops the bag into the hole and sets about filling it back in. The nails are a little bent but she manages to jump up and down on them until everything looks as it should. She realizes she is crying. There’s a pain in her windpipe.
