Part of the Silence

by Debbie Howells

  But there was nothing wrong with my bedroom, my mother had told me. I wasn’t special enough for a new one. The same baby pink it had always been was perfectly fine as it was.

  She didn’t understand how that felt. The more I thought about it, the more it got to me, adding to everything else that wasn’t right. The baby, who wasn’t even here yet; my mother saying how lucky it was that I could stay with Auntie Maureen. How could my own mother not know how I felt? It was like she was talking about a stranger, not me.

  I started picking at the wallpaper in my room, peeling tiny, narrow strips where the edge had already lifted, then making marks where the wall was exposed underneath. And if I didn’t pull the curtains really carefully, the little plastic hooks that held them to the rail would snap off, so the curtains drooped, but that wasn’t my fault. They’d been there so long, they’d worn out. Anyone could see that.

  But my parents didn’t see anything the way I saw it. There was a Disney picture on my wall, of looming Minnie and Mickey Mouse faces. It was childish, the kind of picture I’d liked once, when I was about three. One day it fell, and the glass smashed. My mother was furious.

  “Pictures don’t fall off walls on their own,” my mother said snappishly. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed the wallpaper.”

  “But it wasn’t my fault,” I argued.

  My mother didn’t believe me. “The wallpaper didn’t come off on its own, Casey.” She’d completely forgotten we were talking about the picture, not the wallpaper, but I already knew she’d stopped listening to me. All she wanted to talk about was the baby.

  But my parents were always cross. They didn’t understand how that made me feel. How angry I got, how upset I was. How unworthy I felt. They didn’t know, either, that when my fingers picked away at the wallpaper, if I did it right, sometimes it came off in long sections, and for a while, my anger would go away.

  “Don’t think I’m redecorating in here, too.” My mother’s hard-toffee voice. Like glass, which I wanted to hurl a brick at and smash. Like she didn’t care how I felt. “Don’t you think I have enough to do with the baby coming?”

  The baby again. It was always the baby. But there was still the possibility that the baby wouldn’t come. I started to hope. That maybe it would die inside my mother’s body and she’d die, too. I didn’t want horrible thoughts about the baby, but I couldn’t stop how they just appeared in my head. And the worst thing still happened, because just before the baby came, I had to pack some things to take to Auntie Maureen’s.

  No one listened to my cries of protest. No one cared enough to listen. My parents acted like I wasn’t there. That’s when you know you’re destined not to become someone, because no one sees you.

  Even when I clung to her, begging her, my mother didn’t ask, just told me I was being naughty, when I was frightened. “Please, please, I don’t want to go there. Don’t make me go there. Please . . .”

  In the end, I ran upstairs, slammed my bedroom door, sobbed as I hurled myself onto my bed, the tears pouring out of me until there weren’t any left.

  I hated, hated this baby so much. It was the baby’s fault I had to go to Auntie Maureen’s, which meant that Auntie Maureen’s son Anthony would be there. He was older and made me do horrible things I didn’t want to do. I hated Anthony as much as I hated the baby. If I didn’t do what he told me to do, he said he’d get me into trouble. There was no point telling anyone, he said. No one would believe a stupid little girl.

  After the last time I stayed there, I’d had nightmares, ones where I was walking up a staircase that went on and on, farther and farther from my parents. When I got to the top and looked down, the stairs had gone, and there was no escape. I was trapped there. Then I could hear someone coming. Someone bad. Someone I knew. And I started screaming.

  “I can’t see.... I’m frightened.... I want him to stop.... I want him to go away. . . .”

  It was a dream, my parents had told me when I woke up and found the light on and both of them standing there. Only a dream. I should try to forget about it.

  “Close your eyes and go to sleep.” My parents’ words, wishing me back into the nightmare.

  I tried to tell them that part of it was real, too, but all I could think of was what Anthony had told me. No one would believe a stupid girl.

  And he was waiting when my father drove me to Auntie Maureen’s house. My own father delivered me to the monster, whose ugly, leering face watched out of an upstairs window. I couldn’t say good-bye to my father, just watched him drive away, with a scream inside me, which, instead of bursting out of me, stuck in my throat, choking me.

  When people betray you, it turns you into someone else. Someone with locked-away feelings, who can’t be hurt. It was my parents’ fault and Anthony’s fault. But it was the baby’s fault, too. If it wasn’t coming, I wouldn’t be here.

  12

  JACK

  While he’d been away, the dark, faded greens of late summer had given way to autumn’s red and gold. Nature’s attempt to lull everyone into a false sense of security before the sheeting drizzle and endless gray of the Cornish winter swept in.

  In Spain, he’d left behind the heat of the sun and a parched landscape scented with pine and rosemary. Scents that had soothed his soul and allowed the faintest hint of hope to take root, hope that he’d been determined to bring home with him. Hope that had been lacking in his life. Because life had to go on. Now that he was back, however, he could already feel it slipping.

  Not that he didn’t like living here. It was just that life had served up several types of shit, the kind that dragged you down and held you there. Hence the fortnight in Spain, to break away, change the record. Ordinarily, Jack would spend his time off walking the coast path with Beamer, his black Labrador. He was never short of things to do when he wasn’t working. There was the house, which always needed something or other done to it. The pile of logs that needed sawing and splitting, then storing on the porch until he needed another load for the wood-burning stove that he kept burning all winter. The yard—an acre and a half, mostly woodland—which at this time of year dumped leaves like the clouds dumped rain in winter.

  In an ideal world, he’d be happy not to work. Only the truth was, it had been a long time since Jack had been happy. And whether the idle time was good for him was another matter. There were too many ghosts in his life. His son, Josh, who had died after a car accident. Since then, his wife’s affair, their more recent separation. No doubt divorce, given time. She’d given no indication she’d had second thoughts. It was something else to look forward to. Jack wasn’t a cynic, but sometimes it felt as though life pushed you to see what you were capable of, only all of this felt a step too far.

  After closing the back door, he walked toward his battered Land Rover, breathing in the damp air and feeling a pang of loss for Spain, allowing it to linger for a self-indulgent moment as he let the dog jump in, before he slid inside and started the engine. He needed to get his shit together and focus. He didn’t want to be the sad git, always surrounded by some kind of tragedy. While he was away, his wife had picked up the rest of her things. It was the start of a new chapter, he kept telling himself. Better to be alone than with someone who didn’t want him. Time to move on.

  Autumn wasn’t so bad. In the fading light, the leaves were still vibrant, and even the stubble fields had stayed a pale gold. Only until the rain started, he mused, when it took mere minutes before everything got muddied to gray.

  He’d left it rather late for a walk, but after two weeks away, he wanted a blast of sea air on his skin and the sound of waves crashing in his ears. In Spain, the sea had been a millpond, except for one night, when there’d been a storm. As he’d listened to the waves pounding on the shore, he’d felt a flicker of nostalgia for Cornwall. And it didn’t matter now that it was getting dark—he could find his way around here with his eyes closed. He had walked this coast most of his life, knew every twist of the path, where it narrowed and the e
dge crumbled toward the sea.

  Beamer was pleased to be back here, too. Jack watched him, a shadow lost among other, darker shadows, darting ahead of him. They’d made it just in time, minutes before sunset. Around the sinking sun, orange streaked the sky. He stood for a moment, taking it in. His last night’s solace before he went back to work. Probably a good thing, he mused. Too much time alone made him introspective.

  He was going to be busy, he already knew that. After he got back from the airport, he’d briefly checked his e-mails. While he was away, a woman had been attacked and her child had gone missing. He’d been shocked. It was the kind of crime that, round here, happened rarely. By and large, Cornwall was peaceful. Most of the trouble happened at the height of the tourist season. Petty crime and drunken brawls—so many incidents could be related back to alcohol, though most towns had clamped down, and it was less of a problem than it used to be. Things still happened, though.

  The e-mail he’d read had set all kinds of alarm bells ringing in his brain, before he’d turned off his laptop and silenced them. Work could wait until tomorrow.

  Here, on the coast path, listening to the wind picking up and the waves, he managed to salvage the flicker of hope he’d found in Spain. You had to believe things could get better. Otherwise, there was no point in going on.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a scream. An animal? His heart quickened. It was human, he was sure. Whistling to Beamer, he turned in the direction it had come from, broke into a jog, sure-footed, even in the fading light.

  After hearing another scream, he started to run. What was going on? It was a raw, piercing sound that came from close by. Then ahead of him through the dusk, silhouetted against the glimmer of the sea, he made out the figure of a woman. At least, he thought it was a woman. There was something about the shape of her, or maybe her hair blowing in the wind, something about the way she was standing, her arms thrust toward the sky. She was wearing a silver coat. The color caught briefly in the light from the dying sun.

  Was she the one who had screamed? Or maybe she was one of the sun-worshipping hippie types they got from time to time, and the scream had come from someone else. She must have heard it, though—and she was dangerously close to the cliff edge. He was about to call out to her, but before he could speak, she’d turned and run off into the darkness.

  13

  October 6 . . .

  “Jack! How was your break?”

  Jack’s heart always sank slightly when he saw Sara. She was an adequate police constable, but that was the point. Adequate was functional; it wasn’t inspiring. She was nice enough, though irritating as hell, he tried to stop himself thinking. Be charitable, he told himself. Who knew what was going on in Sara’s life? As he knew only too well, you never knew what lay behind the mask.

  “Good. Thanks.” He was about to ask if he’d missed anything, but for once Sara was ahead of him.

  “Abbie wants to see you. She’s in her office.” Sara pulled a face, as though she and Jack were in cahoots, and Abbie was the bad guy, which she wasn’t. It was inappropriate—and typical of her—but Sara and Abbie were chalk and cheese. Jack pretended not to notice.

  “Right,” he said, surprised. Abbie was here? He hadn’t seen her much since her promotion to detective constable. Then, “Thanks.”

  He wandered through the door into the familiar corridor. There were half a dozen small rooms along it, but these days, only three of them were used as offices. Devon and Cornwall was a huge area to cover, but even so, policing levels had shrunk to their lowest ever.

  Outside one of those offices, he could hear Abbie talking on the phone. After knocking quietly, he pushed the door open and watched her face light up.

  She held the phone away from her face. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right with you.”

  Leaving her to it, Jack carried on to his office. It was a luxury to have his own, due only to the fact that he’d been a detective chief inspector until a major restructuring was carried out and a number of police stations closed. It had happened as his personal life imploded, meaning he hadn’t wanted to move away. In short, Josh’s death had granted him privileges he detested. No one wanted to be treated differently because their son had died. In the same way, he hadn’t wanted everyone’s sympathy. It was nothing to do with them. Everyone died at some point. Yes, it was tragic when it happened to a teenager, more so when it could so easily have been avoided. Jack swallowed. He couldn’t let himself go there. The bottom line was, you got on with it. You didn’t have a choice.

  As he sat at his desk, it was as though he hadn’t been away. The memory of Spain had already merged into his past. He switched on his laptop just as there was a knock at his door.

  “Jack?” It was Abbie. “How are you?”

  She was alluding to more than his holiday, Jack knew that. In spite of his efforts to keep his private life to himself, word had got around, but he didn’t want to talk about the end of his marriage. “Hey. Good. Thank you. I wasn’t expecting to see you here. I’m guessing there’s more than the usual going on.” By the usual, he meant the odd break-ins or traffic accidents that occurred, which didn’t merit the presence of a detective constable.

  Abbie nodded, coming over to his desk and taking a seat, as she placed a file in front of him. “Afraid so. A brutal attack that almost killed a woman, and a missing three-year-old child—her daughter.”

  There was to be no gently easing back into work, then. Jack took the file. “Is she local?”

  “We think so.” Abbie hesitated. “She has amnesia. What she does remember isn’t reliable. We’ve found her ex-partner, who was somewhat unsympathetic. He said they weren’t in touch and he didn’t even know about the daughter. So far, only one woman has recognized her. But we’ve managed to locate where we think she was living, and we’ve just found her mother. She’s flying over from Italy. Apparently, she lives there. . . .”

  Jack was frowning. “Forensics?”

  Abbie shook her head. “That’s the thing. They haven’t been able to find any trace of a child in that house. It starts getting more complicated, because—”

  She was interrupted by a knock on the door.

  “Sorry to interrupt . . .” It was Sara. “We’ve just had a call. Someone’s found a body in the middle of a field.”

  Jack got up. “I’ll go. Are you coming?” He glanced at Abbie.

  “I’m due at the hospital.” Looking at her watch, she got up. “I should have left. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  * * *

  Maybe the absence of the quiet Monday morning Jack had hoped for wasn’t such a bad thing. It meant his head was filled with work, instead of his train wreck of a marriage. Sara’s directions took him along the main road to Wadebridge, then along narrower roads toward the coast.

  He passed the single track he’d driven down to walk Beamer last night, then carried on through the handful of cottages that was Port Quin, then up the twisting bumpy road, until he came to another police car pulled up in a turnout.

  Parking on the bank, he watched the officer in the other car get out. It was PC Pete Underwood. He got out of his car, relieved. Underwood was thorough and reliable. But there were so few of them these days, you almost always knew who you’d be working with.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” He addressed Underwood as they climbed the stile into a field.

  “I think so. The guy who called in was working on one of the farms. A David West. He’s a contractor. He was cutting maize with another farmworker when they saw this woman running across the field. She’d come up from the coast path. I think we should head over there.” He pointed in the direction of the coast.

  They walked in silence across the field. It sloped steeply. Winter grazing for sheep, Jack was thinking. The surroundings were breathtakingly beautiful: the fields edged with stone walls, the sun on the faded straw of neighboring stubble fields, soon to be turned to brown earth when plowing started. Ahead of them, endless miles of cerulean sk
y and sea.

  As they crossed into the next field, the land flattened out. “I reckon that’s them.” Underwood pointed to one of the stubble fields, where a couple of giant forage harvesters had parked near each other.

  “It must be. There’s nothing else around here.” Jack picked up the pace, feeling the wind on his face. As they got nearer, he could make out three people. Two men and a young woman, who watched them as they drew closer.

  “Jack Bentley.” Holding out his police badge, Jack glanced at his colleague. “This is PC Underwood. I understand you’ve found a body?”

  “She found it.” One of the men nodded toward the woman.

  “Can you show me where?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “It’s over there.” She pointed toward the remaining area of uncut maize, then started walking. Jack followed.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “I was walking. On the coast path. I live a couple of miles away. I quite often walk here. Only it was windier than I expected, so I decided to head inland.”

  “The footpath is . . . ?” Jack was querying what had brought her so far off the beaten track.

  “Oh God, the footpath’s way over there.” She flapped her arm somewhere indiscriminate. “But I knew something wasn’t right. That’s why I came over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stopped in her tracks, spun round to stare at him. “It’s the birds. Look at them.” Jack followed her gaze to above the uncut maize, where the birds were circling, every now and then dropping down and disappearing into it. “It’s as if they’re following the plow—only there is no plow.” She shook her head and carried on walking.

  “At first, I thought there must be a dead animal. A large one, like a deer, that had been shot but not killed, and had run into the maize before dying there,” she added.

  She sounded matter-of-fact, but then, if you lived in the countryside, you were constantly reminded of the impermanence of life. The pattern of the seasons, the preying of foxes, the slaughter of farm animals.