The Facts of Life and Death

by Belinda Bauer

  She looked exactly like a cowboy. Her bunny slippers spoiled it a bit, so Ruby chose not to look at them.

  Her right hand fell naturally to the holster and she felt a jag of disappointment that there was no gun to play with. Sticks were just fine until there was something real to measure them by. In this holster they would have been just sticks. A real holster needed a real gun.

  Ruby drew her finger at the mirror. ‘Pow! Pow-pow!’

  The hat fell over her eyes with the recoil.

  Ruby pushed it back, then tried to catch sight of herself while she wasn’t looking, so she could see how she really looked.

  Still amazing.

  The tip of the fishing rod dipped and danced, but John Trick didn’t see it. He saw past it – across the pale-grey sea to the vague hump of Lundy Island on the fuzzy horizon, and beyond that to a more distant place, while the crabs made merry with his bait …

  As a child, John had rarely gone to primary school, where he’d been relentlessly teased about the scars on his face. And when he had gone, he’d learned to lash out first and let the other kids ask questions afterwards – if they still had teeth that weren’t a-wobble in their heads.

  But then – on his first day at big school – he had seen Alison Jewell.

  She had hit him like measles.

  He hadn’t stopped fighting, but he had gone to school every possible day for the next four years just to see her – just to occupy the same space. Now and then, he and the other boys would shout inappropriate things at her in a bid to make contact, but he never had the courage to say anything real, because she came from Clovelly, and he’d heard that her mother was a doctor.

  Her mother!

  Even though he’d barely spoken to Alison in all the time they shared a classroom, just enough of that unexpected schooling rubbed off on John Trick that by the time he left he was taken on as an apprentice welder at the shipyard.

  John remembered the early mornings when he got up in the dark and felt like a man. Riding his scooter through the lanes, the indicator clicking loudly in the night, to join the other men. They’d start with nothing but their hands and a plan and they’d build a ship. Every day they welded and moulded and fabricated their own lives; their own pride; their own futures. They talked and they shouted above the noise and they told dirty jokes and laughed whether they were funny or not. They arrived together and they left together, bonded by clocks and hard labour.

  With his first pay packet he’d got just drunk enough that he’d caught a bus to Clovelly, banged on doors until he’d found Alison Jewell’s home, and asked her to marry him.

  She’d laughed.

  ‘I didn’t even know you liked me,’ she’d said.

  ‘I don’t like you,’ he’d told her. ‘I love you.’

  Alison had frowned – as if she couldn’t understand how someone who looked like him could ever love someone who looked like her – and so he’d leaned in and kissed her with tongues, and then pushed her down on to her bed under her Take That poster. Her parents were downstairs, so she’d tried to shove him off, but she hadn’t tried that hard, and he wasn’t so drunk that they couldn’t seal the deal.

  Happy days.

  He’d wanted to tell the whole world, but Alison said it was more fun if they kept it a secret, and was careful not to let on at school or anywhere else. She’d barely even let him see her, let alone have sex again – that’s how much fun she thought their secret would be – but they couldn’t keep it a secret for ever.

  Ruby had seen to that.

  At first John couldn’t believe his bad luck. Getting Ali pregnant on their very first time! But, as it turned out, a baby on the way was like a proof of purchase for a girl he would otherwise never have been able to afford.

  Alison’s father had hit the roof. Gone through the roof. He’d actually cried. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so insulting. And the more pissed off Malcolm Jewell got, the more obstinate he’d become. Mr Jewell had demanded an abortion – what he called ‘Taking care of it so we can all get back to normal’ – but Alison had refused point blank. Even John had been surprised by how vehement she’d been about wanting to marry him – and moved by how much she loved him.

  For the first time in his life, he’d felt he had the upper hand. Alison was his now. She was having his baby and he would call the shots – and if that meant a register office and a suit from Oxfam, then so be it. Her father could rage and her hoity-toity mother could cry and moan all she liked, but John had taken pleasure in telling them both that he was not one for charity.

  ‘It’s not about charity,’ Rosemary Jewell had said in her squeaky, sneaky, pop-eyed way. ‘It’s about tradition.’

  John Trick snorted and snapped open another can. Tradition, bollocks; it was about possession.

  Nine-tenths of the law.

  They’d married in Barnstaple register office, with Alison in a plain blue dress and her mother sobbing throughout. He hadn’t even told his mother. She’d made her own choice years before, and it wasn’t him.

  When he’d kissed the bride, she’d cried and whispered into his mouth, ‘Thank you.’

  It seemed a long, long time ago, and lately, even nine-tenths didn’t feel like enough.

  In the slow drizzle of the beach, John stared into the shimmering gold of his cider and thought about possession. Possessions were difficult things. Other people liked them too, and would take them from you if they could.

  Alison’s parents would like to take her from him, for starters. They still thought she was too good for him. He tried only to see them at Christmas, but he could tell that was true in Malcolm’s stiff handshake and the way Rosemary touched his good cheek with hers – dry and distant despite the contact. They gave Ali money in secret – he knew that. Not just for her birthday and Christmas, but at other times too. She tried to hide it from him, but he had eyes. He’d found the receipt for the groceries they could not afford; noticed the new jeans Ruby was wearing before her old ones had even gone through at the knees. They were trying to buy Alison back, to control her with money, to loosen his hold. They must have thought they had a shot at it, ever since he’d lost his job.

  As if losing his job had made him less entitled to his own wife.

  And they tried to buy Ruby too, even though she was more his than anything had ever been. Last birthday they’d bought her a bicycle – pink, tassled, and the silliest gift you could buy for a child who lived squeezed between a hill and a cliff. Malcolm Jewell had spent hours puffing up and down the hill behind Ruby, holding on to the saddle, and with his face as red as his thinning hair. Ruby never rode the bicycle now, John was pleased to note, but buying it had been disrespectful to him.

  And the worst of it was, Alison let them disrespect him and then lied to him about it. He could always tell – the way she tucked her hair behind her ear.

  And now something strange was going on too. Something to do with the big glove, and those new shoes that were too high for either of them.

  Alison lied to him about money. Now – for the first time ever – he wondered what else his wife might lie about.

  And he wondered who the shoes might really be from.

  Or for.

  15

  THERE WERE TWO things Donald Moon hated above all – liberals and litterbugs. They were the same thing, really. Without liberals there would be no littering. Nor much crime at all, Donald figured, because without liberals, those found guilty of any crime would be locked up so fast that their feet would barely touch the ground.

  And at the head of that queue, if Donald had his way, would be the litterbugs.

  Donald had once owned seventy acres of clifftop along the coastal path, and had spent half his life picking up plastic bags and bottles so that his lambs wouldn’t choke on them, and the other half glaring through binoculars, hoping to catch someone red-handed in the act of dropping contraband. He never did – the stuff seemed to drop itself! – but he never gave up.

  Dona
ld and his wife Marion had kept a hundred endangered sheep until he’d finally had to admit that he had become that most endangered breed of all – a small farmer in a world where livestock was just another product, like cardboard or biscuits. Each year it got harder and harder, and when his income finally became an outcome, Donald sold sixty-five acres to a neighbour and ninety-seven sheep to other doomed enthusiasts. He turned his remaining five acres over to vegetables and fruit to save on the shopping bill, and used his last three Leicester Longwools to lever his way into a part-time job at The Big Sheep in Bideford. Tourists flocked there to watch sheep shows and sheep shearing and even sheep races, where sheep competed in the Sheep Grand National, with straw-bale jumps and little knitted jockeys on their backs – all as though sheep were exotic beasts in a woolly circus.

  Once his sheep and his land were gone, there was nothing to stop litter becoming Donald’s primary focus. He would roust the stout Marion every weekend to traipse across North Devon armed with pointed sticks for spearing paper or hooking Tesco bags out of hedges. They wore matching Day-Glo vests for safety, and carried big green waste sacks for the cans and the plastic that people flung randomly around the countryside, and the disposable nappies laid carefully in lay-bys – as if they would soon be dealt with by some kind of state-funded poo patrol.

  Donald was on his way home from work that Saturday when he saw the newspaper in the lay-by into Abbotsham.

  Newspapers were Donald’s bête noire. An entire village could be ruined by a copy of the Sun and a stiff breeze. Lurid headlines flapping in gutters, flattened against hedges, fluttering up trees. Paper tits dissolving to porridge in the rain.

  So, even though the light was almost gone from the sky, and even though it had rained all day and his overalls were damp against his thighs, Donald Moon did a U-turn and pulled over.

  This newspaper was the Daily Mail, which was even thicker than the Sun and, therefore, potentially even worse. Already the Coffee Break insert had escaped and spread itself across a field gate twenty yards away.

  Donald picked up the main section, then went after the rest. When he got to the gate, he could see in the dim light that Coffee Break had already come apart, and that several pale pages were now dotted about the wet grass of the field beyond.

  There was nothing for it. Now he had seen it, he had to do some thing about it. Donald muttered under his breath and climbed the gate.

  In the half-dark he dropped to the ground on the other side and landed on something that rolled under his boot. He slipped to one knee, while the other leg twisted away from him at an angle that made his eyes water.

  Donald was not a swearer by nature, but he couldn’t help himself, and he was surprised to find that – contrary to what he’d always claimed in company – it actually did make him feel better.

  Finally he got his breath back and blew tears out of his nose between his finger and thumb.

  Then he peered down through the gloom to see what it was that he had trodden on.

  It was a woman’s face.

  16

  WOMAN’S BODY DUMPED IN LAY-BY.

  Miss Sharpe had read the Gazette right there, outside the newsagent’s.

  The meagre report underneath the giant font consisted mostly of caution and police-speak. The police wouldn’t say who she was or how she’d died. They wouldn’t even call it murder. Yet. All they were doing was asking anyone who’d seen a woman hitching a lift between Bideford and Northam to contact this number. There was a photo of a five-bar gate and a field beyond it.

  Now Miss Sharpe stood at the staffroom window with a cup in one hand, a saucer in the other, and felt a wave of melancholy wash over her.

  The thought of some poor woman lying in that lay-by – maybe for days – undiscovered in the rain, had disturbed her deeply.

  Without a face or a name for the victim, it could be anyone.

  With a hitch in her chest, she almost felt that it could be her.

  After all, who would miss her? Who would call the school and let them know she hadn’t come home the night before? She had only moved here three months ago; she didn’t have a husband or a boyfriend. Her father was across the other side of the country and her colleagues were friendly, but only as far as the car park. Her badminton partner at the club was a sixty-year-old man called Edward, whose dentures had once fallen out during an exuberant rally, and who only ever spoke to her to shout things like ‘Mine!’ and ‘Down at the net!’ He might miss her drop shot, but he wouldn’t miss her.

  Only Harvey would miss her if she disappeared – and then only when the Bugsy Supreme ran out.

  A loud wooden squeal interrupted her thoughts. Behind her, Dave Marshall was making his usual noise. He was the PE teacher, and so used to shifting the gym equipment around the school hall that he couldn’t even sit down for a cup of tea without a great scraping of furniture. He was the only male member of staff, and treated everyone – even the headmistress – like girlish underlings.

  Now – without even turning her head – Miss Sharpe could tell he was picking up the Gazette. Flapping it open like a tarp in a typhoon.

  It took him a nanosecond to form an opinion.

  ‘Silly cow,’ he pronounced, expecting to be listened to, as always.

  Usually Miss Sharpe wouldn’t indulge his masculine nonsense, but today she was rattled by death, so she turned a cool eye on him. ‘Excuse me?’

  He held up the newspaper for her to see. ‘Hitchhiking. What does she expect?’

  A couple of the other teachers tittered nervously. Not Miss Sharpe. If Miss Sharpe ever caught herself tittering, she’d give herself a good smack.

  ‘I imagine,’ she said icily, ‘that she expected someone to pick her up and drop her off closer to home.’

  Marshall gave a snort of laughter.

  ‘Why, what would you expect?’ she demanded.

  ‘What I expect and what she can expect are not the same thing,’ he smiled.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m a man,’ he pointed out, in case she hadn’t noticed his lack of deodorant. ‘Everyone knows women shouldn’t hitch.’

  Miss Sharpe knew that too, but she still bristled like a hog.

  ‘That’s as good as saying she deserved to get murdered. I suppose women shouldn’t wear short skirts either? Or show off their ankles.’

  Marshall snorted again. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Emily Pankhurst.’

  ‘Emmeline,’ she snapped.

  ‘Christ, I’m only joking,’ he said – then raised his brows and rolled his eyes meaningfully.

  Miss Sharpe was this close to tipping her tea over his big stupid head. She knew that look. Her father used to do it too – more and more after her mother had died. It was a look that said she was acting irrationally, but that he wasn’t going to argue with her because acting irrationally was what women did, and that sanity would only be wasted on her.

  Miss Sharpe controlled her urges, and turned her back on Dave Marshall.

  She wasn’t being irrational. A young woman – just like her – had been murdered and dumped in a lay-by like a fast-food wrapper, and a grown man thought she had it coming.

  Wasn’t that reason enough to be angry?

  17

  THE WOMAN WHOSE face Donald Moon had found under his size-ten boot turned out to be Frannie Hatton, a twenty-two-year-old addict-slash-barmaid, who had been reported missing after failing to show up for a shift at the Patch & Parrot in Bideford.

  And the police – who hadn’t been that interested in a missing junkie – were very interested in a dead one …

  Detective Constable Calvin Bridge checked the rear-view mirror to make sure he looked like a policeman.

  Because he never felt like one.

  Take this morning. This morning, any real policeman would have been happy. Here he was, driving Detective Chief Inspector Kirsty King to Old Town to speak to Frannie Hatton’s mother. It was quite the coup for a young constable with only six months in
plainclothes under his belt; DCI King was an impressive woman and right now everybody was trying to impress her back, because there was a promotion in the offing. Detective Sergeant Franklin had taken early retirement due to ill health. And that thing about filling up his wife’s car with police petrol. Anyway, it was quite possible that now he had gone, a couple of people at Bideford would move up a rung of the ladder without much effort – which had been Calvin’s preferred method of advancement ever since kindergarten.

  He’d only applied for plainclothes because keeping his uniform clean and pressed and shiny had been an awful lot of work.

  So driving DCI King around on a murder investigation was a feather in his cap, even if it was really only because he had known Frannie personally, though marginally. She’d been a few years behind him at school, and light years ahead of him at everything else.

  Calvin Bridge knew he should be on cloud nine.

  So why did he feel like a man in a wool suit on a hot day?

  The car behind theirs tooted and DCI King looked up from the pathology report on her lap and said, ‘Green light.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Calvin, and raised his hand in apology before pulling away, barely fast enough to keep up with his frantic windscreen wipers.

  All up Meddon Street he gave himself a good talking to. Don’t be so bloody ungrateful, Calvin. You’re young and solvent and you’ve got your health. Look at Frannie Hatton! Dead in a ditch! You think she wouldn’t change places with you? Pull yourself together!

  Calvin always heard his mother’s voice in his head when he was giving himself a good talking to, because she always knew best.

  Just like his girlfriend, Shirley.

  Shirley wore the pants in their relationship. Calvin didn’t mind; he was too lazy to wear the pants. Shirley was a stolid, no-nonsense girl who, at twenty-nine, was five years his senior – and she was used to having things her own way.

  Calvin was happy to have things her way too.