The Facts of Life and Death

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘Wow!’ she breathed. ‘It’s . . . amazing!

  ‘It’s nothing really,’ said Adam.

  It wasn’t nothing. It was something. More than something.

  ‘Did you get it in Clovelly?’

  ‘Yeah. I remember you said you wanted a donkey, so …’ Adam tailed off. Then added, ‘I walked all the way there and all the way back. It rained the whole time.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s not even my birthday.’

  ‘It’s not a birthday present. It’s just . . . you know, for any old day.’

  ‘It’s the best present I ever had.’ Ruby meant it; she couldn’t think of a better one right at that moment.

  Adam went red but he looked very pleased.

  ‘I’m going to call him Lucky,’ said Ruby.

  Adam moved closer so that their heads almost bumped. He touched the sledge. ‘I thought it would be pretty funny to put some carrots in here; like, behind the donkey.’

  ‘Yeah,’ nodded Ruby. ‘That would be pretty funny.’ She didn’t know why, but she totally agreed.

  ‘Thank you,’ she added.

  ‘No problem.’

  They stood together for a moment, looking at the donkey. Then Adam said, ‘Anyway, I’d better go. Got tons of homework.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said.

  ‘Mine’s Roman roads and aqueducts,’ he said.

  ‘Mine’s a diary,’ said Ruby. ‘We have to write something every day.’

  ‘That’s harsh.’

  ‘I know. I usually just do it all on one day.’

  He nodded at the donkey. ‘Well, today you can write about that.’

  ‘I will,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Night,’ he said.

  ‘Night.’

  She closed the door behind Adam and locked it, then took the key out.

  Ruby went upstairs to bed, even though it wasn’t even nine thirty. She made a space on her bedside table, carefully sweeping a spot clear between the mugs and the sweet wrappers and the books, and put the donkey there.

  They didn’t have any carrots so she got a potato from the sack in the kitchen and put that in the sledge for now, like a big pale-brown boulder.

  She wrote FRIDAY in her diary.

  Adam brought me a donkey from Clovelly. It’s the best present I ever got. He walked there and back in the rain. He has a slej and his name is Lucky. I am going to put carrots in the slej because that will be pretty funny.

  Ruby tried to stay awake, straining to hear Daddy’s car pull up on the cobbles, but instead she fell asleep, looking at Lucky.

  John Trick was late home because someone had cut off Tonto’s tail.

  Most of the Gunslingers had already meandered their way down Irsha Street by the time he and Shiny and Nellie helped Whippy outside to his steed.

  The old horse was tied to the drainpipe where Whippy had left him, chewing on a complimentary sachet of Heinz Salad Cream.

  They got a chair for Whippy to sway on, and guided his boot into the stirrup, then Hick and Nellie pushed, while Shiny ran round the back to stop Whippy tumbling straight off the other side. It had happened before.

  ‘Hey,’ said Shiny, but the other three were puffing and grunting too hard to hear him.

  ‘Hey!’ he said again, and rejoined them. ‘Tonto’s tail’s gone.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Nellie.

  But it was true.

  They helped Whippy out of the stirrup and off the chair and then the Gunslingers stood and stared at the rough bob, which was all that was left of Tonto’s wavy white tail.

  Sometimes people shouted that they were wankers. Sometimes kids threw pebbles at them. But this was much worse.

  ‘Bastards!’ shouted Whippy. ‘Bastards!’

  Hick Trick shook his head. ‘First Blacky’s car gets keyed, and now this.’

  They peered under wooden tables and even crawled about between chair legs – as if finding the missing tail would rectify the situation.

  But Tonto’s tail was gone for good.

  21

  MIKE CREW WAS the most boring man on the planet.

  Calvin Bridge had only been in his company for half an hour, and yet he had already mentally moved him to the top of that chart in the face of tough competition from his old European History teacher, Mr Branch, and the desk sergeant, Tony Coral, who had an extensive collection of railway memorabilia and didn’t care who knew it.

  ‘People think mud is just mud. They could not. Be. More. Wrong,’ said Professor Crew, with all the excitement of a member of the Magic Circle who has decided to blab.

  Calvin glanced at DCI King from the corner of his eye and saw the same glazed look on her face which spoke of a monumental effort to give a shit. He was going to have to work very hard not to drift off.

  Or laugh.

  Would that be so bad? Calvin hadn’t laughed for ages. Last week he’d tried to make a joke about the bridesmaids’ dresses, but it had backfired. Then he’d committed the cardinal sin of not knowing what frangipani was. He’d thought it was a kind of cake, but Shirley told him he was just being ‘difficult’. He realized that the few minutes when DCI King had forced him to engage with her over Frannie Hatton’s corpse had been the most fun he’d had all week.

  That couldn’t be right, could it?

  ‘These are your two samples.’ Crew was holding up two glass slides. ‘I have taken the liberty of labelling them OS 2425 by 1265 Interdental 45, identifying the geographical location according to the Ordnance Survey, and the physiological area from where the sample has been extracted – in this case interdentally – and finally a code relating to my own files and order of work, which is really just for my personal reference—’

  ‘And what did you find?’ said King, rubbing her hands together and leaning forward a little in the universal body language of ‘Let’s cut to the chase.’

  Crew stuck his hand in front of her face and said imperiously, ‘Culm down, dear!’

  King looked coldly at his palm.

  ‘Old pedology joke!’ Mike Crew laughed all by himself while King and Calvin exchanged strained looks. Then he continued, ‘So, the other sample has been labelled OS 2425 by 1265 Gateway 46.’ He stopped – almost daring King to try to hurry him up, but Calvin could see her mentally biting her lip. You couldn’t hurry some people. Professor Crew was going to say what he wanted to say and any attempt to curtail him would only result in prolonging the agony. It was like talking about seating plans, which was fast becoming the Rubik’s Cube of the wedding. Everyone had a back to be got up, an offence to be taken; everyone bore a grudge. Shirley assured him that there would be a way to make it work, but they just hadn’t found it yet.

  God forbid people should just sit down and shut up and be grateful for a free lunch.

  ‘So,’ said Crew, ‘sample OS 2425 by 1265 Interdental 45 is basically a Capers series soil of heavy clay with particulate inclusions. However, sample OS 2425 by 1265 Gateway 46 consists of Manod soils, which are typically Brown Podzolic, which is a silty loam most prevalent over rock typical of the area between Bideford and the village of Abbotsham.’

  He stopped again and they both waited for the next bit, but Crew just got a disappointed look on his face, and said a little tetchily, ‘That’s it.’

  Apparently they’d missed the punchline.

  ‘Oh!’ said King. ‘Sorry, I was just . . . engrossed.’

  That placated him. ‘I know!’ he enthused. ‘We walk on it every day, build our homes on it, grow our food in it, bury our dead in it, and yet how many people really think about soil? How many people really care?’

  Calvin had to turn his head so he wouldn’t catch King’s eye.

  ‘So these are two different soils?’ she said.

  ‘The fine earth fractions are entirely incompatible,’ nodded Crew.

  ‘So you’re saying that Frannie Hatton was killed somewhere else?’

  ‘Of course,’ s
aid Crew. ‘As we say in the business – mud don’t lie.’ He affected a bad Al Jolson voice and matching racist hand-waggle, but King remained utterly straight-faced. She was a better man than Calvin. She cleared her throat. ‘And do you have any idea where that somewhere else might be?’

  Crew milked it, of course. He made a great show of finding an ordnance Survey map of North Devon, which was in his desk drawer all along. Then he spread it across the pens and books and in-trays on his desk so that it was almost as bumped and hilly as its printed surface swore it should be.

  Finally he hummed and hawed and waved a pencil over it like Harry Potter, until he settled on an area between Westward Ho! and Appledore.

  ‘Around there,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the Burrows,’ said Calvin.

  ‘What’s the Burrows?’ said King.

  ‘It’s this sort of . . . flat bit. Behind the pebble ridge.’

  ‘What’s the pebble ridge?’ said King.

  ‘It’s a ridge, Ma’am,’ said Calvin. ‘Made of pebbles.’

  ‘Aah,’ King smiled. ‘The clue was in the name.’

  Crew hurried to regain the lead role in this play. ‘If you could send me a sample, I could be more specific. Close to the sea, given the presence in OS 2425 by 1265 Interdental 45 of particulate glucosamine.’

  ‘Sugar?’ said Calvin.

  ‘Shells,’ said King.

  ‘That’s right!’ Crew rushed to expand. ‘Tiny particles of crustacea, either fragmentary or granulated, interspersed with the parent pedogenic structure.’

  ‘Ground-up shells,’ King translated firmly. She had her message; apparently she no longer needed to massage the messenger.

  ‘Have a look,’ said Crew, and at his urging, Calvin stepped over to the microscope and peered through the eyepiece while the professor twiddled things.

  The smear of mud they’d collected from Frannie Hatton’s front teeth blurred and unblurred and was suddenly in focus – and unexpectedly beautiful, with a thousand tiny fragments which Calvin assumed had once been shells, glittering like mother-of-pearl stars in a chocolate sky.

  Even though he was looking at a blob of mud down a microscope, Calvin suddenly felt very small. He wished he could be that tiny, that insignificant.

  That hard to find.

  ‘Are the Burrows near the sea?’ asked King.

  Calvin straightened up. ‘Without the pebble ridge, Ma’am, the Burrows are the sea.’

  DCI King glanced over as she swung the Volvo out of the car park and said, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘You did warn me,’ admitted Calvin. ‘But I still wasn’t ready.’

  King laughed. ‘The mud lets the boyfriend off the hook, wouldn’t you say?’

  Calvin looked at her blankly. He had no idea why she was asking him or what the right answer might be.

  ‘They lived together…’ said King encouragingly, and then stopped speaking to allow him to pick up the thread.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘So . . . that . . . means …’ he went on, speaking slowly to give himself time to think.

  She helped him out. ‘If you lived with someone and you wanted to kill them, where would you be most likely to do it?’

  Calvin thought about killing Shirley. He’d have to avoid the corduroy sofa.

  ‘In the bath?’ he said. ‘With a knife?’

  King raised her eyebrows. ‘I wasn’t thinking of specifics,’ she said. ‘But you’d kill them at home, right?’

  ‘Probably,’ he agreed.

  ‘You wouldn’t take her out to a field and push her face into mud until she died, and then load her body into your car and drive it somewhere else and dump it, would you?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Calvin again. He wasn’t crazy about mud in his car.

  ‘That would be too much like hard work,’ King went on. ‘Too organized.’

  ‘Yes, it would,’ he agreed.

  ‘Especially for a junkie who doesn’t own a car,’ she said, and Calvin finally caught a glimpse of how her mind worked.

  It was apparently quite different from the way his worked.

  In fact, Calvin was starting to worry that his mind worked differently from everybody else’s.

  For instance, he had gone out last Saturday and brought Shirley an engagement ring, but instead of postponing everything for a couple of years the way he’d imagined it would, the ring had only seemed to make her worse. Suddenly there was a church booked, and he was being bombarded by wedding-invitation designs and something called swatches, and he was expected to pore over The Big Book of Baby Names on date nights, instead of watching Korean gangster movies and having sex on the sofa.

  Calvin had committed to a ring; he hadn’t realized that the ring had committed him to pretty much everything Shirley claimed it did – including three children, because ‘It’s a nice round number.’ He’d wanted to point out that in fact three was uneven and also a prime, but was afraid that Shirley would actually agree with him – and push for four instead of dropping back to two.

  Calvin sighed and wondered what having kids would be like. Better or worse than puppies? Probably very similar, he thought. Messy and tiring to start with, and then after a few months they learned your routine and things got a lot easier.

  He could always do extra shifts at work until then.

  ‘Calvin!’

  Calvin blinked at DCI King. He had the distinct feeling she’d said his name more than once.

  ‘Are you deaf?’

  That confirmed it. ‘No, Ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Well then, try to pay attention, will you? I don’t want to keep repeating myself like those idiots you see calling their dogs in the park.’

  ‘Sorry, Ma’am.’

  Calvin touched his sleeve to his brow. Trying to keep up with life was making him sweat.

  22

  JUST AFTER MUMMY went to work, Daddy appeared at Ruby’s bedroom door in his cowboy clothes even though it wasn’t Friday. ‘Want to go catch a killer, Deputy?’

  Ruby gasped in excitement and Daddy held up a warning finger. ‘Don’t tell Mummy.’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Ruby, and bounced off the bed

  Ruby kept craning forward on her seat, even though it wanted to tilt her backwards. She wanted to see the killer first; wanted to be the one to spot him; wanted to shout, ‘There he is!’ and point her finger, and feel the car swing around hard in pursuit.

  If they didn’t catch him tonight, next time she would bring a cushion.

  She looked at Daddy. ‘You should have a badge,’ she said. And then immediately, ‘Can I have a badge?’

  ‘What kind of badge?’

  ‘A deputy’s badge. And you can have a sheriff’s.’

  ‘We’ll see how it goes, Rubes. I don’t think the Gunslingers would want me to give out badges until they knew you were going to stick at it.’

  ‘I am going to stick at it,’ Ruby assured him.

  ‘We’ll see then.’

  Ruby perched on the edge of her seat, even though they weren’t in Bideford yet. They passed tiny hamlets, no more than a house or three, but she glared at them all with raw suspicion.

  They reached the outskirts of the town – the supermarket and the discount shops and the little industrial estates where little industry happened.

  Here they saw people, out and about, walking their dogs, waiting at bus stops, eating chips from paper cones.

  ‘What does a murderer look like?’ Ruby eventually thought to ask.

  ‘The news said white and about six foot tall.’

  ‘How tall is six foot?’

  Daddy showed her a few inches between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. ‘About yea much taller than me.’

  ‘What colour is his hair?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What colour are his eyes?’

  ‘Don’t know that too.’

  Ruby screwed up her face. ‘It’s difficult.’

  Daddy laughed. �
��If it wasn’t, the police would have caught him, I reckon. That’s why we got up the posse, see? To keep an eye open.’

  ‘I thought we were on the posse to hunt him down?’

  ‘We are,’ said Daddy. ‘But that’s how we hunt him down. You keep an eye open and when you spot him you hunt him down. These things take time, Rubes. I told you it weren’t a game, didn’t I?’

  Ruby nodded.

  They drove through Bideford in a zigzag, and then went on towards Westward Ho!, slowly up the long hill, and quickly down the other side as if they were surfing a wave to the beach.

  ‘Where are the other Gunslingers?’ she asked.

  ‘Round and about,’ he said. ‘We split up so we can cover more area. Some of us on this side of the water and some on the other, off towards Barnstaple. Chip’s covering Torrington. Nobody knows where he’ll strike next, see, Rubes? That’s why he’s hard to catch.’

  She nodded. That made sense, although she was disappointed that they weren’t all riding in convoy, the way she’d imagined they’d be. Of course, she was even more disappointed that they weren’t all on horses, but even she knew that that was unrealistic.

  Now and then Daddy did flash his lights at another Gunslinger, or raised a hand as they passed. When he did, he’d murmur their names.

  ‘Shiny,’ he’d go. Or ‘Whippy.’

  Just that. No more.

  Ruby watched the men’s silhouettes pass and longed to ask questions about Shiny and Whippy and Blacky and Daisy. Wanted to know why they had those names; wanted to say hi and show them that she was a deputy, even though she was only a girl and only ten. But the Gunslingers didn’t stop to talk, just drove on – all hunting for the same killer.

  It was very grown-up.

  They looped through Westward Ho! and then went through the lanes to Appledore, past the shipyard, and back up to Northam.

  They slowed a few times as they passed men walking alone, or sitting in parked cars, and Ruby peered from the window with her heart thudding in her ears.

  What would she see? What would a killer look like? Would she be able to spot him? And if she did, would he know he’d been spotted? The idea made her shiver, and at those moments when Daddy took his foot off the pedal and they coasted past a stranger, Ruby wished she’d brought her guns. Even if they were sticks, somehow she’d feel safer with them in her pockets.