The Facts of Life and Death

by Belinda Bauer

  She decided to call Jordan. He’d be cross that she’d woken him, because he worked shifts, but it was his fault for buying her a fake watch, so she didn’t feel too bad.

  For a moment she thought she had already called him, and wondered how long he would be and did she have time to nip behind a car for a wee? Then she remembered that she hadn’t called him, and needed her phone if she was going to.

  Becky staggered a little with the effort of peering into her handbag. Why didn’t they make them white inside, so a person had a bloody chance? Especially in the dark.

  ‘Sorry to wake you, Jordy, but my watch stopped and I’ve missed the last bus home.’ That’s what she would say when he answered.

  When he answered.

  The phone went to voicemail, so she hung up and tried again.

  Still Jordan didn’t answer.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon me?’ said a man walking his dog.

  ‘You too,’ said Becky.

  The man shook his head and walked on.

  Becky dialled again. Jordan was a deep sleeper. She’d once had a ten-minute shouting match with that old cow next door right under their bedroom window, and he hadn’t stirred. And now he couldn’t hear his phone. Becky had imagined it on the bedside table, but now she adjusted her mental picture to it being on the kitchen counter, or in his jacket pocket in the hall cupboard. All those things were just as likely.

  ‘Come on, Jordy, pick up the phone.’

  He didn’t.

  Becky left a message, then hung up and shivered again.

  A car pulled up alongside her and the window went down.

  ‘Need a ride?’

  She put one hand on the roof of the car to steady herself, and peered through the window at the man. She couldn’t really see him in the dark, but he sounded nice enough. She was half tempted. But he was a man alone in a car and she was a girl alone on a dark and stormy night, and she still had options. Jordy might call her any minute now, and she could probably get a cab.

  ‘Naah,’ she mused. ‘Better not.’

  ‘You sure?’ said the man. ‘You’ve been waiting a while.’

  ‘You been watching me?’ said Becky. ‘That’s fucking creepy! My boyfriend’ll smash your face in.’

  ‘Be like that,’ said the man, and drove off, leaving Becky without the car to keep her upright. She stumbled and would have fallen into the road if it weren’t for the lamp post.

  Of course, as soon as he drove off, Becky realized that the driver wasn’t a mad axeman, that she’d have been perfectly safe in his company, and wished he’d come back.

  ‘Come back!’ she shouted. ‘Oi!’

  He didn’t, and she was back to square one.

  Jordan didn’t call and finally Becky hitched up her tits and wobbled her way across the road to Key Cabs. She knew she didn’t have enough money in her purse for the fare, but she was sure they’d take her home on a promise of payment at the other end. Becky wasn’t quite so sure that Jordan would have the cash when they got there, but by then it would be the cabbie’s problem, not hers.

  ‘Can’t do it,’ said the big man behind the Formica counter in the tiny Key Cabs office.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Becky flirtatiously. ‘I bet you do it all the time!’

  The man was immune. He took a bite of kebab and shook his head.

  ‘Never do it,’ he said, letting Becky see lamb and lettuce swirl in his mouth. ‘Been conned too many times.’

  Becky wasn’t used to being refused when she was wearing this skirt. ‘Can’t you do me a favour? I’ve missed the last bus.’

  ‘Get a watch,’ he shrugged.

  ‘I’ve got a watch.’ She showed him and then pouted. ‘But it stopped.’

  The man glanced at it and said, ‘Get a proper watch.’ Then he took a more ambitious bite. This time the shredded lettuce hung from between his lips like barbels, and some kind of thin orange sauce trickled down his chin. He sucked in the lettuce noisily and cleared the sauce with the back of his hand, which he then wiped down the side of his leg, somewhere below the level of the counter.

  ‘Fat pig,’ said Becky, even though she knew it sealed her fate.

  He shrugged again and said, ‘Enjoy the walk, slut.’

  Becky headed back towards the bus stop because she didn’t know where else to go.

  She tried Jordan again and mentally cursed him to hell and back for his deep sleep and his lousy gift. She should get a new boyfriend; one who would come and fetch her from a girls’ night out. When she got home, she might break up with Jordan.

  Becky waited another few minutes. She hoped for the last bus; she hoped the man in Key Cabs would relent and wave her back across the road; she hoped Jordan would wake up and wonder where she was, and call her back.

  When none of those things happened, she put up her umbrella and started to walk. What the hell – she was young and healthy and more than capable of walking the four miles to Weare Gifford any day of the week. It was on an unlit, tree-lined country road without pavements, but she’d just have to be careful, that was all. She wasn’t that drunk. She’d be fine.

  By the time she passed the police station four hundred yards up the road, she was feeling less confident. She was that drunk, and kept veering off the pavement and perilously close to the road. Once she hit a dog-mess bin and had a little cry because she’d touched it with her bare hands. Also, her boots weren’t made for walking. They’d cost her thirty-five quid in the New Look sale, but they were starting to leak, and squelched coldly with every step.

  She had almost left the lights of Bideford behind when a car pulled over and rolled slowly to a halt right in front of her.

  Brilliant. Becky almost cried with gratitude.

  The door opened and the driver stepped out and walked towards her, and Becky Cobb felt her whole body prickle in fear.

  The man didn’t have a head!

  For a ghastly, free-falling moment Becky thought she would faint with the horror of it. Then she realized he was wearing a balaclava. Black and woollen, with holes for his eyes and mouth. That was hardly any better. She was transfixed by it; she couldn’t move – couldn’t even look away.

  He pointed at her face. ‘When I say get in the car, you get in the car,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s easier for everyone.’

  She hit him with her umbrella. It didn’t hurt him, because the umbrella was open and the drag slowed it through the air, but it hit his arms and stopped him being able to grab hold of her properly, so Becky turned and ran back down the middle of the dark road, towards the lights. ‘Help me!’ she screamed, horrified by how small the noise sounded. ‘Help me!’

  The man yanked her off her feet so fast that all the breath left her as she hit the ground, and she was dragged away from the lights and towards the car, the wet road grazing the small of her back and rolling her micro-mini down around her hips as she kicked and struggled and flailed about for something to grab on to.

  They were at the car. The back wheel passed her peripheral vision and she twisted and grabbed hold of it, hugging the tyre like a long-lost lover while the headless man yanked at her arms and prised her fingers.

  ‘Let go, bitch!’ He picked her up so that her body and legs were completely off the ground, but Becky didn’t let go. She clung on to the wheel, screaming and shrieking, with her cheek pressed to the tyre.

  ‘Hey!’ someone shouted. ‘Hey!’

  She twisted her head. There was a person running towards them – silhouetted gloriously against the last streetlight in Bideford, like Jesus in a sunbeam.

  The man dropped her.

  Just like that.

  One minute Becky Cobb was being kidnapped by a maniac and the next the car door slammed, the engine gunned and she was lying face-down in the road – wet, filthy, and sobbing like a helpless child.

  Within minutes Becky Cobb was at Bideford police station, waiting for the doctor and DCI King to arrive, and telling the desk sergeant, Tony Coral,
everything she remembered.

  It was remarkable how much Becky did remember, given how drunk she still was.

  Tony Coral took down everything she told him methodically and accurately. He couldn’t remember hearing a more detailed description in all his thirty-one years on the force.

  Sadly, it was a description not of a kidnapper, but of a wheel. Four bare bolts, the black cable tie holding the hubcap in place, the crack in the plastic shaped like a dolphin, the metal valve cap and the zigzag pattern of treads on the tyre.

  ‘I’d know that wheel anywhere,’ Becky slurred vehemently every time she woke up. ‘Anywhere.’

  27

  MISS SHARPE PICKED Ruby Trick’s diary off the top of the pile. The title on the cover was written so wrongly, and yet so carefully, that Miss Sharpe didn’t have the heart to correct it.

  She skimmed the latest entries, corrected a few spelling errors, made a few ticks. She smiled to herself as she wondered whether the childish pleasure of a red pen would ever wear off.

  The last line in the book made her gasp.

  She had to read it twice to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.

  And when she had, Miss Sharpe closed the little blue book and sat for a very long time, just staring at the words: My Dairy.

  Then she picked up the phone to call Ruby Trick’s mother.

  Just as Calvin Bridge had promised, the Burrows was a thousand acres of flat land that would have been a lagoon if it weren’t for the pebble ridge that ran for over a mile and was as high as a house.

  These were not any old pebbles. Not pebbles that would sit snug in the hand or skip across a pond. These were kings among pebbles. Emperors of smooth grey sandstone – each one as rounded and as beautiful as the next, and ranging in size from palm to prize-winning pumpkin.

  And the irony was that the sea itself had built the ridge that now kept it at bay. For a hundred thousand years, the tide had picked up and pounded jagged rocks from the foot of cliffs as far away as Clovelly. It had rubbed them and washed them and shaped them and rolled them along ten miles of beach, until each rock was worn to a smooth piece of perfection. Finally the ocean had piled them into this natural wall – slowly cheating itself out of the Burrows, which were instead annexed by locals for their sheep and their ponies and, later, their golf.

  Twice a day, the angry sea came back for the Burrows. It slunk about the foot of the ridge, casing the joint. Then, with the full weight of the Atlantic behind it, it threw itself at the pebbles, clawing and snarling and roaring its intent to take back its rightful property. Once a month, General Moon ordered it over the top, where it sometimes caught a tantalizing glimpse of what it had lost, and hurled insults and froth, but rarely managed more.

  Every year, the Potwallopers walked the tattered edges of the ridge by torchlight and heaved giant pebbles that had been dragged on to the sand back up to the top of the magnificent ridge. Then they feasted on the beach – taunting the sea, and daring it to try again, if it thought it was hard enough.

  In sunshine the pebbles were a tasteful pale grey, some with elegant white crystalline pinstripes. But today it was raining, and they were slate and shiny.

  On any day, Calvin knew they would break your ankle as soon as look at you.

  ‘Remarkable,’ said DCI King as they drove along behind the ridge, and Calvin felt a swell of proprietorial pride at this most prominent feature of his home town – as if he’d built it himself.

  King yawned.

  Calvin didn’t take it personally. He knew she’d been up half the night with some girl who’d been dragged down the Torrington road on her arse.

  ‘Any luck with that girl, Ma’am?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s not going to be any help,’ said King, and yawned again. ‘Even sober.’

  They left the Volvo on a patch of gravel at the foot of the ridge and started walking. The grass underfoot was as smooth as lino. Any blade that dared put its head above the parapet was immediately cropped by sheep or ponies. Now and then there was a ditch for drainage, or a stand of spiky marsh grass to remind them that they should have been underwater. Calvin held out a hand to a passing pony. It stretched its neck and lips, but lost interest when it found that all he had to offer was fingers.

  They stopped at a shallow pan of mud and Calvin bent down to scoop a sample into a small plastic jar.

  ‘Keep your eye open for Frannie’s nose ring,’ DCI King reminded him.

  ‘Will do, Ma’am,’ said Calvin, although they both knew it was a hopeless task.

  ‘So,’ said King, ‘when’s the big day?’

  ‘What big day?’

  ‘The wedding.’

  ‘Oh. Next year. March thirteenth.’

  ‘Lucky for some.’ She shrugged. ‘Looking forward to it?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Calvin, putting the lid on the little jar.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your fiancée.’

  ‘Oh! Shirley. She’s a really nice girl.’

  ‘You make her sound like a spaniel,’ said King.

  Someone shouted ‘Fore!’ and they hunched their shoulders. A dozen yards away, a golf ball thudded softly into the turf beside an uninterested sheep.

  Pans were a feature of the Burrows. They took mud samples from two more before it started to rain hard and King decided they had enough for Mike Crew to make a reasonable comparison with the soil between Frannie Hatton’s teeth.

  They got back in the car.

  ‘You can take those samples down to Mike Crew tomorrow,’ said King.

  Calvin made the outraged face of a fourteen-year-old boy and she added cheerfully, ‘Isn’t the chain of command wonderful?’

  She put the car into gear and pulled off the gravel on to the narrow road.

  Calvin looked out of the window at the wet grass and mud-pans slowly filling with sandy brown rainwater, and sighed deeply.

  ‘Getting cold feet about the wedding?’ said King, not unkindly.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Calvin said. ‘Yes.’

  King laughed, but he didn’t, and she stopped.

  ‘It’s just that it’s all happening very fast.’ He made what felt like a ridiculous face and waved his hands to show he was totally OK with it all. ‘Very exciting, you know? Bit of a blur.’

  He laughed awkwardly. King cleared her throat but said nothing. That was his invitation to say nothing too.

  But instead, after a minute or so, he said something.

  ‘It’s just that everything feels different. People aren’t the same.’

  ‘You mean Shirley’s not the same?’

  ‘Yeah. Suddenly she’s not about us any more. She’s all about the wedding and the honeymoon and all the children we’re going to have.’

  King raised her eyebrows and said, ‘All the children?’

  Calvin nodded. ‘Three. Rosie, Charlotte and Digby.’

  ‘Digby?’ laughed King. ‘Bloody hell, Calvin! Get out now, while you still can!’

  Calvin opened his mouth to tell her that Shirley had wanted Algie, and he’d got it reduced to Digby on appeal, but he was suddenly flung forward so hard in his seat that the inertia reel belt jammed against his shoulder and he braced his hands against the dashboard.

  The Volvo fishtailed a little, then lurched to a stop.

  ‘Get out!’ said King.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get out of the car! Out!’ And she poked him in the arm.

  Confused and a little worried, Calvin opened his door. He didn’t move fast enough for King. She poked him twice more in the back as he went, shouting, ‘Out! Out!’

  He did, then took a few paces before turning to face the car.

  King got out of the driver’s side, looking flushed. ‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘Those marks on Frannie Hatton’s arm and back – they’re in the places they’d be if someone was poking her to get her out of a car!’

  Calvin frowned and touched his arm where her forefinger had first landed. There
would be a little bruise there, for sure – even through his jacket. And the two on his back were lower than the marks on Frannie, but then, he was a lot taller.

  ‘Get out!’ said King. ‘That’s what made me think of it. But Frannie didn’t want to get out – she must’ve known that something bad was going to happen. So he poked her with his finger and the nails left those short, curved bruises.’

  She was pacing with excitement.

  Calvin frowned.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said instantly.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a man doesn’t poke. A man pushes.’

  King stared at him, then jerked a thumb at the car. ‘OK, you get in the driver’s seat and push me out. Let me see.’

  He did, and she saw. He sat behind the wheel and shoved her out with his spread fingertips and the heel of his hand. He didn’t poke.

  ‘And even if he did poke,’ he said, staring at his forefinger, ‘men don’t have nails long enough to leave marks like the ones on Frannie Hatton.’

  King grimaced and said, ‘You’re right.’

  ‘And Katie Squire noticed that his nails were quite bitten,’ said Calvin. ‘It’s in the report.’

  ‘You’re right again. Bollocks.’ She sat back down in the passenger seat.

  That made three times Calvin had been right in the past two minutes. He was never right about swatches.

  ‘Maybe it was a gun,’ said King.

  ‘Seriously?’ said Calvin. This was Devon; now and then a farmer sawed his granddad’s shotgun in half so that he could put the end of it in his mouth, but criminal guns – handguns – were still mercifully few and far between.

  But King said, ‘Yes, seriously. The bit at the front. The barrel—’

  ‘The muzzle,’ he supplied.

  ‘Yes, the muzzle. That would leave a little curved bruise.’ She made her fingers into a gun and poked him slowly three times in the shoulder. ‘Would – ’nt – it?’