When the Dead Come Calling

by Helen Sedgwick

  Main Street turns gradually from a maintained road with central road markings to a potholed track as the houses along it become further apart with noticeably fewer roses in the metre strip of front garden assigned to each. After a while there is a gate, which is always open, followed by a cattle grid, beyond which the track is made of mud and gravel. You are now on the land of Ricky Barr, farmer, widow, and father to seventeen-year-old Andy, work shadowing at Burrowhead police station.

  Church Street leads out of the village for half a mile and straight to the church, which is not a functioning church but a ruin, abandoned by its congregation, who moved to the larger church five miles away in Warphill at some point in the late-eighteenth century. It is thought there was a scandal, something to do with a minister and a boy, or perhaps a girl, or something to do with an abandoned baby or something maybe to do with a slave. The villagers tend not to tell the story, truth be told, but parents will give snippets to the children to keep them quiet or, more likely, to keep them away from the church with the threat of a haunting – twenty-five years ago a bit of the roof fell in and crushed a sheep that had been loitering there to chew the grass. It had to be shot later, to put it out of its misery. The ruined church, along with the rusting playground, is considered a danger to the children of Burrowhead. The children of Burrowhead are not afraid of the ruined church, or of the rusting playground.

  Then there’s High Street, where Georgie and Trish are currently standing outside the Spar and looking at an empty parking space – in fact an entirely empty road. There are no cars parked on this stretch that leads from the butchers on the far corner up past the Spar and Dr Cosse’s flat and on to the village square with its fountain. But if they were to turn around and follow the street back past the butchers, past the lane Walt must have used to avoid the village square, and out of the village altogether, then they would find themselves where they started this morning, at the village playground. More specifically, the road leads into a car park next to the playground that could probably fit twelve cars at least, though Georgie has never seen it with more than half that number, and usually there are none at all. And that is the end of High Street: a car park next to a rusty playground at the top of Burrowhead cliffs, facing out over the froth-marked pebble beach to the sickly green sea.

  Coincidentally enough, the playground was built the same year Georgie and Fergus arrived in Burrowhead, which is to say that all three have become familiar fixtures of the village but are not quite from the village either. In fact, no one really knows where Georgie is from at all. No one in the village can quite place her accent – there’s a bit of Scottish in there, for sure, so maybe she spent time north of the border, but it’s mingled with something from the Deep South of the United States, they think. Bobby the taxi driver suspects she’s lived in Australia, which she hasn’t, though what he actually said was that there looks to be a bit of the Aboriginal in her. No one felt the need to comment. And they say maybe she’s the daughter of diplomats; maybe she’s spent time in Singapore, maybe she has relatives in Africa. She’s not from here though, that much they know. Brown-skinned. Tight dark curls. But originally? Well, where Georgie became Georgie is a mystery no one has been able to solve. A bit like why she married Fergus. Big Fergus with his pointless projects and his collecting of other people’s junk, Fergus who’s Scottish as the day is long and ginger to boot. But marry him she did, for her own good reasons, and Fergus, meanwhile, has followed Church Street beyond the church, at which point it becomes simply the B8629 and leads up to Burrowhead Cross, where there is a crossroads beside a hillock on which he is standing.

  He’s been upset all morning, unbalanced and sick. Such an awful thing with Dr Cosse – and right here in the village. He can hardly believe it, though the moments when it seems untrue are quickly replaced by nausea as he remembers Georgie’s face when she told him. He spent a while thinking about what he could do to help, but he didn’t really think there was anything he could do, so he pulled himself together and got on his bike and now here he is.

  He’s wearing his Lycra outfit, bought when the cycle shop in Crackenbridge closed down and got rid of all their kit. CLOSING-DOWN SALE AT POUND-SHOP PRICES, the sign said, before they locked the doors for good and dumped what they couldn’t sell in the old quarry. It annoys Fergus, the way people dump things in the old quarry. What a pointless thing to do. To litter. He doesn’t understand the urge at all. It’s not as though the old quarry is convenient – people must actually travel there in order to dump what they don’t want into the greyed-out dip in the hill where they used to dig for limestone. Now he goes there to dig through the possibilities that other people have discarded. Once, a few weeks back, he saw Farmer Barr dumping a deep chest freezer in there with the digger bit of his tractor. He saw Fergus watching him do it, but didn’t seem to care. There’s an anger about the village these days that Fergus doesn’t understand either – the anger and the littering. They don’t make any sense to him. But, to go back to the closure of the cycle shop in Crackenbridge, Fergus bought all the cycling outfits he could ever need in that sale and then some. He just didn’t like the idea of it all going to waste.

  It is Fergus’s deepest fear that his life will be a waste, though he’s never told anyone so, not even Georgie. She’d only worry about him, and she’s too protective as it is – something to do with how he reminds her of her brother. But how do you know what bits of a life are worthwhile and what bits are wasteful while you’re in the middle of it all? It’s not so easy as taking your litter home with you. Though, when he thinks about it, taking your litter home with you seems like a good way to start.

  From where he stands on high, he can see both the village of Burrowhead to the south and the larger neighbouring village of Warphill to the north. That’s where the congregation from the old church moved, back in the late-eighteenth century. On the road to Warphill, not far out of Burrowhead, is a derelict block of flats, council housing scheduled for demolition twenty years ago. It was a mad place to build a block of flats in the first place – he was an engineer once, he could have told them that. The village of Warphill is a place Fergus rarely goes to, or rather, it’s a place no one really goes to, unless they have relatives there or friends they particularly want to visit. Unlike Burrowhead, it doesn’t have a semi-famous beach, and so it doesn’t have a tourist season to speak of. It does, however, have a standing stone that seems to suggest a line to the coast, passing through the woods with their half-buried stone of the cup and ring, and ending with the cliffs near Burrowhead playground. He wishes he could get higher up; imagines himself soaring over the fields and dense hedgerows, the glassy twists of the river, to approach the standing stone from above, feel it rising from the land, connecting him to the ancient rock bed below the surface. In fact, a series of photos and a map would make a good introduction to his new archaeological society on the homepage of his website. So many people have lived and died here, over so many thousands of years. He finds that strangely comforting.

  NOT YET NOON

  Georgie pushes the door next to the Spar on High Street and it opens, easily, and without a sound. The hinges must be well oiled. She leads the way, with Trish following close behind, up the dark staircase – there are no windows and the door has swung shut behind them; the lower of the hall lights seems to need a new bulb – until she is standing in front of another door, this one painted a pleasing sky blue, which does not open when she pushes it. The nameplate on the door is brass and polished and it says DR ALEXIS COSSE, PSYCHOTHERAPIST. God, it’s no wonder folk didn’t like him, round here. Most of them farming, or retired, or working in whatever shop can stay open long enough to take on staff for the season. Crackenbridge has more boarded-up shopfronts these days than Burrowhead has sheep, and Warphill is … well, no one really goes to Warphill, unless they’re from Warphill and haven’t yet found a way to get out. But Alexis was proud of what he did, and Georgie liked that about him. A wave of loss hits her, more real standing her
e than it was when she was looking at the body.

  She kneels in front of the door and checks under the mat for a spare key.

  ‘No such luck,’ she says to Trish.

  Then she checks the mat for signs of mud or visitors or disturbance, but she sees nothing out of the ordinary. It is just a doormat. WELCOME, it says. She shakes her head, and briefly places her hand on the mat. It prickles. It is coarse.

  Standing, she looks next for a flowerpot – almost everyone in the village keeps their spare key under a mat or a flowerpot. It’s such a safe place to live, they say, when visitors are surprised. And true enough, there are very few break-ins here, very few burglaries. Though that’s not the only type of crime, Georgie knows, and it would be a foolish villager to rob his own neighbours in a place so small as this. She finds herself leaning against the banister, staring down towards the dark of the ground floor, trying to catch the tail end of a thought, when a person-sized thump echoes through the enclosed hallway.

  Trish, it seems, is ramming the door with her bottom. Having failed to break through the first time, she’s stepping back now, checking the height of the lock against her body. Taking aim. This time her hip smashes against the door, to the sound of wood splintering and a creak of hinges. Quite a thud she makes, for someone so small.

  ‘I’ll call a locksmith,’ Georgie is trying to say, but she doesn’t try very hard, because this might be exactly what Trish needs just now. There has been something going on with her for a few months now, maybe more, maybe it’s been building slowly for a year or two. Georgie wonders if she should have said something before, but it’s not really her way; Georgie tends to wait for people to ask for help before offering it. Besides, she thinks Trish doesn’t like her very much. They have a different approach, a different temperament. If Trish wanted help, Georgie is fairly sure she wouldn’t be asking for it from her.

  Still, that’s got to hurt, on the hip bone like that. That’s going to bruise. And Georgie knows, though she would never comment on it, that Trish doesn’t have anyone at home to run her a hot bath, to help with that later. Georgie moves fast, once she’s made up her mind to do it, and stands in front of the door before Trish can ram into it again.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says – though it does look a bit like Trish might ram the door through Georgie, if it came to that. ‘I think you’ve done enough,’ she says. ‘That was really good.’ She smiles and Trish relaxes a little, breathes back into herself. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘Was nothing,’ says Trish, with a shrug, but one she looks kind of pleased about.

  Georgie turns, waits for Trish to come and stand next to her, and then she tries the handle again.

  This time, the door swings open. It is splintered all down the inside; the lock no longer reaches the mechanism. It sort of hangs there, lopsided on its hinges.

  ‘We’re in,’ says Trish.

  Georgie hangs back and lets Trish stride her way in first. She admires her, actually, the way she can be so forceful about things. Georgie doesn’t tend to be so forceful. Georgie would have patiently waited for the locksmith. She’s not sure, when she thinks about that, whether it’s a fault or a virtue. And Trish is petite, that’s the funny thing. Pale as can be and that spiky hair, fringe down to her eyebrows, nails neatly filed. Georgie glances down at her own big hands, pulls on a pair of latex examination gloves. Passes another pair to Trish.

  ‘The thing is,’ Trish is saying, ‘I knew something bad was coming. Something terrible. Didn’t you? Georgie?’ She’s standing round the other side of the desk now, repeatedly pressing the power button of the computer to see if it will start up. ‘Of course you did,’ she says. ‘Even you must have seen it. Been building for years. Or maybe it’s always been here.’

  A pause while a circle spins on the computer’s grey screen.

  Georgie has noticed certain things, actually. She notices a lot of things, and there has been a sort of bubbling, recently, like people are starting to reach the boil. Though there have always been the comments. Then there was the day when Fergus unplugged the radio from the socket in their bedroom and moved it out to the garage, where it now lives untouched. No more the days of listening to the news together of a morning. Now they have the birds. He says he likes it better, with the birds. They have such an extraordinary variety of song.

  ‘You heard about that boy, down south, that foreign boy they hung from a tree?’

  At the mention of it Georgie feels her insides twist. There are no words for it, for the awfulness of it. She doesn’t know what it would have done to her, if she’d been running the case.

  ‘Animals,’ Trish says, her voice low, cutting. ‘Fucking animals.’

  But it’s people who did it, thinks Georgie. That’s the awful thing; it was human beings who did it.

  While Trish continues furiously jabbing at the keyboard, Georgie walks round to the small filing cabinet behind the sofa. She stands still for a minute, waits for the sting in her eyes to die down some. The sofa is where his patients would have sat. Above it, there are three different pictures of trees – a pencil sketch, a watercolour and an oil painting. The oil is all silvers and dark olive greens, abstract lines with the unmistakable sheen of frost and moonlight. It’s the watercolour she’s pulled to, though, a softer palate, springtime perhaps, and there’s something about it she recognises. Then she sees the name. It’s one of Pamali’s. It’s lovely, delicate, warm. Alexis was into art, she’d seen him out sketching sometimes. The pencil drawing could even be his – there’s no name on that one. She steps back, glances over at the door that, presumably, leads to the bedroom. She’s never even been in here before. He was private, in a way, tended not to invite folk round for tea. But then he would have needed to keep patient confidentiality, wouldn’t he, and what with his office being right here in the front room, well, maybe other visitors weren’t a good idea. With that thought comes the knowledge that this is his whole home; that she will be going through his whole home.

  ‘Such an awful thing,’ she says. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  Though she’s not sure herself if she’s talking about the boy, or Dr Cosse, or all of it. The whole mess of things.

  She leaves the cabinet for a second and walks over to the door, gives it a gentle push. The mood through there is completely different, richer somehow – the front room is for his clients, clearly, but the bedroom is his own. Pristine white sheets cover the bed, topped with a quilt of embroidered velvet, deep red and blue and gold, the luxurious colours reflecting a tiny gold icon hanging on the far wall. There are photos too, on the chest of drawers: an old woman with a creased, tanned face, dressed head to toe in black, his grandmother perhaps; Alexis and Simon together, their faces close to the lens, a white blur of sky and coastline behind them. Simon’s laughing, holding the camera, looking straight at it but Alexis isn’t – Alexis is staring at Simon, his expression serious and genuine and vulnerable and Georgie backs quietly out of the bedroom and kneels down behind the sofa, closes her eyes, gives herself a moment before getting back to work.

  The filing cabinet opens as soon as she pulls a drawer – it isn’t locked or anything. But she was expecting notes in the cabinet drawers, records of his therapy sessions, contact details for his patients, that kind of thing. That’s not what it is, though, not at all – it’s his household filing. Electricity bills. Council tax. She tries the next drawer down. Bank statements. They’ll have to go through all that, of course. Might be something in there. She pulls out her phone and texts Cal to send someone over. Right away, he replies immediately. But she’d assumed she would find something else. Not personal finances or the change of an energy supply company.

  ‘Got it.’

  Trish’s voice is hard as concrete, and Georgie closes her eyes. She knows, somehow, that it’s going to be bigger than the death of one man. Something harder to comprehend, harder to defeat.

  ‘Fucking. Animals.’ That’s what Trish says.

  Georgie looks at th
e note Trish is pointing out to her, lying in the open drawer of his desk. Scans the words with an increasing feeling of dread. FOREIGN SCUM. Just two words, just like the note under the body. Capital letters. Blue ink. It’s not even personal; it’s so impersonal it almost doesn’t seem real. Like a cliché of a racial threat. Except the stab wounds, they weren’t random. They were deliberate. They seemed personal. That’s how they looked to Georgie: close up and personal. Something moves between her fingers, sticky, wet, the slip of blood; a memory so vivid it knocks the air out of her lungs. She looks down – there’s nothing there. Takes a deep breath and gives herself a second to focus. For years she used to reach for Fergus’s hand when that happened, the solid warmth of him enough to bring her back to the present. Today all she’s got is her own gloved hand resting on the edge of Alexis’s desk, and beneath it a small pad of Post-it notes lying next to the computer’s keyboard. With writing on the top one: Kingfisher 8 p.m.

  ‘He had a dinner reservation,’ she says. ‘That’s a restaurant, isn’t it? The Kingfisher, up at Crackenbridge?’

  Trish looks at her.

  ‘I know,’ Georgie says. ‘I know. It looks like a hate crime.’

  ‘I can write you a list of all the people in this village—’

  ‘We don’t need a list, Trish.’

  ‘Let’s start with Ricky Barr then.’

  ‘Got no reason to that I can see.’

  ‘Well, he’s a fucking racist. And he beats Andy often enough, too.’

  Georgie looks up at her then. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she says.

  ‘Everyone else knows,’ says Trish. ‘Does nothing about it. That’s why I offered to help him. I thought…’