When the Dead Come Calling

by Helen Sedgwick

  ‘Alexis kept saying sorry to me as we walked together. He was upset. I’d told him about Dad, see. About how I’d got everything confused. He said it was his fault, but it wasn’t really. It wasn’t anyone’s fault except Bobby’s. We met at the old flats. I wanted to explain everything, tell him the whole truth now I’d finally worked it out. It sort of made sense to follow it through, to end up at the playground so I could confront it one last time and finally move on. That’s all I wanted to do, you know. Move on. They can’t hurt you any more, he said. We were standing by the swings, looking out to sea. It was very beautiful out, on Monday night, before the storm arrived. Then he took off his gold cufflinks and said they were for me. For luck, he said. Told me he didn’t need them any more, because he was already as lucky as a man can be.’

  Simon has slid down the wall and is sitting beside her now, on the damp rocks. There is nothing left to do but listen; he has to listen.

  ‘Then Bobby’s there. It happens so fast. Car, screeching. He has a knife. Long, thin, sharp. He’s lunging at me, grabbing at my hair and screaming, lies, you’re telling lies about me, and I’m back there, a terrified girl staring into his eyes, so like my father’s, except now Alexis is here, grabbing Bobby’s arm and keeping himself between us, holding up the swing to block the knife. Run, Dawn, he says. Bobby stabbing at him, going crazy and there’s blood everywhere and Alexis’s voice, his gentle voice, telling me to run. Run, Dawn, it’s okay. I’ll be okay. Run.’

  The worry doll falls from her fingers into the stale pool that Simon had rescued it from. Neither of them moves to pick it up again.

  ‘That’s what I wanted you to know,’ Dawn says. ‘I’m sorry I ran away. But that’s how he saved my life.’

  Simon finds himself kneeling on the rock, kneeling close to the wall, and his fingers are running along words that have been scratched into the cliff face, their lettering like a scar against the grey. PLEASE HELP MY MAMMY, says one. PLEASE HELP. RIP. That is common – REST IN PEACE. Who could rest in peace in a place like this? Who would want to come here at all? Though so many have, scrawling their initials all over the rock. And the smell, he can no longer deny, is urine. He keeps following the words. Further back into the cave they lead, figures with broken wrists, with broken legs, pointed heads, someone’s daughter, someone’s ribbons tied around thin sticks, a stag, a painted heart, and he feels himself stumble, his boot slipping against the slime on the rocks underfoot and there, scratched all over the wall, is something new and urgent, something for him, Dawn’s words: BROTHER, BROTHER, BROTHER, and he knows it’s true. He knows she scratched these rocks and lost herself to the horror of what she’d seen.

  His phone flashes with an incoming message, casting a blue light over the rocks; ghostly shapes and faces squirm beneath his feet, fingers reach out from the cracks in the cliff and are gone again to darkness. He reads the message. Trish. They’re coming for Dawn.

  Except that she’s innocent. She didn’t hurt Alexis. She killed the man who did.

  ‘You killed Bobby,’ he says, quietly.

  Dawn doesn’t reply. She’s staring down at the ground, her eyes flicking back and forth as though she’s watching something moving down there, something Simon can’t see. Her hand to her mouth. Her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘I’m glad of it,’ he says, and he falls away from the words, falls back towards the fresher air near the entrance, away from this stifling rotten breath, and he knows Alexis was caught in the mess of her family and her pain and he’s gone and it’s not fair or right and none of it should have happened but it has and it’s high tide now. The sea almost reaching the cave’s entrance. It is going to flood. The water, shimmering with light that shouldn’t be there, that he can’t explain, and everything he knows about the sea and the tide tells him it must be about to flood. But it doesn’t. Something happens instead and he doesn’t know what it is – something shifts in the sky, in the air, the light changes and there’s a sudden stillness that is dark and beautiful and unlike anything he has ever known. The air is fresher now, serene but new and crisp, and the water has an endless deep turquoise within it that he almost falls into. Almost. He nearly loses his balance as he stares down into that water, stares down at the stars, but he doesn’t fall and instead the silver glinting lights resolve into the two tiny blue buttons that had once belonged to the worry doll, and he rescues them from the waves.

  Dawn is standing beside him.

  ‘Do you remember Pauly and Rachel?’ she says.

  Simon doesn’t understand. ‘Last year, the suicide pact—’

  ‘It wasn’t suicide,’ she says. ‘They asked me to tell you.’ And she’s holding something out towards him. Two gold cufflinks, glinting like hope. Like love. He holds out his hand, and she carefully places them on his palm. They feel warm.

  ‘He would have given them to you himself, if he knew what was coming,’ she says, her arm still held out towards him. ‘I’m certain of that.’

  In her other hand dangles the worry doll. Simon looks at the two blue buttons he rescued from the sea, gives them to her and gently closes her fingers around them.

  ‘But he didn’t know what was coming,’ he says.

  ‘Neither of us knew.’

  Simon understands, at last.

  ‘I think he used everything he had left to tell me to run.’

  ‘Then run,’ he says. ‘The police are coming.’

  She looks at him, looks right into his eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll be okay, Dawn. Run.’

  DESPERATE HOUR

  All the doors of Burrowhead are open, though many of the curtains remain closed; folk are collecting in the village square by the waterless fountain, except that today it is filled. Rainwater, people guess, storm rains, though it is fresh and clear like no kind of rain they get running through the streets; still, the sky makes up for that – it is beyond grey now, a deep churning brown that swirls into impossible shapes above the village, so they huddle close and pull their scarves closer and curse that black city policeman who refused their cups of tea and dragged them all out here.

  There he is now, standing up and balancing on the edge of the fountain there, his smart suit fair drenched already, and they must admit they quite enjoy the mud stains going all the way up to his shins. He seems oblivious, though; all he cares about is one thing, so he tells them now: he is here to find Dawn Helmsteading, and they are going to help.

  Groups of three then, and off they set down Church Street, High Street and Main Street, knocking on any doors that refuse to open, checking down alleys, scouring the gutters for anything that might have been dropped down the drains. All the bins are overflowing now, they think, but when did the council stop emptying them and mind that explains the birds, the gulls, the crows – the scavengers hereabouts, they’ll move on once the litter’s gone again. Or so they say.

  DS Frazer his name is – with a Z, explains Trish – and he is marching up High Street with a group of villagers following at a bit of a distance, and good Lord the wind fair stings the way it’s channelled along here from the coast. Coldest road in Burrowhead, they say, though not so gloomy as Church Street – they’re all secretly glad they’re not headed down there. Big Fergus is here with some contraption, a drone, or so it spreads through the group, and he’s showing it to Frazer and Frazer’s nodding and shaking his hand, and as the villagers pass Fergus he keeps mumbling, ‘DS Frazer, what a decent bloke, am I right?’ But then the bright red-and-yellow striped swing frame of the playground looms out of the rain and they stop their gossip and think about the blood that must have seeped right into the ground. He won’t break his stride, though, and Trish is on her phone again and they’re all standing at the top of the cliff path looking down the zigzagged track that once before led the collective villagers of Burrowhead down over the loose stones and sandy gravel to the stretch of rough rocks reaching to the sea. Searching for a girl again, they think but do not say, and they feel the salt bitin
g their skin and their lips break in the wind, but they follow him down all the same. Rain so thick and wild down here it’s hard to see the ground you’re treading on, but along the beach they go, scrambling, tripping at times, a cry as someone twists their ankle, a gasp, and the crash of frothing yellow waves all the while. And from up on the cliff path, Simon watches the search party crawling its way along the shore, grey figures in the haze of rain and mist and sinking daylight, and the sight of it makes him sick.

  A NEW WAY OF LOOKING

  Fergus waits as the search party disappears down the rocky track to the beach, as the storm seems to follow them down, as the clouds thin – he’s sure of it – just enough to let a promise of light through, and then it’s time. His drone is not supposed to be used in high winds but these are extenuating circumstances and he has to try, doesn’t he, so he holds it out in front of him and gently, cautiously, lets go. It hovers in the wind, holding its own; this could work. Fergus can feel it in his bones. And although the range isn’t huge and its power won’t last long before it needs recharging, especially battling against the weather, from where he’s standing he’ll be able to get a view of the village and surrounding fields, in and out of the hedgerows, a look at the disused shed by Simon’s place – all the old cracks in his village where someone might be able to hide.

  He takes a deep breath as the drone rises above head height, buffeted by the wind but staying true. His eyes follow it up and its camera looks back down at him. There’s a speck of light in the middle of its lens, like the reflection in a pupil. He shakes off the feeling that it’s blaming him for something. As he touches the controls, it turns from him to look instead at the patchwork of square, stained, matching grey-and-white houses of the village. That way first.

  He follows the road until the markings appear and the houses nestle together, then rises above the thorned roses that twist around their front doors, flies up over their roofs. Old tiles, weather-worn, chimneys without smoke; a child’s bike rusting in a back garden; slanted car windscreens catching the low sun and flaring in the lens, all transmitted back to Fergus’s phone screen. A crumbling Lego village. He feels a tug at his chest and guides the drone past Walt’s house – no sign of poor old Walt, either – and on to the village square. Colour at last, but it comes from litter and a fresh stab of graffiti, and the fountain itself: dirty, stained, filled with junk. Over to Simon’s place. Down to street level – his windows are dark – then round to the field behind, over the gorse and nettles to see the shed, half rotten, empty and discarded by the same community it was built by, built for; he has to get out.

  Higher then, up into the mist of cloud until the village is veiled and beautiful and he can let it go, to follow the thermals as they carry him north to the full expanse of the land, higher, higher again, he needs to be truly above. There: the river winding behind the fields, a silver thread from up here, serene and glistening; mud and weeds dissolving into swathes of green, the land pastel-coloured, like how it exists in his mind. Room to breathe again. It is so beautiful, this land of his. But, of course, he must keep searching.

  He flies lower, sweeping under the clouds to follow the wide curve of the graveyard around the church ruin, in and out of the stone pillars, swaying, darkening, the lens spotted with raindrops, through the shadow of arches that once were, then along the jagged edge of the cliffs to glance down at the pebbled beach below, where the stones are shimmering wet. Something down there, of course: the beach is speckled with people moving like a swarm, drenched and desperate, and so he rises again, his finger forcing the controls, the lens covered with water and everything distorting but he keeps going, looping further inland and gazing beyond the reach of his drone all the way to the motte and the dense, broad, brooding stretch of Mungrid Woods that seems to be almost flickering in the distance through a fresh pelt of rain and an angry gust and then faster than he can understand what’s happening; he’s falling, tumbling, the spin of earth, sky, ground, cloud, earth, then a judder, an error message, a black screen, and his phone telling him his drone is dead.

  OLDER AFTERNOON, OLDER GENERATION

  As Simon gets back to Burrowhead police station, the sun is sinking down into grey and Ricky Barr is just arriving in his ancient Land Rover. So, this is how it’s going to go then. Simon is going to deal with Ricky Barr. He walks straight past him to the front door; Ricky’s out the Land Rover like a flash, standing up close behind him.

  The door swings open and Simon steps inside, taking his time along the corridor before pausing outside the room for questioning and gesturing Ricky inside. He’s not inviting him into the office, that’s for sure.

  ‘After you,’ he smiles. Making it look polite enough. ‘So, what can I do for you, Rick?’

  ‘Cut the crap. You’ve got my son locked up in here, right?’

  ‘Andy’s under arrest, yes. It seems—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It seems he’s been involved in an incident at the Spar.’

  ‘Involved how?’

  They’re sitting either side of the table now, facing each other, though Simon’s leaning back, trying to keep it relaxed. Ricky Barr’s brittle, everyone knows it, and there’s no point in aggravating him more than he aggravates himself. It is highly unlikely he’s here to help Andy, but he won’t like thinking anything is happening behind his back.

  ‘It’s under investigation,’ Simon says, ‘but as far as we know at this stage, he’s one of a group of boys who’ve been sending racist threats to some of the villagers. Notes, that kind of thing. Throwing eggs at windows.’

  Ricky scoffs, but says nothing.

  ‘Then last night things escalated. They vandalised the Spar and attacked Ms Silva. Dislocated her shoulder.’

  ‘Nothing serious then.’

  ‘We are taking it very seriously, I assure you.’

  ‘You.’

  He doesn’t say any more, just leaves the word hanging between them. Doesn’t need to say any more, not with the way he’s looking at Simon – and Simon knows the expression on his face. He’s not going to rise to it, but he knows it alright. He runs his hand through his hair.

  ‘Never wanted Andy doing work experience here,’ Ricky says. Simon reckons he’s trying to make himself look bigger now, what with the way he’s leaning forward and squaring back his shoulders, but it’s useless really – he’s not got the frame for it. Muscle, sure, from the farm work, but he’s all vein and sinew. ‘Didn’t think it would be a good influence on him, hanging round with you lot.’

  ‘Us lot?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ He clears his throat with a rough cough. ‘He’s easily led, that boy. Always has been. Got a habit for telling lies and all.’ His voice is gravel and he turns, suddenly choking, the sound of it harsh and painful.

  ‘Are you—’

  He stops Simon with a scowl and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘He was a scrawny kid, and now he’s a lanky boy. I need him to stand up and help round the farm but he’s no use, no bloody use at all.’

  ‘Well, he’s got himself in some trouble now.’

  Ricky laughs, the bite of his cough still rasping in the back of his throat.

  ‘Got himself in some trouble, aye.’

  Simon hears Georgie out in the hall.

  ‘Here’s DI Strachan, if you’d like a word with her?’

  ‘No, I’m sure you’ll be letting me know when the trial is. That right?’

  ‘Could be a while.’

  ‘Always is.’

  Simon doesn’t know what that’s even supposed to mean. To be honest, he doesn’t know why Ricky even came here, except to let them know he was watching. Yeah, that must be it, like marking territory. They have his son, and he is watching.

  ‘By the way,’ he says, nice and casual, ‘what were you doing up near the Warphill flats on Wednesday?’

  ‘Shortcut into the village.’

  ‘Only if you’re coming from the coast road.’

  ‘Aye. I was
visiting.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’d say that’s my personal life. But I can ask her if she’s willing to come make a statement, if yous really want.’

  ‘Girlfriend then.’

  ‘I’m done here.’ Ricky’s up and heading for the door, looking left and right, and Simon wonders if he wants to catch a glimpse of Andy, if just to judge him, just to kick the boot in.

  ‘Mr Barr,’ Georgie says, arriving at the door as Ricky is walking out – she even holds out her hand to shake his. Simon hadn’t done that, and he is damn glad. No one’s put the lights on in the corridor yet, and night seems to have fallen while Ricky Barr was speaking, while Ricky Barr was glaring at him – and now they’re standing in the gloom, all three of them. ‘We’re waiting to see what charges will be pressed,’ Georgie says, ‘but Andy will need—’

  ‘Lock him up,’ Ricky says.

  ‘What?’

  Simon thinks maybe Georgie genuinely didn’t hear, though perhaps it’s just that she can’t understand his words in this context. She’s like that sometimes, Georgie. So taken aback by nastiness it doesn’t compute. He doesn’t know how she manages to stay that way, after all these years of police work.

  ‘It’ll do him some good, I reckon,’ Ricky says, and he’s seen the cell, gone striding up to the door and beating on it and he yells, ‘You mind your behaviour, you hear me? You watch what you say.’ Then he’s off storming down the corridor and out of the station with a smug look on his face like he’s done exactly what he came here to do.

  TOO LATE TO SEE

  It’s dark on the beach, middle-of-the-night dark even though the sun’s only just skulked away and there’s nothing here, Frazer has to admit that. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, just miles upon miles of desolation in this spitting cold hell of a place.