Unhallowed Ground

by Gillian White

  ‘But, Gail, you know if I truly believed that I would have said it long ago…’

  ‘Oh no, oh no you wouldn’t. Don’t give me that shit. You and your lot, sick, suspicious, spreading rumours, telling lies.’ Gail rammed her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me this! Tell me, is this how you get your sick kicks, Mrs Jefferson? Ray says it is. Ray’s always known what this is about. Prying. Spying. Can’t have kiddies yourself so you have to nose about other people’s. Other people’s lives. Reducing them all to pieces of paper. Your fucking library of files. At risk! At risk my arse.’

  She was reduced to begging. ‘Please, Gail, let me come in.’

  ‘To watch me crying, you mean? To gloat, you freak? To make notes about me and take them back to your bloody office for all your mates to see? To make sure that I’m coping properly and the other two aren’t at risk now? Like Angie? Is that why you are so sodding eager to get back in my house? You want the others, is that it? Well? Is that fucking it? Oh no, you cow, the next time one of your lot sets foot in here is over my bloody dead body, and I’m telling you that for fucking nothing.’

  Georgie gradually realized she was no longer alone on the windswept landing outside the Hopkins’s flat. A small group of neighbours had gathered round to listen. They had come out onto the landing quiet as ghosts, and their faces were white in the dirty light. Little yellow pools in doorways told her from which flats they had come. There were no men with them, just the women, for this was women’s work. One held a dustpan and brush. One had a baby under her arm. Georgie stared about her in alarm, but they held their ground aggressively, the judge, the jury, the just.

  ‘You’re the cunt, aren’t you?’ growled a woman with a long nose and darting, sneaky eyes. ‘I’ve seen your bleeding picture. You’re the bitch in charge of this whole bloody mess, the one supposed to be taking care.’ And Georgie noticed Gail Hopkins quietly closing her door.

  ‘Should be inside with the bastard himself.’

  A small woman in rollers and slippers wiggled a thin forefinger and her eyes flashed with menace. ‘And I hope you’re bleeding satisfied. We knew what was bloody going on. We knew. No fancy education, no bleeding letters after our fucking names, but we knew what was happening inside there; we heard the kiddies crying and yet you did fuck all about it.’

  They were right, dear God, they were right.

  All she wanted was to escape. Georgie was surrounded, a drop to her right, all the way down to that black asphalt. The crowd hostility was so extreme, the eyes so full of blame, she was terrified. She could feel the hate on their breaths, she tasted the bitter heat of their words. ‘I only hope one day you’ll be able to forgive yourself because you’re just as much to sodding blame as that bitch in there.’

  ‘More to blame if you ask me…’

  ‘Murderer!’

  ‘Cunt.’

  ‘You sodding bitch.’

  ‘You’ve got the front to come round here…’

  Quite unable to face them, unable to cope with any of this, trembling and shocked, Georgie backed away. They called out their sickening insults long after she’d pushed herself free and negotiated the corridor, and she could still hear the echoes of their screams as she stifled her tears and careered blindly down the dark concrete staircase. Her body blundered on but her mind stayed to take the blame. Her own shadow loomed and terrified her as she floundered through the series of alleys that made up the estate. White and shaken, she longed for the security of her car and its central locking system, a tiny slither of silver to keep her attackers at bay. Were they coming after her with hard stones of righteousness in their hands? It took two hours of agony, she had read, for a woman to be stoned to death. Dreamlike, she seemed to be moving so slowly. And if this angry posse had been waiting for her, how much worse must it be for poor Gail every time she went out with the kids. For Gail, flight was impossible, although Georgie’s superficial escape only led to self-torture. The minute Georgie got home, if she got home, please God, she would ring Helen, Roger, Suzie, Isla, even Mark would do, any number of friends and colleagues who might understand and calm her down.

  Tell her she was not guilty.

  But no-one could take the pain away, however sympathetic they were, no-one could make her feel better.

  In her agony of confusion and despair Georgie had not considered that this might be Gail Hopkins’s attitude. She always used to deny Ray’s violence, so why should she now, when faced with this terrible reality, change her mind or lower her defences? And yet Georgie had not considered the possibility of such deliberate obtuseness.

  Was it conceivable that all the experts were wrong and that Gail Hopkins was right? Was there the remotest possibility that Angie had fallen downstairs? No, not in a million years. Not with all those professional opinions… Georgie corrected her crazy thinking. She gripped the steering wheel in her trembling hands. She dreaded, in those days, that she might lose concentration, that her car would skid off the road, that she would be involved in an accident and kill a child. Another child. The terror of that, at one point in time, had almost stopped her from driving.

  Georgie stirred from her stillness, sighed and forced herself to bank up the fire. She would sleep in Stephen’s bed tonight and hope for a comfortable, more satisfying sleep than last night’s uncomfortable vigil beside the fire. She hugged herself as she moved into the cold kitchen to make coffee. The chinking crockery inside the house contrasted with the soulless screeching of an owl somewhere outside. Made nervous by this splitting of the night, she searched for something stronger than coffee. If the wily Chad Cramer had removed Stephen’s empties he had not brought them back, and there was no sign of any bottles unopened. Christ, she could do with a drink. But she calculated, probably correctly, that Cramer thought he could get away with a few crates of booze.

  And then Georgie steeled herself for the half longed for, half dreaded unveiling of Stephen’s paintings; she would have to decide which ones she wanted and which she was willing to leave behind. She would probably never return to this place. Once the cottage was on the market she was sure it would sell fairly quickly.

  A self-portrait somewhere, Donna had said. And there he was, her brother, Stephen, a ghostly apparition in oils staring innocently from the canvas, lost under a large Panama and too-long khaki shorts. All those years ago Sylvia had said, ‘Fancy making up a brother. How very peculiar, darling. What a very odd thing to do.’

  And the shame of her lie was deep and lasting.

  ‘He caused Daddy and me all sorts of terrible grief, and when he left home it was merely the end of a long and anguished period for us.’

  But now. A reunion at last. Stephen’s smiling, genial eyes stared opaquely into her own, the deep crevasses in his face were painfully, deeply drawn, but the mouth was wide and generous. She noticed his badly bitten nails, and from this she could deduce he was given to times of secret thinking. Such a sad and crooked smile. He carried a light canvas bag with what looked like a folded easel and an artist’s stool strapped to his side. She could almost see him breathe in and out under his collarless shirt, so realistic was the likeness. Speak to me, Stephen, speak to me. And if he resembled her, as Donna had suggested, Georgie could not see it. Stephen was the kind of man she might once have fallen in love with, and she remembered how common this reaction was when parted siblings were introduced. Georgie leaned forward, hands gripped across her knees, a determined look on her face. She fully intended, by concentrating hard and letting her imagination take her away, to understand and keep her lost brother with her for ever. In the quiet she experienced a peculiar peace. She kissed him on the forehead and wept. Too late. Too late. Just another little stone on the mounting cairn that buried the past.

  ELEVEN

  SURELY THIS IS THE witching hour. Four o’clock in the morning comes secretly and in great quiet. Soon the world will arise out of darkness. More people choose to die and more innocent replacements are born at this hour than at any other in the twenty-four
. It was Lola, scratching at the door, who alerted Georgie to the noxious smell.

  After she’d dragged herself down the stairs, fuddled and confused, Georgie realized with relief that the smell was coming from somewhere outside.

  Wide awake now, nerves on edge, she opened the back door and was knocked back by the foul vapour that billowed straight from the woodshed. Corrosive. A chemical fire? But how? And she was certain she’d closed the shed door last night after she’d brought in the last load of wood.

  At home she’d have rushed back indoors and dialled the fire brigade. Onlookers would have gathered by now, there’d be a crowd in the street. But here, in the back end of nowhere, what the hell should she do? Tearing down the road for the neighbours would be a waste of precious time. There she was, this capable woman, shivering on her back doorstep, tearing at her brain for the options. Fire! Fire! But there were none of the crackling sounds that come from leaping flames, just a slow and steady smouldering, oozing a noxious yellow. Perhaps whatever it was in there could be dealt with. Perhaps she should take a look. Cautiously, holding her breath, she snaked her arm round the open door and snapped on the light. Her eyes stung as she peered inside. She was right, there were no flames—as yet—and the pungent cloud was spiralling out from the far corner that was full of junk. The logs were piled from floor to ceiling at the opposite side of the shed, and thank the Lord there were no sparks or the place would go up, an inferno.

  In fact, the smoke was more like the sickening belching that came from industrial chimneys, reeking of solvents and chemicals, poisonous to the system. Georgie dashed back to the kitchen, tearing her hair as she waited for the slow flow of water to half fill the galvanized bucket, gritting her teeth, cursing, peering out of the door at the gathering, billowing cloud. She snatched up the bucket and covered her mouth with her free hand, but by the time she stumbled the few yards to the woodshed her eyes were smarting.

  She neared the source of the vicious vapour. It looked like a pile of old clothing, rags, discarded overalls, paint-spattered and torn. In spite of the light this corner was dark, and she kicked aside a worn-out floor mop, a mouldy square of carpet and a washing-up bowl with a hole in the bottom. Not knowing if this was a fatal error, if water would make matters even worse, she dashed it onto the smouldering pile and the smoke hovered, still for a moment, before the fumes continued to billow, but weakly and more blackly. Thank God she had made some sort of progress. Back she rushed for more water, muttering tensely under her breath. Again she soaked the heap of rags, a third time, then a fourth, until from lack of breath and exertion her face was a boiled red and her breathing came in frantic gasps.

  But, thank God, the fire was out. And then, underneath the burning came the stench of household cleaner, so something of that sort, not petrol, must have been used to start the fire. There’d been nothing accidental about it. Georgie’s skin crawled. Fear pricked under her arms and she gave a sudden shudder. She swallowed quickly to clear her parched throat, because hell, who would do something like this? The fire, had it spread, could have been lethal. If the wood had caught the cottage could have been razed to the ground, with her and Lola sleeping upstairs, rendered senseless by the fumes. Christ. God. Who would do something like that? Surely even Chad Cramer was not that ill-intentioned. Surely even he would not be so mindlessly evil?

  She could think but she could not feel. Reason told her that everything that had happened was simple and straightforward. This was not an attack. This was an accident. The night was passing. A little while ago the gutters had been overflowing, but now the flow had become just a steady drip. Apart from this an audible silence enveloped the house. Some sensible instinct made Georgie search the ground outside, something to do with tell-tale footprints, but the snow lay in puddles and patches and she could find nothing. Maybe, because of the time of night, she was building this whole thing up into something far too sinister. There was a possibility that something self-igniting had been left behind in the mess, some tin that, reacting to the freezing temperature, had cracked open; substances can be volatile, especially if they are carelessly abandoned. She really knew very little about exposure and evaporation. Rust, thought Georgie logically, could possibly cause a reaction.

  With an old curtain rod she found on the floor, Georgie poked at the dormant pile. Carefully and slowly she moved what looked like an old pillow case, a filthy face flannel, a sleeve torn from a shirt; she pulled the layers off the top of the mound, going about the job so cautiously she felt like a surgeon removing dressings, approaching the crux of the matter, the wound. The stench of solution grew stronger as she delved, as did the mildew smell of age.

  Oh dear God, no. The doll’s plastic face had fallen in with the heat, but its eyes were wide open and its cherubic mouth stayed smiling. The fire-blisters on its concave cheeks looked like tears turned into plague sores. With dawning horror she sensed that she and her bent curtain rod had been disturbing the creature’s bed. The bits of rags she’d assumed were rubbish were what it had been wrapped in, lovingly and with care. But it was these rags that were soaked in the acid solution. The give-away cylindrical tin lay close by the doll, like a terrible hot-water bottle, leaking over its legs and onto the blankets around it. What was left of its hair was charred, but the residue showed it was near-bald anyway. There were tiny rashlike holes in the plastic skull where the hair had once been, and it looked as though it had suffered from some incurable nervous affliction.

  Georgie searched. There was no sign of matches.

  She left the doll just as it was, maimed and burned. She did not want to touch it.

  From horror to horror. From the unspeakable to the fantastic. From Angie Hopkins and the stuff of the untouchable to the terrifying fabrications of fiction.

  She had chosen a doll because she had never seen one among the toys in the Hopkins’s flat.

  So was it coincidence that Georgie had found the burning doll, so similar in size and shape to the one she had chosen from Anne Stubbs’s office high up on the third floor of the social services building only three months earlier? Coincidence or not, it was cruelly significant, especially in the middle of the night when the brain is so suggestible, when there are so many dark thoughts which daylight holds at bay.

  A doll called Mandy in a cellophane box with a neat little case full of its own clothes. She did not take toys to the Hopkinses because they were needy, she took each child a toy merely because it was Christmas, and as a visitor she should bring gifts. The doll was for Angie, of course. For Patsy, aged four, she had taken a Noah’s Ark full of colourful animals, and for the youngest, Carmen, she’d chosen a clockwork frog for the bath.

  The visit before Christmas was the last time she saw Angie alive and, unusually, Ray was home. As normal Georgie had expected the door to stay closed. She had planned to call, leave a warning note and return that same afternoon, but it was Ray who opened the door. She’d been scrabbling in her bag for a pen, that is why she looked up at him, at the quietly opening door. There was surprise and some confusion.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Ray, devoid of any expression.

  She had met him on one previous occasion. She smiled and held out her hand. The handshake was cold, the flesh hardly meeting. No grasp, the grasp was done quickly with the eyes. Unlike his wife’s Ray’s eyes were a pale, cold blue and his wheat-coloured hair was cropped close to his hefty bullet-shaped head.

  She bundled into the flat with her parcels, following Ray Hopkins through.

  ‘Day off today?’ she asked him casually, and he grunted a reply she couldn’t catch.

  Gail hurried in from the kitchen and took up her position on the sofa in haste, slightly irritated, thought Georgie, as though she’d been caught on the hop, ill-prepared.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt if you’re busy,’ said Georgie, taking her usual seat in the armchair to the left of the telly. Ray stepped in front of her to turn down the sound.

  ‘No,’ Gail shook her head. She tightened th
e rubber band, twisting it round the knob of hair that stuck from the back of her head in a stunted ponytail. As usual she wore her patterned leggings and a long, knee-length jumper. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t important.’

  ‘No sign of the children?’ Georgie asked her easily. ‘I thought they’d be on holiday.’

  ‘Patsy’s asleep upstairs, and Carmen was tired so I put her down, too. They get fed up,’ said Gail, suddenly annoyed, probably by Georgie’s unscheduled visit. ‘The holidays are too bleeding long. Especially when you’re stuck up here with no bleeding space.’

  ‘And Angie?’

  ‘Angie’s running messages,’ said Ray Hopkins.

  ‘That’s a shame. Perhaps she’ll be back before I go. I’ve brought them their Christmas presents.’

  ‘There’s no need for you to do that,’ said Ray aggressively, so much younger than his wife, with a face unlined and fleshy. He had chosen the other armchair, and now he sat in it lazily, his long legs stretched across the carpet so that Georgie had to pull hers in. ‘They get enough without needing charity from the social. They get enough rubbish at Christmas time.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ she agreed with him. ‘But this is not a charity visit.’

  ‘What? You went and bought them yourself, did you, with your own bleeding money? Nah. Don’t tell me that. What sort of visit would you say it is then, Mrs Jefferson?’ He held her eyes as he asked her this question, laying emphasis on her name to make it sound slightly absurd, as if she amused him, as if he was sneering. His wife sat watching from the sofa, silent, still fiddling with her hair.

  ‘This is one of my regular visits, as Gail will tell you, to make sure that everything’s going OK. To give you a chance to discuss any problems, to give me a chance to talk to Angie.’

  Ray Hopkins’s eyes did not shift. ‘But Angie’s out.’