Everything She Forgot

by Lisa Ballantyne

  “That’s real, that’s me … I want a story.”

  “A story …” George heaved a sigh. “Once upon a time, there were three bears. There was a little girl bear and she …”

  Moll sat back in his arms to look up into his face, so that he felt the weight of her.

  “You’re rubbish at stories. Just read the paper. I like being read to. It makes me go to sleep.”

  “I could sing to you.”

  “I like to be read to. Read the paper.”

  Holding her in his left arm, George reached into the front seat to pick up the paper. It was the Daily Record.

  He settled into the back again, with Moll cuddled into him. He chose an article on page six with a picture of a polar bear. He folded the paper over and began to read:

  “The polar bear at Glasgow zoo is very unhappy. The keepers have stopped giving him Irn-Bru on the grounds that it is turning his fur orange, but now campaigners say the bear has a right to choose his own beverage …”

  Moll threw back her head and laughed and he rocked in the back seat with her. Her eyes were turning coins of mirth and her long limbs moved against his as she giggled. George saw again the sheer beauty of her: his own daughter.

  “Stop it,” Moll said. “It doesn’t say that. Read the real thing.”

  “How do you know what it says?” George asked her, tilting her downward so he was looking right into her face.

  “Because I can read it,” she said, still giggling at him. George took a deep breath.

  Years since he had ever admitted it to anyone. “I can’t,” he said, tossing the newspaper onto the floor, then hugging her close.

  “What do you mean?” She was looking up into his face.

  “I can’t read.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Angus Campbell

  Monday, October 7, 1985

  IT WAS STILL DARK, BUT IT WAS, FINALLY, MONDAY MORNING.

  Angus slipped his bare feet into his Wellington boots, feeling them like cold, hard porridge against his toes. He was in his pajamas. He was planning on going back to bed after he had seen to Maisie.

  With the passing of the Sabbath, Angus now crept out to the barn where Maisie had calved, to check on her. His legs felt cold in his cotton pajamas and his Wellingtons stuck in the mud. The day was just opening its eyelid. The Sabbath had passed and now he could tend to her.

  On his way to the barn, Angus noticed that the thistles were blooming. They glowed white instead of purple in the waning moonlight. He slowed his pace as he approached, his mouth dry and his eyes wide.

  He didn’t care about the calf, he realized. The most important thing to him was Maisie. He was well prepared for the calf to be dead.

  By the time he reached the barn door, his Wellingtons were dirty to the ankles with mud. Heavy rain had fallen while he was in Glasgow, softening the ground.

  Everything about the slowly opening day was too clean, and made him nervous: the fresh tilth of the soil, the alertness of the thistles, the neat stack of feed by the barn door. Angus’s head hurt. There was the brain-harrowing chirp of songbirds against the death crash of the sea.

  The door of the barn creaked as Angus opened it. Before he entered, two fat flies flew in his face. He swatted them away. As he stepped inside, he inhaled the desperate smell of stagnation, of abortive hope.

  Maisie was spread across the rank, bloodied straw of the barn, her tongue hanging out, white beads of evaporated sweat on her flank, and a dead, unbirthed calf between her haunches. The rear end of the calf was visible: a slick black tumor, but Maisie looked as she always had: pink-nosed and smiling, save from the protuberance of her tongue and the strange glaze of her eyes, like unset jam.

  Angus left the barn and walked straight to the house, the back of his hand over his mouth. He vomited at the front steps, then almost immediately pushed it away with the yard brush and scoured it with bleach. Inside, he called the vet with the acid taste of vomit in his mouth, leaving a message asking that he come to remove animal corpses from the farm.

  Angus stepped back inside the barn. He put a hand to Maisie’s rear, as if preparing to do what he would have done: slide his hand inside and push the calf to turn it. He wanted to do it. He wanted to help her, but he knew that Maisie was dead and the calf was dead.

  Instead, Angus knelt, smoothed a hand over Maisie’s flank and took her tail in the other. He whispered words of prayer: “God of hope, we thank you that not even death can separate us from your love …”

  When his prayer was finished, Angus staggered outside, his eyes wet. Day had not yet broken but dew had formed on blades of grass, the skies were loud with birdsong, and an army of flies was now forming at the barn door.

  Angus went back inside the house, washed his hands and forearms with disinfectant, then went upstairs. Hazel was asleep: curled as a cashew nut. The children’s alarms were set for six.

  It was only four twenty-two in the morning when Angus entered his study. He felt no tiredness, only immense sorrow for Maisie. It seeped into him, like the cold on a wet night, right into his bones.

  “You have to get on with it,” Angus said to himself, out loud.

  He rolled a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter.

  It was all he had been thinking of since he returned from Glasgow. He hadn’t wanted Maisie to die but she had, and now that she was dead Angus felt sharper, angrier, ready to write his story: the story of George McLaughlin stealing Molly Henderson from Kathleen, his former lover and the mother of his child. It was like no other story Angus had tried to write. But he saw it clearly and he was willing to report it truthfully, as he saw fit.

  Pushing the image of Maisie’s death-frozen muzzle out of his mind, he began to type. He typed angrily. Angus was often angry, and there were many targets for his anger, but today his anger was clearly focused on one person: George McLaughlin.

  George was a depraved criminal, who had kidnapped a young girl for God knows what perverse purpose. George was part of a Glasgow crime family that was familiar with torture, extortion, and murder. George was the tallest in the family: six feet three and big-built and Angus could imagine that he used his size to intimidate others, to help him to carry out acts of violence. It was George McLaughlin who had caused Angus to take a trip to Glasgow to discover the sinister links to the Thurso abduction, coming home too late to save his heifer.

  It was therefore possible to consider that George McLaughlin had caused Maisie’s death, and Angus didn’t know how long it would be before he hurt the young girl who was now in his charge, if she was not already dead, as Angus well expected.

  He typed faster than he knew he was capable of typing: he could only type with his forefingers but he generated a sound worthy of a seasoned touch-typist. He referenced the court picture he had found in Glasgow, with the McLaughlins standing on the steps of the High Court after Peter’s acquittal, and also referenced Brendan and Peter’s criminal convictions. He had not found any note of George’s criminal convictions, but he was sure that George was sly and evasive of the law, and that his clean record belied the gravity of his crimes.

  Before the children’s alarms sounded and before Hazel got up to make their porridge, Angus left the house. He drove into Wick and placed his newly written article on his editor’s desk with a note: Exclusive from Angus Campbell. This HAS TO BE in tomorrow’s paper. The nationals will be all over it.

  Angus returned to the farm just in time to meet the vet, who arrived in his Land Rover, wearing dungarees and long green boots. They shook hands and Angus led him out to the barn.

  The barn door was now swarming with flies, and inside, Maisie’s corpse had begun to smell. The barn was well ventilated, but the scent of rotting flesh was heavy in the air.

  When he saw the sight, the vet, Branx Conlan, a young man with an old man’s face, shook his head.

  “It’s been a while,” said Branx, stepping forward to touch Maisie’s corpse. “I’d say she’s been dead thirty-odd hours or so—rigor m
ortis is starting to wear off. What happened? Were you all away? You were so anxious about being here for her …”

  “I know,” said Angus, pinching the corners of his eyes, to stave off tears. “I was in Glasgow. I hoped to make it back in time. It was only my wife and she didn’t know what to do. She thought Maisie would be able to do it by herself, and just left her to it.”

  “Did she not think to call me?”

  “If Hazel thought of anything, it would be a miracle,” said Angus, forgetting himself.

  Branx Conlan was a quiet man, and he was a heathen. When he had vaccinated Maisie he had told Angus, “I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember, but some days I envy you believers. I envy your certainty.”

  Angus had said nothing, but had privately sneered at him. There was no need to envy, because he had it in his power to believe!

  Branx went back and forth to the van, getting animal body bags and laying out chemicals in the barn. He put on a plastic suit as he waited for his assistant.

  “Is Maisie that dangerous?” Angus asked.

  “It’s just a precaution. She’s passing out of rigor mortis, so decomposition is setting in, and the added aspect of labor and the trauma of birth …”

  Mortis. Labor. Birth.

  Again, Angus felt the horror and sickness of grief.

  He wanted to ask that she be treated carefully, respectfully, but as soon as Branx’s assistant arrived, Maisie was hauled into the body bag and lifted by crane onto Branx’s truck. She was lifted like butcher’s meat, by the hook, the calf still inside her. Angus wondered about her burial, and if there would be one, and if the calf would be buried inside her.

  For a moment, as the midday sun warmed the skin on his brow and the last whiff of Maisie left the farm, Angus thought of Kathleen. As he watched the truck pull away, and the tremor of the black body bag, Angus wondered what Kathleen would think when she read his newspaper article the next morning.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kathleen Henderson

  Tuesday, October 8, 1985

  KATHLEEN HAD NOT SLEPT ALL NIGHT. SHE HAD NOT BEEN conscious of sleeping since Moll was taken, but John had told her that she had slept a little.

  She got up when she heard the velvet thump of the newspaper against the doormat, pulled her dressing gown on, and went downstairs. She opened the door and took inside the two glass bottles of milk that were set on the doorstep, then picked up the Journal, and tucked it under her arm. Every second there was a pain in her throat; every moment, a horror—on her skin—like a shiver she couldn’t shake.

  When she was putting the milk into the fridge, Kathleen began to cry, silently. Pouring a glass of milk for Moll was one of the first things Kathleen did each day. Since Moll had been taken, Kathleen cried often, and so did not stop to experience the tears, but simply continued putting away the milk and filling the kettle as she wept. She cried with sharp intakes of breath, so that it sounded as if she were being stabbed. When she stopped crying the kettle was boiling and her face was completely wet. She seemed to have so many tears. She placed two hands over her face, took a deep breath, and then wiped her cheeks and eyes.

  She had noticed that she cried more fitfully when she was alone. She had heard John breaking his heart locked in the bathroom, but in front of her he had been strong. Kathleen found it hard that they didn’t share their grief, anger, impatience, and, most of all, fear.

  John had adopted Moll when she was a baby, just after they were married. He loved Moll like his own, yet Kathleen had always felt that her daughter was hers first and foremost. There was a sense that she and John were each afloat and separated in their suffering. They tried to comfort each other, but ineffectually. The other night John had tried to rub her neck and she had told him he was hurting her. She cooked for him but he had no appetite.

  She poured a cup of tea, heavily, mechanically, not sugaring it although she liked two sugars, and not adding milk because milk made her cry.

  She sat down with her weak, unmilked, unsugared tea and the local newspaper. She checked the clock. It was nearly 7 A.M. She would normally be busy at this hour, supervising Molly getting dressed in her school uniform and making packed lunches and listening to the news while her tea went cold on the counter.

  Now she had the time to prepare and drink a hot cup of tea, but this luxury broke her heart.

  When she was alone, the worst fear consumed Kathleen. She would sit and imagine where her daughter was and how she was feeling. She wondered if she was bound; if she had been molested or hurt in some other way. When her thoughts turned to this horror, desperation would fill her and she would tremble with the desire to run to Moll, to physically save her, to protect her. But there was nowhere to run to, no way to know where she was and nothing, nothing at all, that Kathleen could do.

  They hadn’t said so in the news, but the police had told John that they were comparing the scant facts that were known about Moll’s abduction with those of other young girls from across the country who had been abducted and later found sexually assaulted and murdered. Even though John was part of a large group of volunteers searching the local area, the police had told them that they believed Moll would have been driven far away from Thurso soon after she was taken. With each day passing, the belief that Moll was still alive waned.

  The child abductions of the past few years bore similarities to Moll’s. All the children had been snatched in a public place. Nine-year-old Gillian Hardy had been taken while cycling to a nearby friend’s house, eleven-year-old Charlotte Martin was abducted crossing a bridge over the River Tweed, five-year-old Tracey Begg was snatched while playing outside near her home. All three of the victims had been dumped long distances from where they were abducted, but found within the same twenty-six-mile radius in England.

  The witnesses to all three abductions had been weak, but rough descriptions matched and were not dissimilar to those of Moll’s attacker: tall, dark, unkempt.

  The suspect for the Aberdeen abduction had been described by two separate witnesses as “scruffily dressed,” yet the three girls from Ravenshill Primary had said the man who took Moll had been wearing a suit. The girls had proved poor witnesses, but each girl had separately remarked on the suit worn by the man. Because of the previous crimes and the bulk of accumulated evidence, police suspected a truck driver or someone who drove for work and knew the network of national B roads. The suit was an anomaly, although the police were following up all leads.

  With a shaky hand, Kathleen took a sip of tea and turned over the newspaper. There was a photograph of her face on the front cover. It was the picture from the news conference she had given on the evening of Moll’s abduction. The police had told her it was best that she ask for the public’s help in finding Moll, and in their fraught state John and Kathleen had complied. It was the worst picture, but Kathleen was now used to seeing it: her hair was sticking up and her eyes were red and glassed with tears and her mouth was turned down at the corners. There was no place for vanity at the press conference on your daughter’s abduction by a suspected serial killer and pedophile.

  She glanced at the headline and byline: I JUST WANT MY BABY BACK by Angus Campbell. Kathleen shook the paper in her hands to straighten it and took another sip of tea.

  She remembered Angus Campbell turning up at the door, unannounced, and persuading her to speak to him. She had disliked him intensely; thought him furtive. He had smelled like the inside of an old wardrobe. He had small eyes, and extremely small hands with bitten-down fingernails, and had a strange habit of constantly wiping his nose with the knuckle of his forefinger. She disliked how he took all his notes in shorthand, so that they were like a foreign language she had no hope of deciphering. She hadn’t liked him or trusted him, but she had decided to talk to him because of what he had said about community support and keeping Moll in the public eye. Newspaper interviews were the last thing she wanted to do, but she had forced herself for Moll’s sake.

  Not even a week since Moll’s
disappearance, yet Kathleen was already becoming numb to the newspaper articles. She had been on television, and in the national press. Each teller regurgitated what the last had said; mistakes were made and then repeated. Kathleen was a Thurso local, then from Aberdeen. Some of the journalists wrote about the Moors murderers, as if these comparisons were helpful, when Kathleen knew they were just thrilling speculations to feed their readership. She didn’t know if she blamed the journalists, or the Madame Defarge appetite they fed.

  Kathleen took another sip of tea, steeling herself as she began to read.

  Six days since the abduction of seven-year-old Molly Henderson, her mother, Kathleen, talks of her heartache and desperation as she waits for news of her daughter. Exclusive to the John O’Groat Journal, KATHLEEN HENDERSON talks about their family, and how she and Molly’s stepfather, John Henderson, are coping with her disappearance.

  Kathleen frowned, leaning closer to the newspaper. This was the first time that John had been referred to as Moll’s stepfather.

  The article correctly summarized events on October 2, stating the time that Moll was taken and repeating the rough description of the man and his car given by “three classmates.” The article gave a detailed description of Moll and stated her age and also that she was a “bright, dedicated pupil at Ravenshill Primary.” There was a picture of Moll, and a reproduction of the artist’s sketch of the abductor.

  Before she read on, Kathleen jumped to another picture further down the page. She recognized it from somewhere, and stared at the black-and-white photo of a group of men in suits.

  “What on earth?” Kathleen spread the paper out over the kitchen table and bent over it.

  She had not seen a picture of him for years: it was Big George McLaughlin on the steps of the High Court in Glasgow, with his brothers. Kathleen could not be sure, but she thought it was one of the times when Peter had escaped conviction.

  She could not understand what the McLaughlin family was doing in the John O’Groat Journal’s article on Molly’s disappearance. She flicked to the beginning of the article and skimmed back and forth until she found the explanation.