by P. D. Viner
It will be an emotional service and Chapman’s prepared. Large boxes of tissues have been placed at the end of every aisle and there are four professional grief counselors on hand for free advice after the funeral—he’s pulled out all the stops to make this one work. After all, the press are here and so is the archbishop. This is bigger than the jockey and the serial bigamist combined. Showtime.
Reverend Chapman waves to someone at the back, and the sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees sweeps out from the speakers above the pulpit.
In the front pew Jim bows his head and pulls Patty close to him. Beside them, Tom Bevans’s heart breaks.
At the back of the church, someone slips in and stands behind a stone pillar, unseen by other mourners. Tears slide down his face. He knows he should not be there but can’t help himself—the pull is too strong.
“I am so sorry, Dani. I never meant …” His words are swept up in the howl of the Banshees.
TEN
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Jim makes hot chocolate, piping-hot milk with heaps of dark cocoa. He pours two mugs and sets one on the table in front of her. The curling steam circles her face and seems to shift the lines, smudging her cheeks, turning her features to air.
“I think I can smell it.” She turns her face up to him, a huge smile.
“That’s great.” Jim beams back, though he knows it can’t be true. Maybe she’s remembering the scent—drawing on happy childhood winters or perhaps it’s just wishful thinking. He sips his own, it’s bitter with too much chocolate. He watches her—lost in thought somewhere.
Finally she snaps back. “How’s yours?” she asks.
“Oh it’s good. Really good. Especially on a day like today.”
She nods.
“How about we go for a walk in the park?”
She seems not to hear him at first, then responds slowly. “I’d like that.”
“Great.”
They sit together in silence, until his mug is empty and hers is stone-cold.
“I’ll run up and get something warmer.” He tells her, and heads upstairs.
He doesn’t exactly remember when he first saw Dani—Dani like she is now. For a while, after her death, she seemed to be always there in the corner of his eye, but when he turned to find her she was gone, melted away or morphed into another face. But that flash of her was enough to keep him going somehow.
But there came a point, maybe a year after her death, when it wasn’t just a glimpse. One day, soon after he’d resigned his job, he saw her straight on. She was on a train he’d just left. For some reason he turned back as it was about to leave the station, and there she was. She winked at him. A week or so later she waved from a taxi. She looked as she had that last time he saw her alive: dark brown shoulder-length hair held off her face by a clip, freckles dotting her nose and upper cheeks like they did even in winter. She wore no make-up and looked healthy. Looked happy. He never told Patty he saw her. He knew what she’d say: “You are cracking up, my friend, you need to see someone.”
That was pretty much what she said to him most days back then. He hated it when she called him “my friend” and of course she knew it made him crazy. And, in part, it was why she said it. She knew long before she left him that she would, and a part of her wanted to make him hate her, make him glad she was gone instead of just feeling abandoned. Of course that plan was futile. Without Dani, Jim held on to Patty harder than ever. He knew deep down it stifled her, pushed her away, but he couldn’t help himself. The fear of being alone was too deep, but that very fear made it inevitable. The man who loved women but who was left by them all.
It took Patty eight years to leave him. Eight years after Dani died to feed the resentment and build the courage to leave the man she loved. When she did, Jim fell apart. He called for her, howled for her, and for Dani. Then when Jim hit rock bottom, about a week after Patty left, Dani came back to him. He’d been in the living room and he thought he heard the front door. He rushed out, like a dog desperate to see its owner.
“Patty?” he shouted.
The hallway was empty. He just stood there, staring at the front door, his brief moment of optimism deflated like a ruptured balloon. The sun was going down and the glass of the door was flaring with the last few rays. It was actually quite beautiful, reminded him for a moment of Notre Dame at dusk. Then, within the shimmering orange-gold light, a shape seemed to coalesce. The sun slipped away and Dani stood there. She was wearing a red duffel coat and held a beaten-up suitcase.
“I thought you might want some company,” she said with a smile. “Can I come in?”
He nodded and she walked past him into the living room. Not floating, not see-through. She left the suitcase in the hall. Later he noticed it was gone. That night he asked her to take her old room and she did. He asked where she had been, what she remembered. She said there was nothing. He accepted it, though he liked to imagine she’d been traveling—seen the world like she’d always planned. Once she’d graduated. Had she lived.
“It’s so quiet.”
Jim nods.
Father and daughter walk together toward Greenwich Park. Jim steers them on a slightly longer route than normal; yesterday he saw a poster on a tree: missing cat. He knows to avoid it. The streets are empty. It’s not even 10 a.m. but the grayness feels like dusk. Snowflakes still fall but not so thickly; the wind has died so they gracefully drift toward the earth, turning slowly.
As they approach the park, they begin to hear the first sounds of the day—whooping and yelling. They enter the park at the top of the hill leading down to the Thames and the sprawling vista of London. Today the skyscrapers stand like gray mountains in among the clouds. The two of them stop to view the scene. Jim feels the cold in his chest, watches his breath billow like a dragon’s smoke. But when he turns to Dani there’s nothing.
“What’s going on in your head?” he asks her softly.
She turns her back on him and walks away. He watches her for a moment and then follows.
“Dani!” he calls to her and she turns.
She is just twenty-one, frozen in that state forever and … her face is shattered, a snowball punches through it.
“Be more bloody careful,” Jim screams at the kid.
“It weren’t anywhere near you,” the kid shouts back.
“You hit my daught—” He stops. Looks at Dani, her face is back to normal—and she bursts into laughter.
“Sorry, kid,” he calls back and starts to laugh himself.
“Your face.” She points, still laughing.
“Your face.”
And they walk to the observatory—like they’ve done a hundred times over the years.
“Do you remember anything?” he asks.
The day she came back to him he asked the same question, and he kept asking for months but she always shook her head. He could see the pain, so he stopped. But after his nightmare, and the call from Tom—he feels like something is coming.
“I … Dad, I don’t know.”
“It’s okay.”
“Is it?”
Her face pinches, mouth becomes hard.
“You said you came back for me.”
“I did. You called me.”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t know.”
They’re both silent. They sit on the wall of the closed observatory and watch children sledge down the hill.
“In my day we used a Rupert annual,” Jim says, pointing at the sleek blue sled that a small flame-haired boy is dragging up the hill. The snow has started to fall a little heavier again. Jim watches it settle on the wall beside him. The spot where he can see Dani sitting. Suddenly he jumps up and runs toward the flame-haired kid who has finally got the sled to the top of the hill.
Dani watches him pull something from his pocket and gesture wildly to the boy. Then he turns and with the broadest smile, waves at Dani and motions her to come. He hands something to the child and takes the sled. He sits on it a
nd waits for Dani to scramble onto the back. Then kicks off.
“Whhhheheehehheheheeeeeeeeeeee …”
The sled shoots off down the hill. Dani screams. Jim puts his arms in the air—the wind biting his face, his hair billowing out—and wipes out. The snow shoots up his shirt, down his neck, in his mouth and down his pants. The cold hits him like an electric shock, and he rolls and rolls until the hill runs out.
He lies there, wet and cold but most of all scared. Dani stands over him. She is twenty-one years old, beautiful. He is petrified he is going to lose her again. That was his nightmare—that is always his nightmare—being alone.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
He can’t answer, doesn’t trust his voice. He feels the weight of twenty years bear down on him.
We need to talk about Dani. About what happened. Tom’s words echo through his mind.
At the top of the hill, directly above Jim, stands DS Tom Bevans. He had planned to talk to Jim, had walked a long way through the snow, but seeing him like this—having fun like a child—he can’t. Instead he turns his back on the older man and trudges back the way he came. In his pocket the diary feels heavy. He should have returned it to Jim and Patty years ago—but it’s too late. Everything feels too late.
Saturday, September 27, 1986
This will be my last entry in this diary. Tomorrow I’m packing everything up and on Monday I will be gone. This feels a little like the journal of a child. Time to grow up. I hope when I come back to read this in years’ and years’ time—maybe when I’ve got a child of my own going off to university—that I’m not too embarrassed by my immaturity. Anyway, this is the end of an era, the end of a life. I won’t be like Mum, though. When she went to uni she never went home again. I know she never saw Gramps after she left and Nanny had to get the coach to us if she wanted to visit even when she was dying—I won’t be like that, couldn’t cut Dad out of my life. But … I do have to push Tom back a little. I shouldn’t have said he could come up on Monday—I don’t know how to let him down easy. I hope he’ll find some pretty policewoman soon. I need to start the page again, reinvent myself. A new Dani Lancing.
Finis
ELEVEN
Sunday, December 31, 1989
S-E-B M-E-R-C-H-A-N-T
She writes his name in her tiny, precise hand on a yellow Post-it note. In a zip-like motion she sticks it to the wall below the word BOYFRIEND? Above TORTURE. Her eyes flick across the wall—layers of photos, press clippings, witness statements, police reports—hundreds of documents pinned and stapled, all covered in questions on yellow notes. Always questions—why, how, who—almost a year of questions. She has stood before this board for months, adding nothing but dead ends, theories—nothing concrete. Ahab, standing at the wheel, scouring the infinity of the ocean for a sign. But today the whale has been sighted: Seb Merchant is found. She steps back, knocking a pile of frames that are on the floor. She kicks them further into the corner, hearing glass splinter. They used to hang in front of her—two diplomas and three awards for journalism. They had once been her proudest achievements, now they have no place on the walls.
She feels the broil in her stomach; this will end soon. She’s a little light-headed—she should probably eat something, can’t remember the last time she had, and she will need her strength for later. From downstairs she hears a clatter. They’re still here, she’ll wait for them to go before venturing out.
She falls into her old office chair, it tips back like an astronaut waiting for the kick of G-force. The wall fills her vision, making her feel … she looks down. With a bent paper clip she digs into the quick of her fingernail. She watches the little bead of blood she’s teased from her finger, imagines it swimming with life, and then brings it up to her mouth and sucks it away. The taste makes her want to heave. Downstairs she hears another thud and crash—Christ, he is so obvious, she knows what he wants and she feels so tired of disappointing him, so tired of seeing his pain. He has no idea what she needs, what they need.
“Help. Professional help,” he had said with his big sad cow eyes, adding the killer blow: “Dani would have wanted this.”
She agreed and they went to see Alice Bell, for thirty-four minutes.
“Bereavement counselor. Fucking joke. Fucking joke, Jim,” Patty snapped at him afterward. “BACP, UKRCP. They aren’t real qualifications, might as well include the fifty meters backstroke.”
She remembers the pain in his face as she spat out her poison. It shames her now, remembering the vitriol. It was almost six months ago but the memory feels fresh. His pain feels so fresh.
“Fucking joke. And did you see that photograph?” she snorted.
He had seen it, the only personal item on her desk. It showed Alice Bell, maybe ten years younger, though you can clearly see it was her, with arms around a child in a wheelchair—they both beam with happiness.
“What the fuck does she think she’s saying with that? ‘I know pain too, I know what you are going through, but it isn’t all bad’? Bitch.” She spits out the final “bitch.” She sees Jim cringe at the coarseness of her language; he’s never heard his wife speak like this before. Jim didn’t sit on the news desk and watch her trade crude insults night after night with leery old men who hated working with her but wanted to fuck her anyway. She used to keep work and family life separate: Jim and Dani were like oxygen for her—she needed them to live—but her career was food, the nutrients for a healthy Patricia. Now she had neither. Her editor himself had said she lacked focus, had lost her journalistic balance. He smiled, of course, offered a leave of absence. She told him to stuff it. She knew her “balance” wasn’t coming back. Not until she had revenge. That was what kept her going now.
She knew Jim had liked this Alice Bell, had found her calm voice and kind eyes comforting. Patricia had seen only danger in those eyes, the kind that could lull you into trust. Trust could kill them. She knew Alice Bell’s kind of help was not what she needed.
“To come to terms with Dani’s death—”
“Dani’s multiple rape and murder,” Patty interrupts her, bearing witness to the truth of it, the horror of it. She sees the blood drain from Jim’s face, a sadness creep across the professional Ms. Bell.
“Your loss is terrible …”
Patty hears the first few words and then drifts away—it’s all blah blah blah. She isn’t looking to come to terms with Dani’s death. She’s looking for vengeance and justice. Only then might there be peace.
Jim treads carefully up the stairs, virtually silent. As he reaches the top stair he can see Patty through the slats, sitting at her desk and staring at the wall. He hates that wall. He knows it’s totally irrational, how can you hate a wall? But he hates it. Hates the curled and flapping paper covered in questions, hates the lists, the accusations, the anger spewed over every surface. But worst of all are the photos—the room she was found in and two taken of her after. When there was no more Dani, just a husk that looked like his daughter but had none of her life. They make him die inside.
He needs to ask Patty one last time if she’ll come with them. He already knows the answer, knows she’ll say no just as she has done at least half a dozen times over the last twenty-four hours, but he’ll give it one last try. He’d be so happy if she would go with them.
“Patty,” he calls. Then waits. “Tom and I are going. Please come with us.”
She tilts her head, the tiniest movement, so she can look at him and then, without answering, kicks the door so it swings closed.
“Okay,” he says to no one in particular and walks back down to Tom, who is waiting in the kitchen.
“No?”
Jim shakes his head sadly. Tom nods to show he understands, then picks up his overcoat and they head out into the bitter cold.
It’s only ten in the morning but the sky is gunmetal gray. They drive to the crematorium. It’s the same route they took for the funeral but now they move faster. The heater’s on full blast to keep the wind
screen from icing over. Nothing is said.
At the crematorium they park and get out. Tom slams the door, which echoes through the cemetery like a gunshot. The trees stand skeletal, waving fingers in the sky. Everywhere you look an angel stands sentinel over a fallen loved one. Tom pulls his overcoat closer to his throat, breath streams from his mouth. Jim carries a bouquet of yellow roses. Tom can’t imagine where he got them on a day like this. Tom carries nothing but inside his breast pocket he has a slim volume of poetry—Keats. He will read one and then leave the book for her.
They walk in silence, both knowing where they are going, neither knowing that the other has made this walk twenty or thirty times already—alone. In the garden of remembrance there is a small plaque, chosen together in those first few days.
DANI, LOVED DEARLY AND MISSED DEEPLY
They stand close to it, her men, Dani’s men. Slowly Jim moves forward and places the flowers on a ledge just below the plaque. He whispers something to the air and then steps back while Tom draws out the slim volume and reads.
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.”
As the front door closes Patty gives an involuntary shudder. It’s time. She’s excited but there are other emotions too. Darker ones, that she holds just below the skin, willing them down until the time is right. She opens her bag one final time and checks the contents. Tickets, notebook, keys, whistle and pepper spray just in case. She feels the weight of the small canister in her palm and wonders if she will use it today. A big part of her hopes she will.
