Sarah pointed towards the jetty, swallowing and trying to talk at the same time and not managing to do either. Daniel spun away, panic taking over. Stumbling and screaming, he sprinted toward the jetty scared of what he would find there, scared he wouldn't find anything at all, and that was worse.
“ELLEN! ELLEN! ELLLLLLENNN!”
Then he saw her.
She was stood out in the turbulence beneath the main body of the jetty, her little legs planted firmly in the silt. She was hanging on to something that bobbed in the turbid water like a buoy, stopping it from getting away from her. The twisted set of her face said she was screaming. No sound was making it past her lips. Daniel ran on, pushing through the longer grasses, ignoring their sting as they whipped back at his legs. Drift wood made the slope down to the water as treacherous as any Daniel had ever run, pebbles shifting under his feet as they skidded on yet more pebbles.
The amount of junk beneath the jetty was amazing; newspapers, cans, cigarette wrappers, crisp packets, bottles and all sorts of everything else. Up near the top, where the wooden jetty met the road, blankets had been laid out to make a den. Amid all of the rubbish, a kid had transformed the underside of the jetty into a good, secret place. It had the isolation and the aura of mystery so that seeing it now was like hearing a long and forgotten friend calling to let Daniel know he hadn't forgotten him after all these years, even if Daniel had forgotten that friend long ago.
Ellen was trying to help someone swim, or stop them from drowning, he realized suddenly.
“HANG ON BABY! I'M COMING! DADDY'S COMING! JUST HANG ON THERE!”
Ellen staggered back against the swell, not letting go of the swimmer for a second, though she must have been tiring. How long had she been struggling to keep the body afloat?
The body was face down in the water, hair fanned out like the tail of a peacock on the water's surface, wearing jeans and a white checked blouse, the weight of the sodden denim holding her down. She had no shoes on her feet. The weight of the undertow was pulling Ellen deeper, against her efforts to cling on to the swimmer's body as it was lifted and dragged by the swells of Devil's Water.
Daniel splashed straight in, refusing to recognise the sodden denim and the white checked blouse even though he had spent all of last night looking for them.
“Come on, Hon. I'm here,” he stopped waist deep in the freezing water, taking a hold of the swimmer's legs. Gripping the saturated denim he started hauling the body back to the shore. His foot slid and slipped into the muddy bed of the lake as he waded through the water, part of his mind screaming that he was dragging a dead girl – his best friend's little girl, the girl that he had been up all night looking for, the girl that he had rashly promised to find – through the water.
- PART FOUR –
- A VILLAGE IN SHOCK -
- 59 -
Ben hadn't thought he would ever see her again, but there she was, Wednesday morning, waiting patiently by the lychgate, watching across the old gravestones as Mike Shelton was laid to rest in the same plot as his wife and daughter. The tiny hillside churchyard was exposed and bitterly cold, a fine, gauzy drizzle raining on the funeral service. The bushy canopy of overhanging willow kept the worst of the steady downpour off.
He was wearing a long black raincoat that absorbed whatever rain made it past the willow's siphon. His clothes hung on him as if they were three sizes too big. His skin was a washed-out grey. His eyes were empty. Wisps of rain drifted across his blank stare, diffusing into the air like ephemeral ghosts.
There were only three mourners at the graveside, Ben and Barney and Evie Doyle. To Kristy, over the rows of lacklustre headstones, Ben didn't look so much dignified as he did broken, kneeling to drop a white rose on the coffin lid. The vicar took a handful of dirt and let it scatter between his fingers. The sound of the dirt hitting the lid carried all the way to Kristy at the gate. Beside Ben, Barney and Evie were saying their own silent prayers.
The rain mingling with the tears on her cheeks, Evie gave Ben a fierce hug then stepped back and moved away. Barney scooped up a handful of dirt and let it filter through his clenched fist before backing away to join his wife for the walk back to their car.
Kristy waited while Ben thanked the vicar.
“I don't know what to say to him,” she admitted as Barney and Evie walked past her.
“Who does?” Barney said, shrugging. The big man was red-eyed, hurting, and trying not to let it show.
“Typical man. Just give him a hug, dear,” Evie offered, patting Kristy’s hand. She too was red-eyed and hurting, but dealing with the emotions in her own way.
“Thanks,” Kristy smiled. “I'll do that.”
When Ben finally wandered away from the graveside that was exactly what she did. She wrapped her arms around his back and held him close. He didn’t appear to recognise her, but that was okay. She had set out this morning looking for an ally, heard about Mike from Andy McKenna and decided to stick around and offer herself as a shoulder should Ben feel like crying. Slowly, like a man learning to walk all over again, Ben allowed himself to be led back to his car.
Mike had been dead for two days when Ben found him in that caravan of his halfway up the hill. He had carried his brother all the way back down into the village, to Barney in the police house, tears streaming down his cheeks. To hear Andy McKenna speak, it had been a touching, and a harrowing sight. She could picture it and from the image in her mind's eye wouldn't have argued, even with his choice of words. She imagined Ben straining under Mike’s weight, stumbling, falling and picking himself up again. Touching and harrowing seemed to fit it just right.
Calum Salmund had carried out the inquest in tandem with young Annie Lockewood, in a converted classroom in the old youth block. Alex Slater's fingerprints had been found on the doorframe and the knife. Under the circumstances, with the broken window and the smashed bottles all over the floor, he had no choice but to offer an open verdict.
Annie Lockewood was another matter entirely. The findings made by the Underwater Search Unit backed up Barney's worst fears. There were signs of sexual assault, and enough evidence to suggest that penetration had occurred; even that small mercy was denied Annie's parents. No illusions left unscarred. The water in her lungs matched samples taken from fifteen feet beneath the surface. Rocks, bundled up to act as makeshift weights, were found in line of sight with the jetty, at a depth of fifteen feet, tying in with the samples.
The back of her skull had been caved in by a claw hammer.
Jessie Stevenson had run a piece in the Gazette – Northumbrian village in shock after latest tragedy – and made a couple of columns out of it on a day when the headlines revolved around the brutal murder of Spencer Abel, the Gazette's news editor – Mown down in a city centre car park. Death was all around her. Someone’s pain. Someone else's suffering, yes, but all around her. Rotating on her axis, her pivot. Kristy suddenly felt as if she was the centrifuge spinning wildly out of control, the hurt her fault. She understood easily enough that her mind was laying a massive guilt trip on her, but that didn't help dislodge the burden it strapped to her back.
Add to that the fact that Todd Devlin was still out there, public enemy number one according to Paul Sheridan, the BBC local news man. Kristy was probably the only person in the whole of the North East who wanted to shake Devlin by the hand. Honest to God, and herself, she hoped Brent Richards would never wake up.
All three stories attracted prime time on the local television news roundups, running consecutively for three nights out of four, but didn't catch the imagination of the outside world. Westbrooke was just another small town with its small time problems.
“Are you feeling hungry?” Kristy asked.
“I haven't got any food in the house.”
“That's not what I asked. Let’s try again. Here's your starter for ten: Are you feeling hungry?”
Ben thought about it for a moment, his eyes and his thoughts plainly a million miles away from the mundane neces
sities of food.
“No. Not really.”
“Fine. Do you want to come with me while I go and get something to eat? I thought I might try that place down by the lake. Is it any good, do you know?”
Ben ignored her. He sat staring out into space while the length of silence between them widened. “I'm sorry”' he said, finally. “I don't feel a lot like talking. Maybe this isn't such a good idea.”
“I'm willing to run the risk if you are?”
* * * * *
It looked as if the entire village had closed down for Annie's funeral that afternoon, and every one of them had come to stand by the graveside as Connor Chapman, the vicar of St Mary's on the Mount, voiced all of their farewell's in his short, emotional eulogy.
Ranks of children, from Annie's class at school, and the years above and below, had turned out en masse, fidgeting and looking uncomfortable this close to mortality. A full complement of teachers accompanied them, supposedly to keep the youngsters in check. Today, they weren't needed. The children's usual high spirits were very definitely subdued.
No one seemed to be talking, another miracle all in itself. The rain hadn't eased any. The grass was like a mulch beneath their feet.
Two dozen employees from the paper mill had turned up to offer Graeme their condolences and pay their respects to little Annie.
Barney Doyle and Charlie Adams stood slightly away from the graveside, Barney feeling awkward and not sure what to do with himself, Charlie sniffing a lot and shuffling from foot to foot. Knowing what Evie would have been like, Barney had tried to make her promise to stay away, eliciting a compromise which suited him down to the ground; Evie had told him she was going out and not to wait up, which roughly translated to: I'm going down to the restaurant to knead some dough and pretend it's your head, thank you very much.
Barney took the licorice papers from his coat pocket and rolled himself a smoke, despite Charlie's frown.
“God'll forgive me.”
“He might, but other folk won't,” Charlie said, reproachfully. The truth be told, Barney was only rolling the smoke for something to do with his hands, he hadn't even thought how it might look to others. He ground the unlit cigarette into the soft grass.
Daniel Tanner stood beside Graeme and Jenny, his own thoughts very much on his wife and his girls back home. The doctor had given Ellen something to help her sleep. God only knew what had been going through her head since she had found Annie face down in the water. He had tried to talk to her but it was like talking to a Zombie. At her age picnics were supposed to be fun, things to be looked forward to on wet, windy afternoons. Not the scripts for nightmares. In the space of a week, Ellen had found the body of a stranger hanging in the woods, and then her best friend floating in the water. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, the best foundations for a healthy childhood to be built upon. If the doctor was to be believed kids were resilient and Ellen would be bouncing back in no time. Daniel wished to God he could be so positive, but he simply couldn't.
Few people looked at Billy Rogan as he leaned against the trunk of the weeping willow, and those few that did turned away quickly rather than look the scarecrow in the eye.
Billy was intensely proud of the way things had turned out. He had been so sick he couldn't move from the driver's seat of the Zephyr for two days, parked in the barn with a blanket pulled over his head, Annie's shoes clutched firmly in his hands, his body tormented by the shakes and the sweats. The few tufts of hair he had left had fallen out yesterday morning, leaving raw patches on his scalp that wept like the sores around his mouth. He had had to drag himself into the house for water and food then, or die. His body had made the choice for him by refusing to die painlessly; it was something else he couldn't fathom, how he felt nothing, not even numb for days on the trot, and then it hurt like buggery just twisting around in the seat of Pops' old car to open the door.
He didn't hurt now, but if he put his fingers up to his temples he could feel out the swelling beneath the skin where his bones seemed to be slowly forcing their way apart. His head was the only part of his body that did not seem to be withering and dying. He felt as if a new person was gestating inside him, waiting to be born. His head was the egg then, the shell beginning to crack as this new hybrid Billy forced its way out into the world.
His legs and arms were like sticks, the fat burned off by his hyper-active metabolism. Two days in the Zephyr had allowed his body to start feeding on the sinew and muscle, stripping both from Billy’s limbs before he could start building them up with a fresh intake of protein and carbohydrate. One thing he understood now, better than anything else, he had to eat almost constantly unless he wanted to slip back into the sweats and feel himself being eaten away by the strange, cold anger taking over his body.
Connor Chapman waited for Annie Lockewood's coffin to be lowered into the earth before he continued with the few lines from the Holy Bible set aside for burying children and sending departed souls on their way to the good Lord. Death sickened Chapman. He couldn't bring himself to view it as dispassionately as did many of his brethren. With death, Connor was as near atheism as his faith would allow. The doctrine that Connor preached from his Sunday pulpit offered comfort with four words, eternal life in heaven, for the sinner or the saint without discrimination of race, creed or colour. Which was all to the good but Connor couldn't believe in a God who claimed innocence for the evil of another anymore than he could believe in heaven as a place, Noah as a man, or the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ as a given.
Leading the funeral service for a girl he had seen every week since her christening eleven years ago, Connor wanted to tear the hair from his head and scream the truth at the sky, and be damned with his eternal soul and the emotional baggage that went along with that way of thinking.
He was uncomfortable with these dark thoughts inside his head.
He felt so low, so cold, beneath it all, so very, very angry.
Connor Chapman recited verse and word from memory, the Bible in his hand held open on the wrong page, his voice flat and toneless, going through the motions. Connor felt like nothing more than a fraud, pushing a credo he had no faith left to believe in.
Offering hope where there was only sorrow and suffering to be had, no better than a snake oil man pushing his own form of miracle elixir down the throats of these people.
Connor stepped back from the plot when Billy Rogan moved in to start refilling the grave, circumstance forcing him to act like a polling day politician, pressing palms and offering condolences of his own as the mourners came looking for God to say it was all right for them to hurt and carrying on hurting just as much as they needed to, and for just as long as their own self-revolving universes would allow them to dance to the piper's melancholy song. There was desperation in each and every face. He lied and they were happy to believe him.
Billy did his share of handshaking and accepting pats on the back from the adults and then from the children mimicking their parents and teachers, a good many of them shying away from him when they saw the infection spreading across his face. If Pops had been there to see the way they reacted he would have knocked some manners into the young ones, and bashed a few of the older one’s heads together for not knowing better. But Pops wasn't there, and that was one of the problems Billy the Scarecrow had to adjust to.
Billy sank as much of his anger as he dared into shovelling the top soil into the hole and on top of Annie Lockewood. The tears were streaming down his cheeks as he dug. He could feel himself starting to hurt again, and that feeling scared him badly.
Daniel Tanner wandered back to the graveside.
“You holding up okay, Billy?”
Billy looked up from shovelling and nodded, wiping his eyes.
Daniel was an amorphous blur through his teary eyes. “Doin' okay, Mr Daniel,” he managed.
Daniel smiled sadly, mistaking Billy's tears for the same grief he was struggling to keep bottled up and failing to cope with even as he cheated hims
elf into believing he had it under control.
“There's no shame in crying, son. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“I won't,” Billy promised earnestly, this time wiping his dirty hands on the legs of his overall, the fresh smears lost in with the accumulated camouflage of grime and grass stains already ground into the legs.
Billy watched Daniel Tanner walk away toward the lychgate, deep in conversation with Barney Doyle and Charlie Ash. He didn't need to hear what they were saying to know that they were talking about him. Pops was right, they all made fun of him when they thought he wasn't looking. Even Mr Barney, and he said he was Billy's friend.
Filled with the energy of anger, Billy set about the dwindling heap of soil, shovelling three and then four spadefuls into the hole in the time it took him to think Billy the scarecrow twice over in his head.
Soon the heap was down to nothing and the hole was a levelled off rectangle of dark soil clogging up with rain.
The cries would begin soon enough, screams of horror the like of which Billy struggled to imagine, even with the aid of the constantly expanding presence within his mind, carried along with cries of disbelief as their undercurrents of pain. When they began they would be so very, very sweet to hear.
Billy heard a dog braying. Its howling sent tiny electric shivers of anticipation coursing through him.
* * * * *
Rain streamed down the glass of the windscreen. Beneath the wheels every puddle sounded like a sheet of blotting paper being torn up into smaller and smaller pieces.
In the small rectangle of the sun visor's mirror Ben's face looked haunted by the thoughts living behind it; dark circles beneath and around his eyes betraying the string of sleepless nights he had spent retreating to the fictional Wild West of J.T. Edison and listening to whatever the radio had to offer the silent hours.
Sufferer's Song Page 37
