The White Shepherd

by Annie Dalton

  Anna wanted to say something to comfort Tansy, but she couldn’t think of a single word that wouldn’t sound fake. She drove to the pumps and filled up with diesel.

  As they pulled off the slip road, Tansy said, ‘Do you ever feel like, no matter how hard you try to wash the crap of your old life away, people can still, you know, detect that whiff? I do try to be a good person, but I’ll always be my father’s daughter.’ Tansy’s voice gave a wobble. ‘I am, you know! I take these mad chances. My stepdad calls it my “kamikaze” side. Take today. I suddenly go tearing off to London because I’ve got this … fixation, or whatever, that Eve’s been abducted by Albanians.’

  ‘It wasn’t so ridiculous,’ Anna said, pulling out to pass an ancient Renault Clio being driven at about forty miles an hour. ‘People do get abducted. Statistically, a small percentage must be abducted by Albanians.’

  ‘And I always get involved with rubbish men,’ Tansy said miserably, as if Anna hadn’t spoken. ‘I daren’t get involved with good men like Liam Goodhart because I’m scared how they’ll react once they know the real me. It’s like however hard I work at being Tansy, my default setting is always going to be bloody Maxine.’ She darted a look at Anna. ‘Sorry, I always get morbid when I’m tired. Feel free to slap me any time.’

  ‘I don’t want to slap you, but I am a bit talked-out.’ Anna managed to summon a smile. ‘Find a good music station,’ she suggested. ‘Old school as you like.’

  ‘Can we have talk radio instead?’ Tansy asked. ‘I listen to it sometimes when I can’t sleep.’ She searched through the available stations, eventually landing on Radio Oxford.

  Anna also listened to talk radio sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. The anonymous bee-like murmur felt like proof that the world was still turning. It was like dozing in the back of the car at night when you were a kid, hearing the monotonous ebb and flow of your parents’ voices discussing subjects that held absolutely no interest for you and was comforting for precisely that reason.

  Tansy tensed. ‘Did he say Inspector Chaudhari?’ She hit the volume button in time for them to hear the rest of the newsflash, telling them that a member of the public had phoned the Thames Valley police with important new information. As a result, they had now formally charged a suspect believed to be the so-called Oxford Ripper and who had admitted responsibility for the spate of local murders. The newsreader read out the names of the murdered women. To their astonishment Naomi’s was among them.

  Tansy looked wild-eyed. ‘Oh my God, Frankie was right! I can’t believe it.’ She pressed her hands to her cheeks. ‘I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Anna said. The horror of Naomi’s unsolved murder had hung over them since the day they met. Now it had been solved at a stroke, and it was a complete anticlimax.

  In the end Naomi had just been another young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was something depressingly random about this which Anna didn’t feel up to examining. ‘The university authorities will be happy,’ she said, striving to be upbeat. ‘Leaving home is scary enough for young girls without a serial killer on the loose.’

  ‘Yes, totally,’ Tansy said. ‘But this should be a good thing, right? So why doesn’t it feel like a good thing? Doesn’t it make you feel very slightly insane?’

  Anna didn’t feel able to say that she would love to feel only very slightly insane. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs that now absolutely nothing in her world made sense. Anna didn’t need a therapist to tell her that her obsessive need to make sense of Naomi’s death had its roots deep in her own bloodstained history. Turning detective had been her way of dealing with experiences too unbearable to deal with any other way. But Tansy Lavelle was different. Despite her criminal dad, maybe even because of him, Tansy had learned to bring a kind of luminous integrity to everything she did. Tansy’s mum had helped to make that happen when she’d taken her daughter away from Frankie and Frankie’s life. And then along came Anna with her obsessions and her murder boards and suddenly Tansy was going on stake-outs and accessing autopsy photos online. Anna didn’t want to be that person who had dragged her back out of the light into the shadows.

  When they pulled up outside the converted corset factory, Anna said, ‘Next time we get together we should do something that doesn’t involve murder boards.’

  Tansy faked wide-eyed amazement. ‘You’re suggesting we do something just for fun?’

  ‘Yes, like go to see a movie or a play.’ If Anna shut her eyes she could still see the motorway with its constantly shifting lights. She was suddenly so tired that she could have crawled into the back with Bonnie and crashed out there and then. Yet once she got home she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  ‘Rambert is coming next month,’ Tansy said. ‘I’ll get us tickets if you like.’ She looked pleased and excited. ‘Did you ever see that Rooster ballet?’

  ‘I loved that ballet,’ Anna said. ‘I love modern dance.’ She had a sickening sensation of falling as she remembered all those other times that she’d resolved to do the things that happy healthy humans do and how it had ended.

  Tansy yawned and stretched. ‘So, just to be clear, you still want to be my friend even if we’re not being the dog walking version of Charlie’s Angels?’

  ‘Never tell anybody this, but I did secretly enjoy us being the dog walking Charlie’s Angels,’ Anna said, ‘but I don’t think it’s good for our mental health; yours, mine, or Isadora’s. As for being friends …’ She looked away for a moment. ‘I don’t have a lot of experience of being anyone’s friend in normal adult life.’ She gave Tansy a cautious smile. ‘But I’m willing to give it a shot if you are.’

  Tansy already had one hand on the door handle as Anna added, ‘Talking about normal and adult. You should give Liam a call. Just tell him about your dad. He can handle it.’

  ‘You think?’ Tansy said wistfully.

  ‘I know he can!’ Anna took a breath. ‘Tansy, what you did today was really brave.’

  She stiffened. ‘I’m not scared of my dad.’

  ‘I know that. But I think you’re scared you might turn into him, or get sucked back into his world.’

  Without warning Tansy threw her arms around Anna. ‘I know we met in such a terrible way, but I’m so glad I met you.’

  ‘Me too,’ Anna said, gently detaching herself. ‘Me too.’ If someone had talked to her like this when she was Tansy’s age, Anna thought, she might have turned out differently. She might have made a proper life for herself instead of just wandering through a recurring bad dream.

  Back home, Anna fed Bonnie and threw some dirty clothes into her washing machine. She was hungry, but it was too late to cook proper food so she made herself French toast and ate it in front of the TV.

  Though she was sitting quietly in her kitchen with her dog at her feet, somewhere inside she was still driving through the dark. Anna put her hand against her chest and felt her heart speeding. She’d first felt it in the car: the fear that she was in danger of losing her grip on what was real. The last few weeks had left her strung-out and depleted. She had to be careful or she’d make herself ill, as she had done before.

  Anna admitted to herself that she was never going to give up her searches for the person or persons who had come into her parents’ house that night and slaughtered everyone they’d found inside. She wasn’t going to chop up her cupboard of horrors and set it on fire. She couldn’t. Not until her family’s killers had been brought to justice. But nor could she be everybody’s favourite caped crusader.

  Anna had to take her own advice to Tansy and take a step back. While it was terrible that Laurie was dead, she had to try to accept that he may have actually taken his own life. Though it might seem macabre, it was not impossible that Laurie had styled his suicide as an especially melodramatic way of telling the world that he was Owen’s partner and lover just as much as Audrey.

  Anna put her plate in the dishwasher and went upstairs. She switched on a lamp nearest
the sitting room door and saw the murder board she’d created.

  ‘I thought only serial killers had these!’

  She stopped to study the faces in the photographs, then walked to her fireplace. Kneeling by the hearth, she took kindling and screws of paper from a basket and set a fire. When the tiny flame from the match had caught and the kindling was burning, she added small logs, then slightly bigger logs, and sat watching, holding out her hands to the flames, waiting for the moment when her fire put out real heat.

  Her father had taught them all how to light fires, just as he’d insisted they all learned to swim. In that way he’d hoped to keep them safe from two of the world’s oldest dangers. The third danger he couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

  Anna rose from her knees and went back to the murder board. One by one she removed the photographs. They didn’t need it. Nobody had ever needed it. When the board was empty she carried her collection of pictures back to the fire. Squatting by the hearth she gradually fed them to the flames, watching as they started to curl at the edges; Naomi’s laughing face, Laurie playing music with the street children, Owen and Audrey, Eve, Huw and Sara. If she’d had a picture of Dritan Lika she’d have burned that too. She stayed watching even after they had all burned down to ash.

  SIXTEEN

  It was the first Tuesday after Michaelmas and the new term had begun, bringing a storm of inquiries and complaints from staff and students to Anna’s desk. On the first day of term the control board had gone down in one of the lecture theatres, making it impossible for lecturers to link their laptops with the screens. Three of the IT guys were off work with flu, and Nadine had put up the backs of the remaining two as only Nadine could. As a result, Anna had come in to work to find the electrics still weren’t fixed. She was eventually able to soothe everyone’s ruffled tempers, but in the meantime the Nietzsche lectures had to be temporarily reassigned to a different room, which meant notifying everyone involved.

  ‘Looking on the bright side, I can now spell Nietzsche in my sleep,’ she joked to Kirsty as they walked through the city centre in their lunch hour, making the most of the sunshine before they had to be back at their desks.

  Kirsty laughed. ‘I’ve been here three years and I have to google it every time!’

  The students’ arrival was an irresistible tide filling the city with youthful energy and purpose. Dons and students were everywhere; coming out of cafes and bookshops, whizzing by on bikes, their short black gowns flapping and flying. Kirsty and Anna watched one glowingly beautiful girl cycle by wearing her gown over denim jeans. She had filled her bicycle basket with bright-yellow daisies and loaves of bread. ‘We should photograph her for the Walsingham prospectus,’ Kirsty said. ‘She looks as if she’s starring in a movie about Oxford.’

  ‘They’re all starring in movies about Oxford,’ Anna said wryly. ‘Nobody ever came here before them.’

  ‘Bless them,’ Kirsty said as the girl lifted a graceful hand from her handlebars to wave to some friends. ‘So good they caught that guy,’ she added with a shiver. ‘Or that gorgeous creature might have found herself starring in a different kind of movie.’

  Anna quickly changed the subject. ‘Don’t you think it feels weirdly timeless when the students are back? You’d think it would make Oxford seem more modern. But if you edit out everyone’s smartphones, it feels like it could be almost any era.’

  ‘That’s why I love this city,’ Kirsty said. ‘It’s the closest place I know to Narnia! Oh, did I tell you Paul says I can decorate? He says if I like I can have a twelve-month lease.’

  ‘Do you think you will?’

  ‘It’s such a lovely part of Oxford,’ Kirsty said. ‘Charlie loves his new nursery, and it only takes one bus ride to get there. Also, Paul is charging us super-cheap rent.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Anna said. ‘You and Charlie deserved a break.’

  ‘Though I thought we’d blown it the other day,’ Kirsty said, pulling a face.

  ‘Oh, no, what happened?’

  ‘Paul has this massive table totally given over to some civil war enactment. I had to go and see him about something, and of course Charlie is immediately fascinated by all these little figures everywhere, and Paul says, “Oh, don’t worry, Kirsty, he can’t hurt them.” And I’m thinking, he’s obviously never seen the kind of carnage one three-year-old boy can create!’ Kirsty laughed. ‘So inevitably Charlie breaks one of the tiny soldiers, and then gets completely hysterical because Jason always got so mad about stuff like that. But Paul’s just like, “It’s fine, Charlie. That’s why glue was invented. We’ll have it fixed in no time.”’

  A group of hefty red-faced young men in grass-stained rugby clothes hurtled by, talking at the tops of their voices as they passed an open bottle of champagne between them.

  Kirsty’s smile faded. ‘Jason’s been texting me. He wants me to forgive him.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, his ex dumped him?’ Anna said, and Kirsty nodded. ‘Good!’ Anna said, narrowly avoiding a collision with a child’s buggy. Her phone pinged.

  ‘So, how about you?’ Kirsty asked. ‘What’s been happening in your life?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ Anna said, smiling at her text from Kit.

  Bloody students are back. Feel a hundred years old. Fancy meeting a bitter old bastard at the Duke Bar later for a drink?

  She quickly sent a text agreeing to meet him. Though she had kept to her resolution to step back, Anna felt she owed it to Kit to put him out of his misery about the Albanians. She couldn’t bear for him to spend the rest of his life reproaching himself for Naomi’s death because of a stupid misunderstanding. Unfortunately, this meant sharing what she’d learned about Sara Traherne, but she thought Kit deserved to know. It was up to him if he decided to pass it on to Huw.

  As she and Kirsty headed back to Walsingham, Kirsty said fervently, ‘I could never go back to Jason now. This is the first time I’ve felt really free to be me – and, Anna, I’m talking about in my whole life.’

  Anna felt an envious pang. She knew that from the outside she must look like the poster girl for liberated womanhood. She owned her own home. She had no tiny dependent children or unfaithful husbands to worry about. But she was constantly battling impulses and imperatives that had a mysterious agenda all of their own.

  The night after she’d got back from London, Anna had eventually given into her compulsion to drive by Eve Bloomfield’s house and check if the lights were on and she was OK. She’d felt almost furtive, leaving the house with a sweatshirt pulled on over her pyjamas. It was only when she was turning into Eve’s street that she’d remembered that even if she was at home safe and alive, she was likely to be tucked up in bed. But to her relief Eve Bloomfield’s lights had been on and, as she hadn’t properly drawn her curtains, Anna had been able to glimpse her pacing her small sitting room, apparently talking on the phone. Eve’s ‘abduction’ really had just been a figment of Tansy’s overactive imagination.

  Anna was startled to feel Kirsty suddenly linking arms with her, apparently oblivious that Anna’s attention had been elsewhere. ‘It’s like that song, “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves”!’ Kirsty’s eyes sparkled, then she gave a naughty giggle. ‘Not in a rude way, I don’t mean!’

  ‘I know! I always thought those lyrics sounded really suspect!’ Anna laughed and surreptitiously disengaged her arm.

  A few hours later, Anna was standing in front of her wardrobe trying to decide what to wear for her date with Kit. She took down and discarded various tops, then felt annoyed as she caught herself smilingly remembering a recent email from Jake. He had sent her a photo of the view from his hotel in Stockholm and said he’d been trying to come up with a funny story ideally combining Scandinavian meatballs and Ikea furniture, but had had to give up. ‘I did meet a wild pair of nuns on the plane though. I think you’d have liked them.’

  Anna couldn’t figure Jake out – either what she meant to him, or even what she really felt about him. But she had been doing
a lot of hard thinking, and she’d begun to wonder if part of the attraction was his unavailability. Though she sensed that he liked her as a friend, he had never sent any clear signal that he wanted a deeper relationship.

  Since that night driving back from London with Tansy, Anna had decided that if she was going to stay mentally well, certain things had to change. She couldn’t live a healthy life unless she made healthy grown-up decisions. Falling in love with an un-attainable guy was not a healthy decision. It could only end in grief, and Anna had had enough grief. Kit, on the other hand, had made it clear from the start that he liked her, and he always seemed flatteringly delighted by her company.

  Anna stopped in the middle of putting up her hair. Was it healthy and grown-up to enjoy being flattered and flirted with? Her phone rang before she could follow this thought to any conclusion. It was Jake. ‘Anna,’ he said, when she picked up. ‘How are you?’

  It was ridiculous how much she loved to hear him say her name. Just an ordinary two-syllable name, yet Jake’s voice endowed it with colour and warmth, which if she didn’t know better could be confused with real affection. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Bonnie’s fine. Well, she’s fine, but we are having a bit of a situation at the moment.’

  ‘You and Bonnie?’ He sounded astonished.

  ‘There are these treats my grandfather has got her addicted to. I only give them to her occasionally because they’re so calorific. Now she’s figured out where I keep them. First she started sniffing madly around the bottom of the cupboard, then twice now I’ve surprised her opening the cupboard to help herself!’

  There was a short pause before Jake said a little sheepishly, ‘I might be to blame for that.’

  She laughed. ‘How are you possibly to blame?’

  ‘Me and the guys trained her to get us beers out of the ice box. It was like her little party piece. We’d tie a string on the handle, and she’d pull on it with her teeth until the door opened, and then she’d take out our beers one at a time!’