by Nina Milton
“Cliff did. He just didn’t tell anyone.”
Rey leaned across and took the recorder in his hand. “I don’t want to say this, Sabbie …”
I shrugged. “You might as well. It’s your poor policeman’s brain again. He could be making it all up, couldn’t he?”
“Of course he could. Even with conclusive proof of his guilt, a good lawyer could convince a court with a story like that. And Cliff has a very good lawyer.”
I gritted my teeth. I was pleased and relieved that Cliff had strong representation. But Rey had introduced a worm of doubt into my mind. I felt a chill wash through me.
“What’re you thinking, Sabbie?”
I was thinking that Cliff had phoned to make his first appointment after Josh Sutton’s grave had been discovered. Was he playing me for a fool? I looked down and discovered that Rey’s ample, slightly hairy hand was covering both of mine.
Crying is rather like vomiting, I’ve always thought. There are times when your body insists on it—no argument—but there are times when you can battle the feeling by breathing deeply or biting your lip. I fought back my tears, but my chest gave a tell-tale judder.
“I’m sorry,” said Rey. “I have a shitty job sometimes.”
“Would it help at all,” I asked, “if Cliff managed to prove that his story was true?”
“It would mitigate things. His legal team would go for ‘balance of mind disturbed’, I’d think. But let them work these things out. Don’t go getting any more involved than you already are.” He stood, filling his jacket pockets with the book and the recorder, ready to leave. “You haven’t touched that drink.”
“You didn’t make one for yourself.”
“I should get back.”
“It’s true, then: cops do work into the night.”
“Bridgwater doesn’t see many major murder investigations, to be fair.”
“So long as there’s no one waiting at home, tapping their fingers as the supper goes cold.”
He pulled a face. “Nah. Supper’ll be a nice, chilled lager and a bag of cheese and onion. Been a long time since anyone’s cooked for me.”
I pulled a face back at him. “That’s sad.”
“No, it’s not. It’s fine. Great. I spend all day surrounded by gits—and then there’s the criminals. I like it nice and peaceful in the evenings.”
He began to jiggle his car keys. Part of me just wanted to go on enjoying his company, but I was equally fearful of being on my own. I could still feel Cliff’s turmoil vibrating in the air around me.
Rey must have felt it as well, because he leaned down and squeezed my shoulder, his fingers lingering against my neck. I forced a blithe smile onto my lips and glanced pointedly at his hand. “Is this what the police call a ‘collar’? Should I be getting worried?”
Rey smirked. “Hope not, Sabbie. You’re certainly not down in the books as our most cooperative witness.”
I watched his car roll away, not wanting to close the door against the outside world. My skin felt as if hairy-limbed spiders were crawling over me. I sank onto the bottom stair and swallowed the scream that rose into my throat.
It was a long time before I could move again.
EIGHT
I woke up the next day with a banging headache. Dreams hung like a backdrop to a play, dark images that made no sense without the players.
I checked the diary on my mobile. Living half in and half out of otherworlds, I need the occasional alarm to remind me an appointment is coming up. My first client today was an after-work regular, so most of my day was free, and normally I’d spend it in the garden at this time of year. I scrubbed my teeth and spent several minutes scraping my hair into a ponytail. Sometimes, when I just want it off my face, I wonder why I persist in keeping my hair so long. But when it’s shorter, it curls tightly, and I love the wavy black length of it down my back.
Once I’d pulled on my joggers, I filled the bread machine with organic flour, water from the tap, and yeast, and then went out into the early morning garden. It felt cool and slightly damp and the sight of it—the glittering webs that graced the herb bushes, the ghostly batons of my last leeks, and the tiny heads of the early broad beans in their soldiers’ columns—made my dark heart feel glad.
The kitchen door leads to a paved storage area, where I keep my tools and winter stores and such. Beyond that it’s veggie paradise, with grass pathways so that I can walk up and down between the beds and get to the hen house, shed, and greenhouse. Over by the compost heap, on the remains of a pile of horse manure, is a rhubarb crown hidden by an old metal dustbin that has lost its base. I lick my lips every time I peer in and check on the rose-coloured stalks. And this summer I’m hoping to get my first soft fruit crops—some strawberries in tubs and a few raspberry canes. I checked them all for slugs, tossing these into the hen run as an extra-tasty treat.
The early morning sky was overcast, and a cold wind was coming at me from the east as I released Juniper, Melissa, and Ginger from their fox proofing. Juniper, top of the pecking order now that Saffron was gone, gave my wellies a fond scratch. The three of them didn’t seem to be grieving for Saffron, Pettitgrain, or the Cocky Bastard one little bit; in fact, a single egg had been laid, the first since the break-in, so I guessed they were on the mend. I placed their hopper full of layer’s pellets at the far end of the run and watched in satisfaction as the three hens ventured towards it. During the fallow season, I let them roam all over the garden, but I stopped doing that when the winter broad beans began to show. Last year they devastated them; you learn by your mistakes. Anyway, they didn’t fancy straying too far at the moment. Since the break-in, they barely separated even to explore their personal favourite scratching places, and the three girls were already roosting inside their coop long before dark fell.
They’d taken so well to being free-rangers. When they’d arrived a couple of months after I’d got the keys to the house, they’d had almost no feathers at all and had hidden at the back of the coop with eyes wide with fear of the unknown. I’d got them as twelve-month-old battery hens. The farmer had told me they still had a good couple of years laying in them, but as I looked at them, stuck in their travelling crate, I couldn’t have cared less if I never saw a single egg. I just wanted to rescue them from their pitiful existence. They’ve rewarded me a hundred times over, and not just in eggs. Which made me feel even more guilty that I hadn’t kept them safe from the fox. I’d tried telling myself that at least it was a natural death, but that hadn’t really washed, and I was still waking up each morning with the taste of bereavement at the back of my throat.
I shut the run door on them and grabbed a spade. Half of my vegetable plot was covered in a winter coat of good horse manure and needed turning over. With each push of my boot, I felt the soft crunch of muck and hay. This had to be the richest, yummiest soil known to plant life.
The garden is where I can let my thoughts roam around a dilemma, and today I couldn’t stop thinking about last night. I felt that if the police had real evidence on which to arrest Cliff, everything I believed about my practice would fall apart. I had never been so sure about what the spirits were telling me, about Cliff’s innocence. The man had come to me for help, and I was committed to stand by him.
None of the work I do with my clients has any foundation in fact. It doesn’t even rely on accepted methods of psychoanalysis. I know that my clients are often so desperate they’re ready to snatch at any straw, even false straws. But I didn’t begin my shamanic work because I wanted a happy ego trip, offering shallow comfort to people prepared to believe what they’ve paid to hear. I believe implicitly in the results I get. Time after time, clients tell me that the spirits have not lied, but helped them in their difficulties as symbols and ciphers knit together into the fabric of an answer. Usually, though, my clients are not snatched away by the police before we’ve properly begun our work.
Two hours
later, I heard the bread machine bleeping. I straightened up, wiping the honest sweat from my face and no doubt leaving a trail of honest horse poo in its place. I took a long, hot shower while the loaf cooled. I dried and rubbed some scented oil into my body. It was already nine fifteen and I was starving.
I dipped a Marmite soldier into canary-yellow yolk, drifting off to such a breakfast paradise that when my mobile crowed out, for a moment I thought it was my Cocky Bastard.
“Miss Dare?” It was a number I didn’t recognise. “My name is Linnet Smith, and I’m the solicitor representing Mr. Cliff Houghton—”
“Hi, this is Sabbie Dare.”
“Glad to have reached you.” Her voice sounded so efficient that already I felt I’d never attain her standards. “I believe you know that Mr. Houghton was arrested last night.”
“I know all right,” I said. “What’s happening? Has he been charged with anything?”
“No. My first goal is to get him released without charge. But if that’s not possible, we’ll apply for bail.”
“Has he told you why he’s seeing me?”
“Indeed. Mr. Houghton believes it might be useful if we talked. I’d like to arrange a meeting, as soon as possible.”
I’d picked up a pen in readiness—it was flicking back and forward between my fingers. “That’s fine with me. I’m free this morning. Where are you?”
“Our offices are close to the marina.”
“I could be with you in less than an hour.”
“Excellent. I look forward to meeting you, Miss Dare.”
The weather had turned icy. Rain fell in tiny stinging drops, like it was practicing being sleet. People beetled along the wet pavements protected by the slick black wings of their umbrellas. I’d left Mini Ha Ha outside my house and taken the green option, but the bus journey was miserable. The wind whipped around my legs every time the doors hissed open, and the person next to me shook the rain off their fleece like a dog. I stepped from the bus into a puddle, thereby discovering that the patent leather boots that had been a snip in the sale were not, in fact, waterproof. By the time I’d found Hughes and Heaven, Solicitors, I was bitingly disgruntled.
Linnet Smith worked out of a high-prestige office in a converted chapel close to the centre of town. Hughes and Heaven weren’t Bridgwater’s only solicitors, but they must have been among the most expensive. Miss Smith sat behind her impressively large black desk. No bits of MDF balanced on bedside tables for her. As I was shown in, she rose and extended her hand.
“Please take a seat.”
The woman had been unfortunate in the genes department. She had that greasy line down the middle of her face that some women are plagued with, and I think it was sensible of her to wear light makeup—just lipstick and mascara. She had chestnut hair in an urchin crop, and this was a good move also, as it lengthened her neck and showed off her pearl earrings. I shook her hand and sat, feeling guilty over my silent critique. My damp feet were turning me bitchy.
“I may as well get straight to my reasons for asking to see you,” said the solicitor. “Cliff has told me that he’s undergoing therapy with you.”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat, more nervous than I’d realized. “Did he tell you what that therapy was?” After my run-ins with Rey, I thought we should be upfront from the beginning. “I’m a shaman.”
Miss Smith nodded. “I surfed the web. Sounds bizarre, but Cliff trusts you very deeply.”
“We did seem to be getting somewhere.” It was good to hear that Cliff still trusted me, because I wanted to get back to work with him once he was released.
“And it doesn’t worry you that your client has been arrested?”
“No—well, of course, I’m worried for him—”
“Two crimes. And two charges, if they manage to make them stick. Child kidnapping and child murder.” She paused, blinking several times, as if taking in the severity herself. I was fixated on the words if they manage to make them stick.
“I believe in Cliff’s innocence.”
“Good, because, personally, I can’t think of any worse crime. It makes me sick to my stomach. And I can assure you that is also true of the general public. They want an arrest as much as the police do. They will want my client charged, tried, and sentenced. They are baying for it.”
“I’ve heard of people—well, they look like the guilty person, but it’s all based on coincidence, you know?” I thought about how my own work was often based on a series of coincidences and trailed off.
“Oh, I agree. At the moment everything the police have is circumstantial. All they have to go on is that Cliff has been acting oddly.”
“He thinks he was involved with a serial killer when he was a kid.”
“A strange way of putting it, involved, as if he was in some way compliant. Is that what you were trying to suggest?”
“No,” I said, frustrated. “I didn’t mean it like that. Have you heard of the Wetlands Murders?”
The solicitor gave an audible sniff from across her desk and took her time unscrewing the top from a pen the size of a gear stick. She thought I was questioning her expertise. She’d have to get used to it, just like Rey already had. “Of course I have. It’s one of those unsolved cases student lawyers pick at in their spare time.” She scratched a note onto a pad. “What is it Cliff suggesting?”
“That he was abducted as he walked home one day.”
Miss Smith closed her eyes. “How could a person possibly forget, then suddenly recall such a thing?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. People hide dreadful memories from themselves all the time.”
“Of course you’re right in general terms—regressed memory, motivated forgetting. I suppose digging this stuff out is part of your job?”
“It’s more a case of dealing with whatever crops up. I do have a psychology degree, so I’m not working in the dark if my client has an extreme reaction.” I leaned forward, warming to her questions. “But what I do is nothing like hypnotherapy. It’s me who goes into the trance, not the client.”
“What do you know about these murders?”
“Much less than Cliff. I was tiny when they happened. But they were shocking.”
“I’ll get my researchers onto it—media coverage, police statements, that sort of thing.” She looked across the desk at me. “You can see why the police are getting so excited. They will be keen to emphasize the fixation he’s had all this time.”
“But that’s wrong! He’d forgotten about it.”
“That’s what Cliff told you. He’s told me the same—that he had no idea why he’s got this collection of news items on the Josh Sutton case. We’re going to have a hard job proving that this wasn’t a growing obsession, finally exploding into mimicking behaviour, that started with a fantasy he invented when it was plastered all over the TV—what was it—twenty years ago now?”
“More. Cliff was eleven.” My voice felt weak. “Copycat crime, that’s the theory, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Dare,” said Miss Smith. She had been doodling on her page of notes, a criss-cross of lines like the webs of a colony of spiders, but now she laid her pen on her blotter. “I know it appears I’m negating your work, when I’ve just suggested how useful it could be, but I have to keep a clear perspective.”
I nodded. She was right. The defence needed to think up all the angles the prosecution might use. “What’s happening about Cliff, anyway? You said on the phone that you were getting him released without charge.”
“I actually said I was trying. But this is such a serious case, the police are reluctant to let him go. They’re searching his flat. If that shows the all clear, they’ll be forced to release Cliff today.”
“They’ve searched it already,” I said. “It was the cuttings they found there that put him under suspicion in the first place.”
“It�
�s routine, that’s all. However, I have to tell you that after Cliff’s release, he will remain one of the prime suspects.”
“Only because they’ve got no one else.” It struck me that people like Cliff were convenient to police investigations. I hated the thought that they might not search for the true perpetrator of the crime because they already had someone who looked nice and guilty. “You don’t think he’ll end up in court, do you?”
“Not if I can help it. But I need to get my facts ordered as quickly as possible. I want you to tell me everything you’ve uncovered about Cliff’s past. It will help a lot.”
“Right. Yes, I see that. Did he tell you about the notebook we keep?”
She nodded. “But he doesn’t have it in his possession.”
“The police have commissioned it.”
“Okay.” She flipped the page on a secretarial pad. “Will everything be in there? Everything that was exchanged between you?”
“Yes. Except …”
She looked up from her writing. “Go on.”
“I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him. It was as if …” I stopped. “You’re going to laugh at this, but it’s okay, I’m used to it.”
“Go on.”
“I felt evil. In the place. In the spirit place.”
“Give me a definition of spirit place.”
I gripped my shoulder bag in an effort to stay calm. “The places I see on my journeys—my trances. This one was …”
“Evil.”
“Yes.”
She sucked air through her nostrils again, but this wasn’t so much a sniff as a desire to fill her lungs with good clean air. I looked across the desk at the way she wiped her mouth with a hand. She might have a clipped way of speaking and a suspicious way of eying you up, but she was upset, just like I was, that Cliff had been damaged as a boy.
“You see,” she said at last. “This is why you are crucial to us. You might become our most valuable witness for the defence.”
“What, me?”
“Absolutely. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Your honesty and openness alone would sway a jury.”
