by Nina Milton
“We have to face facts. The fingerprint evidence alone is going to sway the jury. In that case, someone like you—a witness who can make a credible statement—may convince the jury he underwent a severe trauma.”
“You don’t sound as if you believe him!” My voice hit a seagull shriek as the full realization hit me. “How can you represent him if you don’t believe him?”
She looked at me with dull eyes. “This is my job, Sabbie. I represent people who are accused of a criminal offence. Even if they’re guilty, they deserve an advocate. It’s the bedrock of our legal system.”
I had stopped walking. We both had. We stood facing each other across the pavement. “I know he’s innocent,” I said.
“Is he? He’s blameworthy of something. Or blames himself for something. I can see it in his eyes.”
“Well, I can’t,” I snapped. But when I stopped to think if this was true, I had to admit that although the sensations connecting me to Cliff felt harmless, they didn’t feel blameless. I recalled the intrusions I’d seen crawling out of his otherworldly mouth, and my stomach gave a lurch.
“You don’t think there’s something disturbing about him?”
“Why is that surprising? He was kidnapped by a sadist. Tortured and abused. That’s disturbance enough, surely.”
She rubbed her fingers over her forehead. “I’m sorry. Please don’t worry. I will represent Cliff as innocent until I’m blue in the face. If you can help me with that, I will be most grateful.”
“Of course I will. Anything.”
“I’ve finally been allowed to read the notebook you and Cliff were keeping, I can see that you hit the nail on the head.” She put a tender hand on my arm. “Anything that occurs to you, or that comes to you, I want to be the first to know. That way we can make sure the information is used in the best way. Or smothered if I believe it might have the reverse affect. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded. She was telling me that trusting the police was tantamount to informing the prosecution. We began walking again. I lagged behind, trying to process all the new stuff that was being thrown at me.
I caught her up as we turned the corner. “Linnet. The name Cliff gave us. This … Patsy. Surely we should try to find her?”
She looked up at the grey sky as if the answer might be in the clouds. I could see our cars, parked at the kerbside. I had less than one minute’s walk to convince her this was important. “Please, Linnet, say you’ll consider it.”
“I’m just not sure what good it will do. What will it prove, exactly?”
“It’ll prove that this whole thing isn’t a fiction Cliff and I have dreamed up together. That’s what the police are thinking. For all I know, you’re thinking it.”
She pulled down her lips. “Actually, rather despite my own good judgement, I’m beginning to be convinced by these dreams of yours.”
“Journeys.”
“Journeys of yours. They do seem to reveal things. Does this girl figure anywhere?”
“Yes, actually.” I could see I’d got her attention. Her fingers stopped fishing for her keys. “It was the journey I took the night he was arrested. I walked into this cottage. She was there, in the kitchen, making tea. A whistle kettle on a gas stove.”
“Good God.” Linnet shook her head as if trying to get her thoughts around what I was saying. “Did she speak to you?”
“She offered me a biscuit. Garibaldi. She said she hated them. Squashed flies. That’s what they’re called, isn’t it?”
“Sabbie,” said Linnet. “I know you say you’re not asleep, but that sounded like a typically weird dream.”
“Was I asleep at the prison?” I tried not to sound defensive.
“I don’t know. Where would you say you were?”
“I’d say I was within my spirit world, but you’re entitled to think that’s a load of bosh.”
“No,” said Linnet. “Not bosh, not really. Something’s out there, I’m convinced of that. Ghosts … yes, they exist, I’d say.”
“This is not quite the same as people hauling chains and carrying their own heads.”
She resumed the hunt for her keys, her eyes downcast as if she was a teensy bit embarrassed that she’d raised the subject. “Of course not, but when someone dies, they don’t always completely leave you, do they? Isn’t that a haunting? When you can still hear their words inside your head?”
I took a breath, as a little “Sabbie lecture” on the difference between the spirit world and ghostly spectres formed on my lips, but I thought better of it. We were getting off the track of things.
“Do you have any other suspects that might take the place of Cliff?”
Linnet didn’t answer for a moment. I hoped she was thinking my question through, but eventually she sighed. “That’s not really my job.”
We had reached our cars: my little old Mini, her shiny new BMW.
“Oh come on. If you work with a detective agency, surely you’ve thought of getting one step ahead of the police.”
“For heaven’s sake, Sabbie, who else might there be?”
“What about Aidan’s dad?”
She looked at me as if I was a rather dim-witted child. “Garth Stanford? I don’t think so. If you murder a kid, you do not go on to steal your own son. You’d be putting the finger on yourself.”
I shook my head in frustration. “I can’t believe the police haven’t investigated that avenue. Could it be possible that Aidan Rodderick’s disappearance is totally unconnected with Josh Sutton’s murder?”
“But it’s Josh’s murder he’s charged with. Unfortunately, Cliff also lives very close to Aidan’s school. Naturally, I will be arguing that this is pure coincidence. By the by, what was all that about signposts being like trees?”
“Nothing much.” My fruitless search for Brokeltuft had taught me to interpret my journeys with a bit of caution. “Shamans always play with symbols.”
Linnet shuddered. Or perhaps it was the cold wind that whipped along this long street with its high-security wall. “Trees and signposts can be gallows, can’t they? Let’s not take symbols too far. Let’s stick to the facts.”
I reversed out of my parking space and drove through the back streets of North Bristol until I reached a road lined with bay-windowed, terraced houses. Their doors were flush to the pavement, but each had a proud name carved above the porch. I drew up outside the one called Oak Villa. Around the name were carvings of oak leaves and acorns. The stonework was chipped and blackened, but the paintwork was glossy and the leaded stained glass panels above the door glinted in the weak sun.
I stood for a moment, taking in the memories. I’d lived in Oak Villa for eight years, and I still thought of it as my true home. The door opened before I could ring the bell, because Gloria was expecting me, her arms ready for me to dissolve into.
“Come right in,” she said. “I’ve been baking.”
I first met Gloria Davidson shortly before my thirteenth birthday. She was cleaning the passage floor in the children’s home I lived in at the time, and I saw her as just another new worker I could taunt and wind up. I’d moved through a lot of foster homes and children’s homes since the age of six and had learnt one thing more comprehensively than anything else: the less you care about what happens to you, the better. So picking on the home workers and even the social workers was fair game, in my opinion. It’s impossible for me to imagine what a horrid child I’d become by that point, but I certainly wasn’t being offered foster placements any longer. As far as I could see, I was going to be stuck in The Willows until they were legally entitled to chuck me out.
That day Gloria was pulling the vacuum cleaner methodically backwards and forwards over the carpet. All I could see of her was the pair of extra-large jeans in which she’d managed to cram an extra-large rear.
I leaned against the door and
yelled at the kids who were watching the telly one room away. “Come and get an eyeful of this bum! It’s gonna win the fat-ass of the year competition!”
Gloria swung round at me and planted the cleaner squarely between us, like a weapon. “You can say what you like about me, Sabbie Dare,” she said, her voice earnest. “But you say it to my face. My butt might be big, but it’s my mouth that answers back.”
By this time, the other kids had joined us, ready for the show. I could throw a classy verbal punch by that age, and I’d already perfected my catfight techniques. I was a wild wee thing, and a new staff member at The Willows was not likely to thwart my constant search for trouble.
Yet I was struck dumb. I stared into Gloria’s face. All the things I saw—her strong, full mouth; ebony eyes; tight twists of sable hair, but especially that insipid in-between mid-brown skin colour—were the things that I hated the most about my own looks. Gloria could have been my birth mother, except I could vaguely remember that my mother’s fragile skin had been so white it was blue.
Now that I have a degree in psychology, I understand the theories of identity. But back then, I was very confused about where my roots lay. For my first six years, I’d lived alone with my blue-eyed mother. Afterwards, I had been brought up (that was their claim, at least) by white middle-class social workers. I’d never met my father, although I understood that he was black. In fact, I didn’t know many black adults and had never bothered to think more closely about my origins. I knew I was of mixed race, but all that meant to me was that I was often the wrong colour altogether, neither properly white nor properly black. Frankly, I was too engrossed in the pain of my present to think deeply about my past.
Gloria might have been the first person I’d ever met in my thirteen long years who had my exact skin tones. She arched her eyebrows as a smile lifted her mouth, and to my shock, I discovered being a shade of caramel didn’t mean you weren’t beautiful. It was a tough connection to make—that someone who resembled me might be lovely to gaze upon. So tough that for a few moments I didn’t recognise the sensation I felt inside. A sort of thawing, an opening of petals. The idea that throwing a smile into the sepia mix could make something wonderful happen.
Gloria had taken hold of my shoulders. Usually, back then, that meant someone was about to try shaking some sense into me, and I can remember getting ready to pull away, but instead, she gently squeezed, as if testing me for freshness.
“You okay, girl?”
“Yeah.” Everyone watching had known there was something up. I wasn’t using my tongue as a hatchet. In fact, I was trying to copy the smile, although I wasn’t very proficient at first.
“Girl,” she had said, “you finish this carpet off, and I’ll make you all pancakes.”
“You’re not allowed,” said Kelly, who was ten and rigorous about rules.
“We’ll see,” came the reply. I was about to learn that Gloria could get away with breaking conventions even better than I could. She passed the handle of the cleaner to me, and I heard her whistle as she went into the kitchen. She’s been baking for my sweet tooth ever since.
“Is Dad home?” I asked as I walked into Oak Villa.
“No, he’s gone down to the caravan to spruce it up for the Easter break. Dennon’s out somewhere; looking for work, I hope. But Charlene and the kids are coming for their tea.”
This was the family that had melted the ice chip in my heart: my foster parents, Gloria and Philip, and my foster brother and sister, Dennon and Charlene.
“Something smells good.”
“It’s a fatless sponge,” said Gloria. We passed into her kitchen where a massive yellow cake was cooling on a wire rack. She lifted it onto one hand, balancing it like a drinks tray while she sliced it into two thinner pieces with a bread knife. “But the chocolate filling is bursting with fat and sugar, so it’s not diet material, I’m afraid.”
Gloria hasn’t lost any weight since I was first hugged by her—thank the goddess, I say—but she doesn’t clean floors anymore. She works part-time as a teaching assistant at the school in Bristol where Charlene’s kids go. That’s Kerri and Rudi, my niece and nephew. The fridge was plastered with kiddie drawings and I checked them out while she filled the cake. She’s in her element with kids around her, although I’m the only one she ever brought home permanently.
“Put Polly on, will you?” said Gloria. I filled the kettle and settled down at the kitchen table, my feet stretched out and my hands behind my head.
Gloria placed two enormous triangles of cake on separate plates and sat down across the table from me. It was as golden as honeycomb and soft chocolate drooled from its middle. I let out a little moan of ecstasy.
“So,” said my foster mum. “How’s things going?”
I pulled a face. I didn’t want Gloria to feel the entire weight of the burdens I had begun to carry around with me. She had to be following Cliff’s progress on the TV news, and she’d burst a button if she knew how deeply I was involved. But I did want to pick her brain. “Mum, d’you know anything about tracing people? If you only have a first name and a vague idea about their age?”
To my surprise, Gloria leaned over the table and squeezed my hand. “But you do have enough, you just don’t realize it.”
“What?”
“You know your own full name and date of birth. If you use that, you’ll have traced your family soon enough. I’m just surprised you haven’t started sooner.”
I blinked, feeling stupid. “I’m not looking for me.”
“You should be. It’s not right to have no roots.” Gloria smiled, opened her wide mouth, and slid fatless sponge into it.
Déjà vu. For the second day in a row I’d watched an elderly lady eat homemade cake while I sat frozen with shocking realization. Gloria was right, of course. I had no idea about my parents. I didn’t even know if Dare was my father’s family name or my mother’s.
I gave myself a shake. “Gloria, you’re the only mum I need. I don’t care about the past. It’s the present that counts.” Unless, like Cliff, the past nudges at you, ruining your life. “I wanted to find a person, that’s all. I don’t even know where to begin.”
“As far as I understand, if you’re looking for certificates—birth, death, marriage—you go to the Register Office. If you want to know where people lived, you go to the Record Office, where they keep parish records, that sort of thing.”
“How d’you know all that?”
She grinned. “Wisdom comes with age, girl. So I can guess this has something to do with one of your batty therapies.”
I waved my hand in a careless fashion. “A client … amnesia …trying to trace the bits of his life he’s forgotten.”
“Learn delegation. Let him do it himself.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that. He’s in prison at the moment—that’s why I’m up in Bristol.”
“Prison!”
“Honestly, Mum, he’s innocent, I know he is.”
“Pshaw! You should leave that sort of thing to the police.”
I nodded. “Of course you’re right, but that’s complicated too. The detective who’s working on the case … Reynard the fox …” I felt a blush warm my cheeks.
“What?” asked Gloria. “What?”
“He’s a dish.”
I watched her roar with laughter. “Girl, you will find trouble even when it’s buried six foot deep.”
I shivered at her choice of metaphor. “Rey isn’t trouble, exactly.”
“That’ll make a change. You usually pick your men out of police lineups.”
“I can’t have done, Rey is the police. And I haven’t picked him. In fact, I wish I could stop dreaming about him. He clearly thinks I’m a notch away from crazy.”
“Opposites attract.”
“Yeah, well that clarifies my feelings, but Rey seems to have his own ag
enda. I don’t know where I stand with him, is the truth.”
“I’ll tell you where you stand,” said Gloria, holding up a silencing hand. “You should make sure that the guy is always a bit sweeter on you than he thinks you are on him.”
I laughed. Gloria’s knack with matters of the heart was legendary in her family. “Okay. I’ll go for that. It might encourage Rey to answer my questions.”
I thought about questions. They’d multiplied since seeing Cliff. And Gloria was right. I couldn’t answer them myself. But they needed answering, and in express time.
I sprang up from the table. “I have to get back.”
“Hey? I thought you’d hang around for Charlene and the kids.”
“I’m sorry. There’ll be another time. Soon, I promise. But right now—”
“You haven’t even finished your cake.”
“Wrap it up for me, will you? I’ll eat it in the car.”
I put my foot down all the way back to Bridgwater, but Rey had already left for the day by the time I reached the police station. Gone home to his lager and crisp supper. Instead I was presented with Detective Constable Abbott and taken into a little room where he towered over me like a shadow in a dungeon.
Even when they’d been arresting Cliff, Abbott had reminded me of portraits of the Tudors. The square of his torso would perfectly fit into the box-shaped tunics and rucked-up shorts they wore back then. His hair, as black as a villain’s, would have looked great curling from beneath a feathered hat, and he had those eyelids that cover the upper half of the eye like a tight-fitting garment. The pupils swiveled away from me when I looked back at him, as if Abbott only sneaked glances when you weren’t noticing.
I had the impression, mostly from this eye-avoidance, that Abbott had disliked me on first sight. Maybe it was because of Rey and me. I checked myself. There was no Rey and me, and I should be severely worried that I could even think such a thing.
“Sorry to disturb you like this,” I said, starting out on the wrong foot—never apologise is my usual motto.
