by Nina Milton
I felt my mouth gape. “How did you know?”
“My colleague informed me of your visit, of course. You think we sit on our asses?”
“He said he had no intention of doing anything about it.”
Rey grinned. He was enjoying my surprise. “The two bodies you’ve just discovered rather changes things.”
“You’ve just spent the last ten minutes explaining why you aren’t interested.”
“I’ve never said that. But I have to pose questions. If this missing girl was taken by the murderer, why did we never find her body?”
“It could be anywhere, Rey.”
He gave a brief nod, as if to concede this. “Okay. But if Cliff was abused in any way, why didn’t his parents come back to report the full story?”
I thought about this. “He was trying to protect his mum. His dad was in hospital at the time …” I trailed off, confused by dreams and fantasies, truths and trances. “You’re never going to believe anything I tell, are you, Rey?”
Rey hunkered down in front of me. “Not true.”
His eyes were directly across from mine, and in them was something that disturbed him. “What?” I begged.
“Plastic carrier bags, Sabbie. Stuffed under the floorboards and placed on the bodies of the two victims. Gnawed through, of course, so the contents had fallen all over the skeletons.” He shook his head, as if the image distressed him. “They were clothed in it. As if their spines had grown fur.”
The memory of the gently rustling, squeaking mattress came back to me. “What?” My voice was weak. “What!”
“Carrier bags of hair. Until forensics have done we won’t be certain, but human hair, I’d guess.”
“They shaved the heads of all their victims,” I whispered. “And kept it. Is that what you’re saying?”
Rey gave me a lopsided smile. “You wrote about hair, sacks of hair. How did you know so early on, before, as far as I can see, Houghton had confessed to his early memories?”
I reached out for the photocopies. Rey got up and walked over to a pin board on a wall, as if the notices were suddenly of great interest. He’d made the copies to give to me, but he didn’t want to witness the fact. “You should go home,” he said, without turning round. “Get some sleep or something.”
“I can’t afford to do that. I have clients. If I don’t work, I don’t eat.”
“Apart from eggs,” said Rey. He glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes, green as a sprite’s, wrinkled wonderfully.
I hadn’t dared tell Rey that I had a visitor’s pass for Horfield Prison the following day. He’d probably think I was still interfering in “police business,” but I badly wanted to see if Cliff was doing all right.
Visiting started at two p.m. and I skipped lunch to make an early start. I couldn’t have eaten anyway. Some form of butterfly had hatched out in my stomach and was fluttering round, taking up all the room. I’d never known a prisoner before, despite my reprobate past, and this time round I didn’t have Linnet’s hand to hold.
After queuing outside the visitor’s entrance along with wives and mothers and other assorted loved ones, I decided that the prison system went out of its way to humiliate people connected with its inmates. I could feel my shoulders hunching and my eyes following my feet as I shuffled down the line towards the bag search. I thought it might be bullet-proof glass and telephones, like it is in films, but the visitors’ room for remand prisoners was a spread of cheap tables and plastic chairs.
Cliff was sitting at the far end of the room, bent as an old man. I took the chair on the opposite side of the table and realized they were bolted to the floor. To prevent use as missiles, I supposed. I stretched my hand across to him. As soon as I touched his skin, he spoke.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I know that, Cliff.”
“Yeah.” He risked a tiny, piercing look into the very heart of my eyes. I would have lurched backwards, if the plastic, bolted chair hadn’t stopped me. There was a glint of crazy in them, anguish that could not be quenched. “But no one here does.”
He kept his voice down. There must have been twenty tables in the room, most of them occupied, but people spoke in quiet tones, apart from a woman at the far end who was losing it big time.
“It makes you crazy, this place,” said Cliff, as if he knew what I’d seen in his eyes and needed to explain it.
“You’re not crazy, Cliff.”
“I think I’ve always been mad.”
I found I was trembling. In the course of four days, Cliff had changed. He’d become a convict. “Have you seen your mum?”
“No. I can’t see her. She’d only cry. I can’t watch that.”
“But she wants to support you.”
“You and Linnet are doing that. Linnet’s working so hard. She says the only real evidence is Josh’s toy, and she’s trying to prove that it could have been planted in my flat.”
“That’s great! What’s she come up with?”
“My landlady,” said Cliff. “She has a spare key.”
“The woman who runs the post office? I’ve met her.” I hoped my voice didn’t tell him I’d taken an instant dislike to her.
“Linnet thinks she might have a grudge against me.”
I felt a tiny seed of hope begin to germinate inside me. “Do you think that she let someone into your flat?”
“Mrs. Gale? She’d never do anything like that. She wouldn’t give a person a second-class stamp unless they paid up-front. She has her position to maintain.”
“So how is Linnet going to make this work?”
“It’s what she calls a ‘counter argument’. Any opportunity that the toy could be put there by someone else would make a jury see things differently.” His voice sounded stronger as he said the words, but he didn’t look up or unfold his arms from a permanent self-hug that reminded me of the pull of a straightjacket.
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s going to put Mrs. Gale on the witness stand and get her to admit that she’s never liked me.”
“Counter argument.” I tried to keep the smile on my face. I had trouble with the image of that cross-examination; transforming a dour-faced woman into a credible witness for the defence. “Tough call!” I laughed, challenging him to laugh too. “Cliff, I’m so sorry I haven’t been of help.”
“You tried your best.”
“But now you’ve got the best. Linnet. She’ll look after you.”
He rubbed his fist across his eyes. “Since that time. Even though I never remembered what happened. I sort of knew.”
A robotic hand gripped my stomach and twisted. “Knew what, Cliff?”
“That the trouble wasn’t over.”
My hands covered my stomach, protecting it from the internal grip. “What d’you mean?”
“I don’t know. I think those people have followed me all my life.”
“Those … the Wetland …”
“Yes. Like they were inside my head. They got inside my head and I didn’t even know they were there, but they’re there all right. They’ve ruined my life.”
Caroline had said the same—Cliff never became the person he should have been. I took a breath. “There’s a couple of things I’ve been researching. The name you remembered, Patsy. You were right. A girl disappeared before you did. She was never found. I’ve got her details, and I’m going to try to find out more about her.”
“I told you,” said Cliff. He did not sound surprised. “She was the first victim.”
I gave a solemn nod, as if to acknowledge her demise. “Do you think the other two names will come back to you? The woman and the man?”
He shook his head, not as a negative, but to shake thoughts out of it, like a dog shakes water from his coat.
I said, “I think I know their names.”
; “What?” His fingers wandered up to his lips and jerked as if they were rubber. I fought back the temptation to gently pull his hand away, as if he were a small child.
“Some of the signs that were in the journeys we did together, they led me to Brokeltuft.”
“What?”
I leaned over the table. “I found it, Cliff. It’s derelict now. But your tree is still there; it got me in, I went inside.” I broke off. The news was too much for him. He began to shake like he had a fever. Sweat broke out on his face, which was stony white. “Cliff,” I said. “It’s all right. They’re dead. They’re dead.”
“Jesus.” He looked away, then back at me. “How d’you know?”
“I saw them, the bones of them. They came to me as spirits. She … the woman … spoke to me.”
“Kiss,” said Cliff, his voice rising up over the other hushed mumbles. “Her, and him … ”
“Quietly, Cliff,” I said, my voice a whisper.
“God—oh God in hell!” wailed Cliff. “Kiss and Pinch—oh Jesus Christ!”
I could see that he’d alerted the officers on duty. One stepped towards our table. “Cliff,” I whispered, “calm down, or they’ll take you back to your cell. Calm down, please.”
He nodded frantically. “Yes. Calm. Yes. Not easy in this place.” But he was calming, his voice back to normal. The officer stopped, although his gaze was now permanently on Cliff. “I keep having dreams. I wake up yelling out. They don’t like that.”
“The officers?”
“The men.”
I looked closer at him, at the sallow skin of his face. There was a bruise on one temple, and what I’d thought was a shaving mark looked suspiciously like the sort of wound a ring would make.
“Can’t they separate you from the other men?” I asked.
“Not all the time.”
“Tell me what your dreams are about,” I said, desperate to move the subject on. If I knew for sure how the other men were treating Cliff, I would never be able to report this visit back to Caroline without her seeing it in my face.
“I’m on a sort of moorland. I hear the sound of hooves. I look back and there’s this horse pummelling towards me. Pitch black horse, and the rider all in black. I take to my heels, but I can’t run—”
“That awful slow-motion thing,” I whispered, not meaning to interrupt. “Like your legs are tied to the floor.”
“Yes. But he catches up, leans off the horse, and clamps a hand on my shoulder. I try hard not to look at him. It’s like my face is forced round … and it’s him.”
“Pinchie?”
“Yes. I know because I feel that fear. The shock that stops your heart. Then I wish he really had scared me to death and I’d never woken back up to all this.”
“Please don’t lose hope,” I whispered. “Please don’t give up.”
He lowered his head into his hands. I thought he was about to cry, but after a moment, he spoke again. “All he did was laugh. Bloodcurdling laugh. It shot through me like a pain. I woke up straight away. But, you see, that’s the problem, the waking up.”
I swallowed. I had no need to ask what he meant. I understood. The dreams were jogging the memories, and that was where the true horror lay.
“It’s all coming back,” I said. He nodded, over and over, his hands still tight to his scalp, the hair grating under his fingers, a small repulsive sound.
“They had a sun lounger. Turned it into a contraption. A place of torment. Pushed you down on it, held you down, belt across the chest, stop you moving, belt across your neck, stop you breathing. Head and legs bent back, on your stomach, on your back. They called it an operation.”
I turned my head away and closed my eyes. No wonder Cliff had hated lying on my lounger. Without meaning to, I let out a moan.
“That’s right,” said Cliff, suddenly fierce. “You moan. Moan for me. Why not? I did. Moan, cry for my mummy, scream … but they didn’t want tears. Or screams even. They wanted white fear. You know what that is? White fear?”
I nodded, once. The terror that silences your mouth—numbs your brain. Stops your heart, finally, if you’re lucky.
“They were terrible people,” I managed.
“Oh God! No one in this world more evil. Ever. Worse than cruel; cruel people want to make you cry. Not them.” He flopped back, exhausted.
I thought about Rey, how he wasn’t convinced Cliff had been part of the Wetland Murderer cycle. If he could hear this, surely he’d understand. But then, wouldn’t he still say that none of this was relevant to his enquiry, except to bring Cliff into it? They are long dead, Sabbie …
“Did they,” I struggled with a sensitive way of asking, “leave marks on you?”
He nodded once, a slow up and down.
“I just ask because your mother never said.”
“Mum never saw. Well, I was gone eleven. I was never going to show her what they did. And I was lucky, I guess. I wasn’t in that house more than two days. The others … they weren’t so lucky.”
“Matthew,” I whispered. “Nicolas, Joanna, John. And Patsy.” By the time Cliff left the clutches of Kissie and Pinchie, Patsy Napper must have been damaged beyond repair and destined for an unmarked grave.
“It was her who got me out,” said Cliff.
It came out of the blue. I felt my spine tense. “Can you remember what happened?”
“I remember it was always dark. They pinned the curtains across the windows, nailed into place, I suppose. Thick, dark curtains. The second night, the door opens to my room. I don’t make a sound. See, I’ve already learnt that doesn’t help. She comes over with scissors in her hand. I know it’s her, but that doesn’t mean I trust her. I hadn’t even seen her since I’d been in the car. She’s in jeans. So am I—the clothes I’d come in. She cut through the stuff they’d tied me with, ripped up sheets, I think. Then she went to the window and yanked at the curtain. It fell down in a cloud of dust. I was still on the bed, paralysed, sitting up looking out into the night. It was drizzling.
“She hissed at me. ‘Can you climb trees?’ It seemed a daft thing to ask. I just gawped. She pulled up the sash window and pushed me towards it. She didn’t say ‘hurry up,’ or anything, but I didn’t need to be told. I got onto the sill. The end of one branch was just brushing the pane right above my head. I had to pull at the thin end of it, yank it down, slide my hands along it, and try to shinny out of the window.”
His voice was muffled. I had to strain to hear each word. I was hardly breathing as I listened. I could see the images so clearly. I’d been in that bedroom, seen the mattress and the metal ring.
“My heart is racing. I’d never climbed as high into a tree as I was when I went out that window. But somehow I land on the branch, somehow I keep my hands around it, wriggle towards the trunk. The girl hisses ‘fucking hurry up’. It shocks me. None of my friends swear like that. She’s waiting for her turn. The leaves drip rain. The branches are wet. I cling on for my life, but my fingers are slipping. The entire branch is bending under my weight. I hear the creak—the crack. I don’t understand. I look up and see her mouth open in horror. Then I’m flying. Just like in the dream. Still hanging onto the branch. It’s falling with me. I think it gets caught on a lower bough, because something slows me. I land flat on my stomach in wet earth with the wind out of me and the palms of my hands stinging, but I get up straight away. Right in front of my eyes is my bike. They’d thrown it onto a pile of rubbish in the garden. The back tyre’s soft, but I’ll get away quicker on it. Anyway, Mum would slaughter me if I didn’t bring it back.”
Cliff grinned. It wasn’t a very humorous grin and it certainly didn’t light up his eyes, but I smiled back at him in some sort of hope.
“She helped you escape.”
“You don’t understand. I think she planned to get through that window. When the moment was right. It m
ust’ve been the only route out of that house of terror. Then I turn up and, well, she decided it was now or never, or maybe they’d taken their eye off her, now I was there. She took her chance, but she let me go first.”
“Of course,” I said, keeping my voice low. I could see the window in my head, see the darkness outside, feel the chill of the rain as it lashed into the room. “Of course she did. You were younger. You didn’t know what was going on.”
“But I broke the branch.”
“Your weight broke the branch. Hers would’ve too, wouldn’t it?”
There was silence between us. I wondered why Patsy hadn’t just thrown herself into the tree, even though the bough had broken. Was she already too terrified? Or too brainwashed? Or were Kissie or Pinchie stirring? I wondered about the scissors, the clean cut through the bindings. I tried not to imagine just how mad they would have been, but clearly Cliff could imagine. The memories were returning.
“She gave her life for me.”
“One life saved. Isn’t that a good thing?”
He looked up. His eyes were raw from broken sleep and tears. “She didn’t mean to give her life. But now I know that she did anyway, it makes me feel …” His jaw moved, teeth grinding.
“You will get out of here,” I told him. “You won’t be found guilty, not by twelve ordinary, honest people.”
He shook his head. “It’s not the injustice. I never expected justice. Now I remember about Patsy … well, I don’t honestly want justice. Someone must pay. Because of the little boy.”
“Aidan?”
“They think I’ve got him somewhere. But I’ve got no idea where he is, or what he’s going through.”
I nodded. We would both be having the same sleepless nights, wondering about little Aidan.
“He’s been gone five days. That’s too long.”
Cliff was right. Time was running out and no one was getting any closer.
