by Nina Milton
He turned and climbed back into the van, a length of bronze-haired shin showing beneath his kaftan as he pulled himself up. I scrambled after him.
I was expecting to find myself up against the front seats, but everything had been removed—seats, steering wheel, gearbox, partition. There was nothing about this van now that made it a vehicle. Instead, the interior had been turned into a surprisingly spacious one-room accommodation. Garth’s bed was a mattress tucked in behind the back doors and raised from the floor, caravan-style, to allow for storage underneath. Along both sides were overhead shelves stacked with books, tapes, potted plants, and a mismatch of crockery. On top a small chest of drawers was a cardboard box of vegetables and a shabby portable radio. There was a tape playing inside it—something from a different place and time, maybe ancient Greece, maybe Mexico City. Wherever he could, Garth had draped throws and scarves and other fringed things, giving the metal interior a feeling of softness and colour.
“Take a seat.”
I looked around. The choice was eclectic—a chair straight out of the Sixties, with wooden arms and a sagging cushion; a beanbag covered in big yellow sunflowers; or a set of canvas camp chairs, folded against a wall hanging of another dragon, this time with ochre scales and eyes of burning coal … a bit too much like the massive Slamblaster for me. This was a symbol he clearly identified with, yet I couldn’t see anything fire-breathing about Garth. I plopped down onto the beanbag.
“Nice music,” I said.
“Helps me relax,” said Garth. “I’m trying to stay calm, see.”
“I guess it’s hard.”
“I’d like to kick the sides of the van in.”
“You don’t look to me like a van kicker.”
Behind the glasses the honey brown eyes closed, briefly. “It’s having nothing to do. Not being able to help in one single way.”
I was reminded of how Arnie had volunteered to find the missing children—how all the parents must have done so. Garth struck a safety match and bent to light a gas burner. He placed a whistle-kettle onto the half-hearted flame. “Drink?”
“Oh,” I said, startled. “Thank you.”
He didn’t offer me a choice but spooned something from a tea caddy into a small white pot, pouring water on top as soon as the kettle whistled. The lid chimed into place. Every action was self-possessed and measured.
“This is a peaceful place to be,” I said. Actually, I loved it—loved its simplicity.
He nodded. “It’s good.”
“You travel about, or just stay put?”
Instantly, this struck me as a stupid question. The man literally had no wheels. But Garth gave it his reflective consideration.
“I guess we’re all looking for the place to settle. Never thought that would be me. But I like being close to Aidan and Stella.”
“Only, finding somewhere to live alternatively …”
“Yeah. Can be hard. The council have tried to move me on.”
“They’d have a job,” I quipped.
“I’m lucky. I’ve found a friendly farmer.”
“He lets you stay?”
“I get the pitch, rent free, if I lend a hand when they’re at full stretch.”
“Oh, good exchange of energies.”
“The farm job makes me an ‘agricultural worker’.”
“Great!”
“It’s an organic farm.” He gestured to the box of vegetables, which I assumed was part of the exchange of energies. This was a man of as few words as possible.
“I’ve turned my garden over to organics,” I said. “Hens, vegetables, that sort of thing.”
Garth gave the pot a slow stir and poured a straw-coloured liquid into two chunky mugs. He handed me one and made himself comfortable on the floor, sitting cross-legged.
The scent of the tea wafted up from the mug. “Mmm,” I said, sniffing. “Mint, chamomile, Melissa, something fruity … haws, perhaps?”
“Rose hips. You know about herbs?”
“I used to live with herbalists.” I took a sip of the tea and felt its warmth and flavour slide into my stomach, relaxing me. “And I’ve got most of these in my garden. I ought to get round to blending them more than I do.”
“So, did Nora send you here just to remind me I’m useless and hopeless?”
I shook my head. It was getting hard, being in the middle of so many people’s utter pain. My hands were around the mug, comfortably warm. I felt relaxed and at home. The lemon balm in the tea, the smell of incense in the van, and the music were all drifting around my mind, making me forget why I’d come. It would have been nice to talk about permaculture for the rest of the afternoon—anything to avoid the subject of a missing son. Maybe I could even convince myself I’d be doing Garth a favour—taking his mind away from his agony.
“You know I’ve come here about Aidan,” I said, as softly as I could. I waited for Garth’s response. His body rocked to and fro, his mug in his hands. “But it’s more about the man they’ve arrested.” Suddenly, I knew I was going to tell Garth everything from the beginning, from the moment Cliff had walked into my therapy room for the first time and I had seen anguish and mystery in his eyes.
Halfway through my story, I absentmindedly put my empty mug down on the floor, and Garth refilled it from the pot.
“Something wasn’t right about Aidan’s Buddy,” I finished. “When I touched it at Caroline’s, I felt a despondency that couldn’t have had anything to do with the kidnapping. So I suppose I came here to ask you if you could shed any light on it.”
I realized how my agenda had changed. I had no intention of trying to work out where Garth had hidden Aidan, or if he’d killed Josh. As far as I could tell, he’d find it difficult to sever a stick of barley or dig up a carrot.
In the dim lighting of the van, I saw his otherworld image. It was lifting slightly away from him with a sort of repressed compulsion. It explained to me how Garth was managing to cope with the calamity that whirled around him. He had risen above it; he had risen above the howling world.
“I’m sad to think my son was sad, even before … what happened.”
“What I got was more everything not being right.”
“Things weren’t right,” Garth agreed.
“Oh?”
“If Aidan had had his way, he’d be with me now. Out here, where a kid can run and climb and eat off a wood fire.”
“Are you saying he’d choose to live with you over his mother?”
“What? No.” Garth shook a laugh out of himself, the first I’d seen. “No, Stella used to dig this life too. But her mother wouldn’t have it. They wanted Aidie to go to the church school in the village. Come home and play on a computer. Have nice friends to tea.”
“To be fair, that’s not quite how Nora told the story.”
“You have to make up your own mind about that.” He looked down at the herbal dregs in his cup, then back up at me. “Stella was always torn. She loved the travelling. We used to spend every summer going from festival to festival. Then she finished her degree and inherited a bit of money from her grandmother and we took off. India, Thailand.”
“The hippie trail?”
“You can look at it like that, if you want. You can say we trod in the footsteps of a lot of other people. But we did it for ourselves, to work out what we wanted from our lives.”
“And for you, that was …”
“The simplest life I could possibly find. The joy of never harming a living thing. The wonder of waking each day just to appreciate that the sun has risen and the season is moving on.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can see the attraction in that.”
“Can you? Stella lost that feeling. We came back to England because she knew she was pregnant—that we were pregnant. She insisted she wanted to be near her family for the birth. Before we knew it, obstet
ricians overran us with their epidurals and caesareans. I think we had our first row ever.”
I didn’t interrupt, but I had trouble imagining Garth in a row of any description.
“She moved back to her mum’s. I went off for a bit. I missed the birth. I never forgave myself for doing that, but I didn’t feel part of things with her anymore. There’d been a takeover bid.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Garth went back to his gentle nodding. The tape clicked off and the otherworldly music stopped. The silence extended into a Zenlike stillness.
Garth moved around the van while I finished my second mug of tea. Carefully, he put the cassette into its battered case. He threw some herbs on a charcoal burner and a scented fog of smoke curled into my nostrils. When he came and sat down again, something had changed in him.
“You’re quite a shaman,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t just mean the Buddha. I was thinking of what you said earlier—the way you found the cottage.”
“The police don’t believe that had anything to do with my work. They assume Cliff told me.”
“I don’t assume that.”
“I’ve no actual idea what happened. It was a trail of coincidences and twists of fate. And an image that came through strongly while I was holding Cliff’s hand in the prison.”
“So to pick up directions, you need to be close to the person who could give you them.”
I shrugged. “I was fool enough to hope that I would find Aidan when I found the cottage, but it hasn’t been used since the Wetland Murders.”
“Is that the point of all this? You think you’ll find Aidan?”
When Garth put my secret hope into words, it made me splutter with embarrassment. “Don’t think—I’m not trying to race the police investigation—anything like that.”
Garth leaned back, balancing on his spine. “Makes no difference to me who finds my son, so long as he comes back to us whole.”
I looked over at him for a long time. Mostly, I was contemplating the word whole. Aidan had been missing for a week. Even if he were alive, he would be changed. I began thinking about Josh. How the little boy from Bristol had probably trodden the same path and seen the same sights as Aidan had in his stead.
“I—I shouldn’t tell you this,” I stuttered, “but I did have the opportunity to work with something forensic.” Garth shifted his position, his eyes concentrating on me. “But Josh’s spirits didn’t lead me anywhere.”
“You touched something of Josh Sutton’s?”
“That’s what I’m saying. But it was a world away from what I got when I held Cliff’s hand.”
“Have you thought about where Josh Sutton is now? Physically, I mean.”
“His body?”
“Yeah. In some morgue, perhaps? If they let you touch this forensic thing …”
I shook my head. “Cliff told me. He knows every detail of the case.” I took a moment to work things out myself. “Josh was taken on the twenty-fourth of December last year. He was found on the eighteenth of January. His body was released for burial shortly before Cliff had his second appointment—that’s only a couple of weeks back, but I think the family were planning immediate cremation. His ashes might be scattered anywhere.”
For a few seconds, I’d seen a sort of rising of hope in Garth, but it withered and died as I spoke. His head bobbed down onto his chest. “He was missing for less than four weeks when he was found dead.”
“The body wasn’t hurt, Garth.” I shook my head. “That is no consolation at all. I’m sorry I said it.”
He looked at me with hardened, dry eyes. “We’re clutching at straws, aren’t we?”
I don’t know why the image came to me at that moment, unless Trendle conveniently helped it bubble to the surface, but I saw Cliff in my mind’s eye as I had when he’d told me the story of his first arrest. The bulrush he’d picked for his father’s memory.
“I guess straws are better than nothing,” I said.
It was gone lunchtime when I got home. I was starving, but I didn’t intend to sit down to a hot meal. I sniffed around the fridge. Gloria had left a plate of her spicy veg pies for me, now three or so days old. I grabbed one and some fruit from the bowl to go with it and switched on my laptop. While it was booting up, I went over the photocopies I’d brought home from the library, cross-referencing the site of the burials with my walker’s map. I took a sharp intake of breath. The shallow graves were hardly more than a mile from Brokeltuft Cottage.
This latest crazy idea of mine had to be the most extreme of long shots. Neither Garth nor Nora had asked me to do anything further, but I had to try, and, as I didn’t have appointments to keep, now was the time to start. I clingfilmed a couple more of the little pies and lowered them into my backpack on top my bird-spotting binoculars, map, torch, phone, purse, gloves, scarf, and a bottle of water. I laced up my mud-caked boots and locked the door behind me. The day was cold and there was a dampness on the wind. I doubled back through the side entrance and shepherded my flock of hens into their fox-proofed house. It was March, and night wouldn’t fall until almost six, but I had no idea when I would get back.
Leaving Bridgwater, I got snarled into traffic, then spent unnecessary time trying to get close to Brokeltuft, but the police had blocked the lane off at the top, by the signpost on the grass triangle. I examined my map, looking to get to the burial site from the opposite direction, driving up and down the country lanes to find the closest walker’s path. Finally, I parked on a remote B road, pulling in close to the hedge that ran along its flank. I stared over the flat, green fields punctuated with willow and shimmering with water. I checked my watch. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, but the heavy cloud cover produced a premature feeling of dusk. If I was honest with myself, I did not want to be here.
I followed a footpath arrow that led to an iron gate. It creaked on rusty hinges as I pushed my way through. The metal burned like ice into my hands. I fished out my gloves and pulled them on. I reckoned I was only half an hour’s tramp from my goal. I shifted my backpack onto my shoulders and set off.
The Somerset fenlands had once been fresh lake mingling with salt sea. Early farmers, desperate for more growing room, had reclaimed every clod of earth I trampled on. They’d gained their fields by digging the rhynes, ditches, and canals that stretched in every direction. Even so, my boots squelched as I headed over the field towards the first of many wooden bridges.
This place felt more and more like one of those children’s maze puzzles. I was zigzagging across water meadows, blocked in on all sides by ditches—some holding clear and fresh water, some reeking and stagnant. And where there weren’t ditches of water there were hedges—pussy willows in fluffy white bud and hazels shimmering with catkins and scratchy thorn bushes bare of leaf and shiny from the damp air.
I tramped on, seeking ways to cross water, until I had been walking for well over an hour on this tortuous route. I sat down on the elevated bank of a rhyne, my legs dangling over the edge high above the soft-moving water, and ate most of Gloria’s pies while I looked at the map. If I gave up now, I’d be back at the car before the sunset. But I didn’t want to give up. I wasn’t far from Josh’s resting place. I had to go on.
“Is that what you do?” Nora had asked. “Just by closing your eyes, you can talk to the dead?”
It’s difficult to describe what happens to me. People are expecting a snappy sound-bite response, but that would be too simplistic.
Most people can feel the “difference” between a graveyard and, say, a park. The veil that separates the living from the dead is thinner in some places. I think I’m just a fraction more sensitive than most. I pick up … well, for want of a better word, I’ll call them vibrations … that other people only half feel.
Garth had said, “It might be the only way to find Aidan. The police don’
t have a clue,” but that wasn’t true. They had plenty of clues; the only trouble was, they all pointed directly, and most conveniently, to Cliff.
I got up, brushing down my rear. I missed the company I used to have on country walks with the Davidson family … Gloria’s pleasant chatter, Philip’s solid back moving constantly in the right direction, and the wicked laughs I’d be having with Charlene and Dennon, plus whatever dog it was at that time. Being together made the walks fun and easy. Being alone in these vast wet fens as gloom grew was unnerving. Early evening shadows were already closing down the colours, taking the greens and silvers to shades of grey.
I pushed through a thin line of trees and came upon the peat bogs. These stretched out before me, miles of grassless land as black as a seam of coal. Acres of the peat had been dug out to a depth of several metres, and the recent excavations were already filling with water. The lines were mechanically angular—thin, straight paths led between this scourging of the soil. There was no choice but to tread them, even though my mind was screaming at me to go back. The paths were slippery and narrow, with an invisible drop on either side. It was like walking around the edges of massive ink-filled swimming pools.
When I lifted my chin away from my footsteps, I could see I was drawing closer to the long-abandoned areas, murky water held together with sedges and bulrushes. These bogs went on forever, impossible to tell one blackened hellhole from the next. I had no idea how to find the location I wanted.
I turned a full circle, skimming the horizon. Far away into the west, an ancient clump of willows sprouted out of the bog. The trunks were glossy black against the reddening sunset. Each branch, thick as a Sumo wrestler’s leg, skimmed the water’s surface before turning upwards to the sky. The patterns they formed brought symbols to my mind—cages and gallows and rune signs. My skin goosed up along my arms.
Where they were hid, them babbies, massive trunks were coming out of the water, growing there for years …
Without a doubt, these were the willows Arnie had described to me. I pulled my jacket close about me and raised the collar against the wind. As I marched towards them, I saw the faint outline of police tape on thin metal poles, inadequately closing off the area.
