The Devil's Claw

by Lara Dearman

  ‘You sound like my mum.’ Jenny teased. ‘Kids these days, getting up to all sorts of no good.’

  ‘Maybe. You know I’m right, though.’

  It made sense. It probably happened all the time. Cranks and timewasters showing up every time something like this happened. Which wasn’t often. Jenny remembered a body had washed up years ago, when Jenny was at school. Another young woman. That had been a suicide. It had been front-page news for days and there had been some criticism about mental health services on the island. Now that was an angle, a sensible one. She finished her drink. Sarah waggled the bottle in front of her.

  ‘One for the road?’

  Sarah filled her glass. Jenny sank back into her chair sipping the wine. It was rich and warm and relaxing.

  ‘So, you’re definitely all right?’ Sarah asked. She wasn’t going to let it go.

  ‘I’ve told you. I’m fine.’

  ‘Only, you’ve got that look about you.’

  ‘What look?’

  ‘Tired. Stressed. Anxious. I know you, Jenny. I know how you get.’

  ‘It’s been a rough couple of days.’

  ‘Rough couple of years, more like.’ Sarah paused. ‘Are you ever going to tell me why you really came back?’

  ‘You know why I came back. Dad died. Mum needs me.’

  ‘I know that’s the official story. But what happened in London? That had something to do with it too. It frightened you. I’ve only ever seen you like that once before. And we both know what happened after that.’

  Jenny drained her glass. It was good to come back, after what had happened. She’d needed to get away from the city. At least, she’d thought she did.

  ‘I’ve told you all this before.’ She was in no mood for an impromptu therapy session.

  ‘You said you’d had a run in with some bad people. Hardly an explanation.’

  ‘That’s exactly what happened. I was working on a story. There was a woman who was being exploited, forced to work, kept in permanent debt by a gang. I tried to help her. I failed.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They found out what I was doing, threatened me, told me to keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘And the woman, who was she? What happened to her?’

  ‘Her name was Madalina. I don’t know what happened to her.’ Jenny shook her head. ‘I do know what happened to her. I just can’t prove it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He killed her.’

  ‘Who did?’

  Jenny played with her hair, twisting the ends through her fingers, then she pulled it aside, stretching the scar at the nape of her neck, feeling it stretch and burn and turned to show Sarah.

  ‘The same person who did this.’

  * * *

  Margaret, fretting about where Jenny had been and why she was so late, opened the front door before her daughter could get her key in the lock. She looked at the space on the driveway where the car should have been, asked where it was, and before Jenny could answer, set about panicking, convinced that she’d had an accident.

  Jenny locked the door and slid the security chain into the track.

  ‘I went for a couple of drinks with Sarah after work. I told you we were meeting up this week. I left the car in town and took a cab home.’

  Margaret’s frown relaxed slightly, but her face remained pale and strained. She fluttered down the corridor. Of course, she said, Jenny had mentioned she was going out, but she’d forgotten and when it got so late she’d been worried. She put the kettle on, offered Jenny tea.

  ‘We lost track of time. I sent you a text.’

  Sarah had tried her best to get Jenny to tell her more about Madalina but Jenny had distracted her, only temporarily, knowing Sarah, with another bottle of wine and some gossip about school friends. Now, as Jenny sat at the kitchen table, the room spun a little and the bitter taste of alcohol burnt the back of her throat.

  Margaret picked up her handbag from the back of the chair and scrabbled around for her phone, jabbing at the screen when she finally found it, shaking her head as it failed to come to life.

  ‘I’m useless,’ she sighed. ‘Always forget to charge the damn thing. At least you’re all right.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Margaret smiled too brightly and reached for the cups. She asked Jenny was it just her and Sarah, because wasn’t Sarah’s husband in a band? Perhaps Sarah could introduce Jenny to them? Margaret had seen their pictures in the News, a couple of them were nice-looking, she said, bit long-haired and scruffy, but that was all part of the look, she supposed.

  ‘I’m a bit old to be a groupie, Mum.’

  ‘Of course you are. I’m not saying that. It just might be nice for you to meet someone. So you’re not on your own.’ Margaret poured the boiling water into the teapot and Jenny could see her hands shaking as she set the kettle back on its base. Jenny went to her side.

  ‘Sit down. I’ll do this.’

  She finished making the tea, brought the cups to the table and set them down.

  ‘You need to stop worrying, Mum. I’m not on my own, am I? I’ve got you. Unless you’re planning on going somewhere?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Margaret said. ‘Surely you must think about it, seeing Sarah with her family? And that poor girl washing up like that – doesn’t it make you think? How precious life is, how short?’ She sipped at her tea through tightly pressed lips and Jenny could see the tension in her face.

  ‘Mum! Stop it.’

  Margaret rubbed her eyes and shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry, love. It’s having you home here again. Of course you don’t need me fretting. But I’d like to know you were settled, that you had someone looking out for you.’ She reached out her hand and stroked Jenny’s hair, tucked it behind her ears.

  ‘It’s nearly grown back. But you look different, you know. Around your eyes, I think that’s where I see it most. You look at people differently. London changed you: the city, the work, those awful people. What they did to you. It’s a cliché, isn’t it, to worry about the scars on the inside? But I do, Jenny.’

  Jenny took her mother’s hand in her own and gently placed it back on the table.

  ‘Mum. It’s been a long day. And I’m a bit drunk. You look exhausted too. Let’s get some sleep.’

  Margaret brushed Jenny’s cheek with her lips before going to bed and Jenny felt it again. That lightness. Even her mother’s kisses were light these days.

  She lay in bed looking at the shadows on the ceiling. The wine should have made her sleepy but there was too much to think about. She tried to still her thoughts, to calm the disquiet she felt rumbling in her stomach. Sarah was probably right. Matt was just attention seeking. And DCI Gilbert, he was probably right too. Amanda’s death was likely to be an accident. Or a suicide. And it was only natural that Margaret would be upset by a body washing up on the beach, only natural she would worry about Jenny. She’d been through a lot. They both had.

  She closed her eyes. She saw Amanda. She had looked so perfect, lying there. As though she’d been for a swim and then fallen asleep on a bed of stones. Nothing like when her dad had been found. She screwed up her eyes and tried to dispel the image. She tried so hard not to think about it, about what he must have looked like. Although she knew that it would have appealed to his sense of humour – that the fisherman ended up fish food.

  11

  August 1961

  Mother was dead, her face twisted unnaturally, mouth frozen in a grimace, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Too much alcohol, too many pills. An accident. She surely lacked the nerve to have done it on purpose.

  As he got closer to the bed, the smell hit him, sour and damp. Piss. The wetness spread over the sheet covering her. He pulled it back to expose her body, flimsily clothed in one of those girlish nightdresses she loved. He lifted it, pushed it up around her neck and over her face. Her breasts sagged, shapeless, towards the soft spread of the belly in which he once grew.

  How many men
had used her to service their weakness? Had his father been the same? Had he fucked her once and left like all the others? Or had he come often, tempted time and again by her pliant body and her soft, breathy voice?

  He placed his hand on her breastbone and stroked her, tracing down to her stomach. Her skin was cold but soft and textured. It was a miracle, really, that she had given life to him. That he had sprung from this weak, flawed body.

  Sparse, black hairs grew around her naval and thickened as they spread down towards her underwear. Her only asset in life had been what lay hidden beneath that slip of yellowed cotton. And now she was dead and powerless and all she had to show for a lifetime of whoredom was him. He pulled back the sheet in disgust.

  * * *

  There had to be a funeral. The parish insisted on it. There were few mourners, even fewer that he recognised. Unsurprising. Mother had only a handful of acquaintances and no real friends that he knew of. Family, of course, were nowhere to be seen. He listened to the vicar’s words with a detached interest but was unmoved until he found himself in the cemetery staring down at the wooden box in the ground.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  He threw in his handful of dirt. He wondered if the coffin would rot quicker than Mother’s flesh, or if by the time his dirt touched her she would be nothing more than bones and it would settle into empty sockets or the hollow of her rib cage. He felt his eyes moisten then, at the thought of her heartless, fleshless, hollow rib cage. He could cast off the burden of shame she had forced him to carry. No more questions from well-meaning neighbours about the state of her health. No more sideways glances when he accompanied her on a walk around the village, her dress stinking of gin and mothballs, lipstick bleeding into the fine, powder-filled lines around her mouth. He was free. As her heart shrivelled and dried, so his seemed to fill, beating with a new strength and he experienced another of those rare moments of exquisite joy. He wiped the tears from his cheek and kept his smile hidden until he’d left the graveyard.

  He returned home to find a man sitting on the front doorstep. He did not look like Mother’s usual type, although there was something familiar about him. He wore a blazer and smart trousers, round, black-rimmed glasses giving him an air of intelligence. He introduced himself. Uncle Peter.

  When Mother had been drunk, she had slurred Uncle Peter’s name, cursed him for forsaking her. She’d loved the melodrama of it all. Uncle Peter inherited when Grandfather died, the island laws leaving it to the eldest son to ensure things were distributed fairly on the death of a parent, or not, as they felt fit. Uncle Peter had not felt it fitting to provide for his Jerry-bag sister, a sister whose existence he had sworn to forget the moment she told them she was carrying a Nazi baby in her belly. He wondered if Uncle Peter was thinking about the fact that this was the very same Nazi baby standing in front of him right now.

  He rose from the step.

  ‘I was expecting a child,’ he said. ‘Stupid. You must be fifteen now?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Nearly a man. But not quite.’

  Uncle Peter felt some remorse, it seemed. Not at Mother’s death, nor at the fact that he hadn’t seen or spoken to her for more than fifteen years, but that he had neglected to provide for his nephew who should not be suffering for the sins of his parents. He wished to make amends. To provide for him so that he could finish his education.

  ‘Your mother aside, you’re from a fine family. You’ve done well, to get a scholarship.’ Uncle Peter said. ‘You shouldn’t waste the opportunity to make something of yourself.’

  Mother’s death turned out to be a wonderful thing in more ways than one then. Not only was he free from her cloying, grasping touch, and her cheaply perfumed, gin-soaked scent, he now had the opportunity to continue his studies.

  It was a fresh start.

  A new beginning.

  12

  Michael

  Wednesday, 12 November

  The wind rattling the windows woke him early. He stood in the back doorway wearing a dressing gown wrapped tightly over fleece pyjamas and a pair of thick socks (slippers made him feel old) and watched the apple tree. Its branches swayed violently in the wind and one in particular was in the perfect position to fly off and smash into his garden shed. He sipped his coffee and turned back into the kitchen. The tree was probably older than he was. It had weathered enough storms. It was a wonder either of them were still standing.

  Two years after Ellen died, the end of 1999 – that had been his lowest point. He and Sheila were married but she was getting sick of him. She’d spent the first year after the accident in a state of permanent emotional agony, and then suddenly, just like that, she’d woken up one morning, done her face and started to get on with her life again. She’d been having therapy. That probably had something to do with it. She’d wanted him to go but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. How could talking about it make it better? She’d dragged him along to a couple of sessions anyway, tried to get him to discuss his lack of empathy towards her, his lack of emotion about the whole thing. Bloody empathy and emotion. Presumably she meant that twisted ball of throbbing pain in his chest which constantly threatened to burst out of him, choking him and everyone around him, which he pushed, further and further inside of him every waking minute, knowing he couldn’t survive if he let it out. But he didn’t want to talk about it. He chose the slow, steady, onwards and downwards approach, followed it all the way to the bottom of a bottle and stayed there.

  New Year’s Eve. Everyone had been talking about the millennium bug, how they were all going to be plunged back into the dark ages, a sort of electronic Armageddon. All the lights were going to go out, planes were going to fall out of the sky, the banking system was going to crash and they were all going to starve because, apparently, you needed a bloody computer to eat these days. He’d barely been sober for a year. At some points he’d been less drunk than others; mostly, but not always, when he was at work. He’d become an expert at disguising his not-so-stale alcohol breath with a combination of chewing gum and Fisherman’s Friends. He’d also found that the energy drinks which Ellen had taken to drinking while doing her A levels were especially effective at countering the fatiguing effects of several late nights too many at his local boozer.

  Which is where he was that particular 31 December, same as most nights, although it was busier, due to the occasion. He’d waved his empty glass at the barman. People were laughing and shouting. It was a shit pub and most of the clientele were colourful characters, to say the least. They all knew Inspector Gilbert. Some of them even bought him a pint. Sheila was out at a dinner party. He’d been invited but said he was working. She’d known he was lying and he’d known she was happy that he was.

  He’d joined in the countdown to the new millennium with gusto, secretly hoping that the doomsayers were right and that everything was going to stop at the stroke of twelve. A fresh start would have been a fine thing, in his opinion. It was a predictable let-down when the music kept playing past midnight and the TV signal remained uninterrupted.

  When he’d got home she’d been sitting in her favourite chair, reading a book. She’d smiled when she saw him. Not the dead-eyed upturn of the facial muscles he had become familiar with. A real smile. The corners of her eyes crinkled. She was wearing a black velvet evening dress, which showed off her trim figure and her legs. She had looked so young. She was young he had thought, with a rush of emotion. Only forty. Young enough to have another child, even. Why had they not talked about that? Maybe it was something she spoke about with the therapist. He would ask her. It was a new year. It could be a new start for them.

  Sheila had agreed. It was time for a new start. She’d said some words. Lots of them, about love and time and healing and about Ellen, and she’d smiled and reached out and touched him, stroked his face, like she used to, when everything had been good, and the words floated around them and none of them made any sense until the bit where she’d picked up her things and left.
/>   So the doomsayers were right. All the lights had gone out after all.

  At first, it seemed like a terrible thing had happened. But, quickly, he realised that not much had really changed. He went to work and did a good job, even better than before, if anything, because with nobody to go home to he put in longer and longer hours at the office, which had the knock-on effect that he was spending less time at the pub. He threw himself into every case he was assigned, gaining a reputation as someone who would leave no stone unturned. It made him unpopular at the station – everyone knew there was no getting away with doing half a job around Inspector Gilbert. He was promoted. Chief Inspector. Worked more. Slept less. Spent his days off drunk. Only now he didn’t have to bother pretending to be sober and there was nobody to nag him when he fried himself a couple of eggs every morning and ate more than one bag of crisps every night.

  He had been actively encouraging a heart attack. He knew, despite the web of black thoughts he spun each night, that he would never have had the courage to end his own life. A massive coronary, however, to rip the pain out of his chest and obliterate it and to take him to Ellen, wherever she was, would be perfect.

  When it happened, then, he had been surprised by the force with which he fought it, his body seemingly working against his darkest desires, crawling to the phone in the middle of the night, his fingers dialling the magic numbers, his voice rasping his address to the operator with his dying breath.

  He’d regretted it when he woke up. Alive. Tubes coming out of every orifice, pissing into a catheter, a jolly, rough Filipina bed-bathing him like a child every couple of days. They’d told him he was lucky. He had laughed. Properly. Like he hadn’t done in years. When he left, after several weeks, finally able to urinate unaided and wipe his own arse and with a scar, which ran from the bottom of his throat to the top of his stomach, they had given him an armful of leaflets. Eat Right For Your Heart, Need Help with A Drinking Problem? Get Fit, Have Fun! He’d put all of them in the bin outside of the hospital, except for one.