Now, there is a nature reserve; walks, sailing. The weekends are busy. Sometimes, you see the occasional Pakistani family, over from Leicester, being stared at by us locals as if they were a particularly interesting species of fauna. You can still live your whole life in Rutland without meeting anyone who has, as Miss Crabbe would put it, ‘a bit of colour in them’.
Traffic passed intermittently, the cars roaring and fading. I was parked in an exposed spot and drivers coming up the hill from Oakham had a full view of me for a couple of miles. I would have to be quick.
I walked over to the gate and leant on the top bar, staring into the wood. The light was fading. There was the odd, pointless cheeping of a solitary bird.
The lay-by was at the top end of the woods. To one side there was the well-preserved glory of Burley Wood itself, divided by a barbed-wire fence from the small, scrubby afterthought of Ashpit Spinney.
I didn’t know whether the Spinney counted as Ancient Woodland or not but it didn’t look like it. Leading into the trees was a narrow, twin-furrowed track. Maybe the owner took a Land-Rover up there occasionally, to go shooting, perhaps, although I couldn’t imagine there was much in there to shoot at. It seemed lifeless, dry and crackling. The trees were top-heavy and unkempt, the ground level overgrown with beige strands of tall dead grass. The track turned after a few yards and became lost. To the right, by the barbed-wire fence, there was a pile of old doors.
The dusk was quickening, the sky clouding over. The last remaining glow of sunlight was struggling through a gathering mass of lilac and grey. It was going to be another still night.
It was ten days since the Cowpers’ murder and Gemma’s flight from Nether Bowston courtesy of Tim Gordon’s beaten-up motor. The stony lay-by was where she would have climbed out of the car. If she had walked along the A606 or tried to cross the open fields by Rutland Water, surely somebody would have seen her and reported her. She must have headed into the woods.
Burley Wood was swathed in barbed wire and obviously well managed, open. The Spinney was the only hiding place.
It takes weeks to starve but only days to die of dehydration – even I knew that. What was she drinking, rainwater? There had been no rain. There were probably stagnant ponds in the Spinney. Country legend has it that if you drink from a stagnant pond you go mad, but Gemma Cowper was mad already. Maybe it would send her sane.
What do you do if you are deranged and frightened and alone?
You pretend to yourself that you are hiding, when actually you are waiting to be found.
I gripped the splintered top bar of the gate, pursing my mouth, narrowing my eyes. I was not a brave princess. I had no intention of stumbling through trees in the darkness looking for a teenage psychotic in bloodstained clothing. At the same time, I knew that I couldn’t let this knowledge go. I had something that nobody else had. There had to be some way to use it.
I glared into the Spinney, before turning and striding defiantly back to my car.
Now, sometimes, I look back to the way I stood at that gate as the light faded and try to remember what I was really thinking. What followed muddied everything. Did I really believe she was in there?
Maybe I only remember it that way because of what I know now. Sometimes I think, my thoughts cannot have been that logical or clear, whatever story I have made up for myself.
I don’t think I really believed that she could still be in there after all that time.
WHERE IS GEMMA? The headline greeted me as I arrived at the office the next morning. It was Friday. Six copies of the Record were fanned neatly on the coffee table by the front door. We had hit the streets.
I had slept badly and rose early, creeping around the house so as not to wake Andrew who was comatose in my airless little box room. He had left his tin of tobacco and Rizlas downstairs, so I pinched them and sat on my back step, taking up smoking again while I had the opportunity.
It was early enough for the air to be damp, for the grass to glimmer. I loved that mistiness, the mingling of grey and green. The morning felt fresh in my lungs. When I inhaled, I could taste each mouthful of smoke.
I have a row of evergreens at the top of the slope that leads up to the end of the garden. Sitting on the step, I couldn’t see the distant fields but I knew of them, knew they were there. There was space above me and beyond.
There was nothing in the garden when I moved in, just a few foxgloves hiding among the dandelions and cow parsley and a couple of sad dog roses which wouldn’t flower for three years. I was hopeless to start off with, buying anything I liked the look of from the garden centre. I put in a whole row of delphiniums, which got eaten by snails. I didn’t do a pH test on the soil. I didn’t even use compost. On my first trip to the centre I took a list of the essentials, according to the beginner’s book I had bought at the newsagent’s. It said, ‘And of course, you must have a pair of good stout gardening-shoes.’ I thought that gardening shoes were something specific, like the shoes you need to go bowling, or ice skates. I wandered up and down the aisle of the garden centre’s indoor bit, looking for them.
The stone step was cold beneath me. I had pulled on a skirt and t-shirt in a rush of optimism about how warm it was going to be that day. My skin prickled pleasantly. My arms were goose-pimply. I rubbed them. It reminded me of how they feel when I weed around my rose bushes. You can’t help getting tiny, invisible cuts on your arms – the thorns are unavoidable. You don’t notice it when you’re hard at work. Then you go inside to get a drink of water and the sweat stings on your skin with a pain so minute it is exquisite. You know you are alive.
I breathed the damp air and finished my roll-up. I hugged myself and listened to the skittering of a bird, twisting unseen in the back border.
I watched my lawn. It needed scarifying. I wondered what to do.
My life before the murders seemed long ago and far away. I suppose it is the same with any dramatic event. Time contracts, then explodes. I thought, I haven’t seen anyone for ages – friends that is; Lizzie, my badminton buddy; Pat from school. The three of us go to the pub occasionally. Pat had a fling with Andrew once and I had been wondering whether we should all go out for a drink while he was around.
Now, though, I could only concentrate on one thing. It burned in my head. I had something, some knowledge that no one else had – not even Tim Gordon, whose imagination went no further than his timidity would allow.
WHERE IS GEMMA? Supposing I was right? It was a story. I had inside knowledge. Knowledge is power. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Villain, know thyself. How often in my lifetime would this kind of thing happen to me?
I drove to work listening to the radio. Most of it was election garbage but there was also a report on the breakdown of the nuclear family. Stabbing your parents to death – that’s a pretty unequivocal way to break up your family. I realised I hadn’t seen much cultural analysis of the case yet, not even in the broadsheets. Maybe somebody would be interested in a big feature. How much would a national newspaper pay for something like that? I had no idea. Enough to get my re-wiring done? A tabloid would pay, surely. I earned £9,560 per annum. I had a mortgage I could scarcely afford and months of remedial works to pay for. I had no real interest in working for a national newspaper – I much preferred being a big fish in little Oakham – but it did occur to me that I could try and develop a profitable sideline, something that brought in a bit of extra money without any commitment.
I thought about it for the rest of that morning. I thought about it as I sat at my desk reading through some of Cheryl’s interview notes. She had done a lot of the background on the Cowper case that week. She was good at that. She had tracked down the local doctor who had signed their death certificate, talked to Gemma’s old schoolteachers. You would not call Cheryl one of the great prose stylists but you could always rely on her to come up with the facts.
Doug was standing in front of my desk.
‘Do you think we should do something on the progress of the se
arch?’ I asked him. ‘You know, maybe a map of where she could be, ask John about each area. Something to get people going. We could use some of that stuff John told you, maybe.’
Inspector Collins had confided in Doug after the press conference, off the record of course. There was bad blood between him and the fat super – not surprising, really.
Doug downturned the corners of his mouth, looking pettish. ‘We’d have to dress it up. We don’t want to drop John in it.’
‘What about this bloke in the car?’ I asked, without looking up from my papers.
‘He thinks it’s a dud. He thinks she’s in one of the barns. They’re doing Wardley Wood and Quakers Spinney over the weekend.’
I picked up a biro and twiddled it. ‘They’d better get a move on, hadn’t they? What about Burley Wood?’
Doug lifted his arms, bent at the elbow, and eased his shoulders backwards, as if he had a twinge of indigestion. ‘He’s having problems. Like I said, this super’s trying to do it on the cheap and of course John knows but this bloke won’t listen. They’ve got the RAF in to do Rutland Water ‘cause it looks good on the telly. He’s tearing his hair. They’ll have to do Burley soon, they’ll look daft otherwise. The super’s got the personnel on house-to-house in the villages. John’s furious. He said it’s not as if she’d’ve checked into a B and B, is it?’
Doug got to his feet and picked up a wooden ruler from my desk. ‘They say that the old man bought it in the stomach, like this.’ He gestured with the ruler, a straight stabbing motion level with his waist. There was something comic about Doug’s plump white forearm making such a movement, clutching the wooden ruler like a schoolboy. ‘Which I suppose is conceivable from the girl. She was five foot six and her dad was only two inches taller. The mum was about the same height and she was stabbed like this.’ He raised the ruler up above his head to jab downwards, then froze in that position.
I thought, for a moment, that he was striking a pose. I only realised what was happening when I looked at his face and saw it was rigid with pain, the eyes tight closed, the mouth cracked open.
I was on my feet in one speedy, fluid movement – a movement which seemed all the more efficient in comparison with his clumsy collapse. He was pitching forward, arm still raised. I rounded my desk but wasn’t in time to catch him. I reached out and grabbed at his shirt as he fell. His weight pulled it out of my hand and there was a harsh rasping as a seam gave.
After the ambulance had left, the mood in the office was strange. Cheryl went with Doug. They insisted on taking him over to Leicester, fully conscious and protesting furiously. I was in charge.
Everyone’s concern for him was mingled with a guilty, holiday feel. It was Friday. The paper was out and the boss and his deputy were absent. I was up to my eyeballs in work but fidgety as a ferret. Cheryl had told me to ring Shires Periodicals and explain the situation. She and I could bring in next week’s paper but if Doug was going to be off work for a while, they would have to send some help. Apparently, she and Doug had been requesting extra editorial and Shires Periodicals knew he wasn’t healthy. I was surprised they hadn’t discussed it with me. They must have known I wouldn’t have minded a bit more editing.
All day, other members of staff came up to my desk and asked me to relate what had happened. All day we murmured and tutted. ‘It never rains but it pours,’ said one of the girls from production, meaning first a murder, now this. A mood of fatalism had descended and on its heels came a certain gaiety, an air of what-the-hell.
What-the-hell was how I felt when David Poe appeared. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I heard about the ambulance. Is he okay?’
I shrugged, leaning back in my chair. ‘We think so. They didn’t have to resuscitate him or anything. I don’t know.’
After a few minutes, I said, ‘I can’t really chat now. Do you want to go for a drink this evening?’
He looked pleased and surprised.
‘What do you think I should do if I wanted to write a big piece about all this?’ I asked him. ‘What if I had a story?’
He looked at me. Between us on the pub table were two baskets with the glistening remainders of a meal. Shreds of grey flesh hung from the chicken bones. The chips were cold and limp. In each basket, there was a single lettuce leaf.
David Poe was on his third pint of County. I had had a Guinness, then moved on to vodka and lime. For some reason, he found it amusing that I drank vodka and lime. ‘It’s what all the girls at university used to drink,’ he said, which offended me. It made me feel provincial.
Now, an air of intimacy had descended. I thought maybe he fancied me. I didn’t fancy him, but there isn’t a great deal of opportunity for flirting in Rutland, so I was making the most of it.
‘So you’re thinking of moving on to higher things?’ he asked.
I frowned. ‘You’re making a typically metropolitan assumption.’
He spread his hands.
‘You ought to realise, you lot,’ I said, lifting my glass, ‘you ought to have cottoned on by now, that everybody in this town knows exactly what you think of them. What you don’t seem to appreciate is that the contempt is mutual.’
He rocked a little in his seat. ‘Okay okay, point taken, so why don’t you write this piece for the Record? I shouldn’t think they’d be happy about you doing it for someone else, anyway.’
I shook my head. ‘God, no. I’d get the sack. I’d have to use a pseudonym.’
‘There’s a lot of stuff been written already you know . . .’ This was his tactful way of saying, why would a national newspaper buy a feature from a provincial hack like you?
I felt quite sober. ‘What if I had a new angle?’ I asked.
He didn’t pick up on what I had said. He waved a hand. ‘Everybody’s got an angle. In London, the streets are paved with angles.’
The moment passed. The conversation moved on.
It wasn’t until the end of the evening, when we were back out in the market place, that I raised the subject again.
We were standing by my car. Was I okay to drive? he wanted to know. We both knew I was way over the limit.
I fingered my car keys, ignoring his concern. ‘So you don’t think I should make a few phone calls, then?’
He sighed, clearly frustrated that the conversation had not remained on the intimate level he had spent all evening achieving. ‘I don’t think you’d get a commission unless they knew you, and it’s pointless doing it on spec’.’
‘What about information?’ I asked. ‘The tabloids pay for that, don’t they? Let’s say we forget the article.’
He paused and looked at me. I could almost hear the cogs in his brain turning.
‘What sort of information?’
I shrugged. ‘Something big enough for a front page.’
It was dark now. The air was cold, just to remind us that summer was not yet upon us. I thought how strange it was that the evenings seemed chilly, yet at night it was always so close. I shivered.
David Poe was biting his bottom lip. Two other journalists emerged from the pub behind us and we were silent while they passed us.
‘I did a piece for the Express last year,’ he said, measuredly. ‘They were running a series of features on extra-marital affairs and someone I knew had a cleaner who had met her husband at a woodwork evening class. They were both married to other people at the time. She was supposed to be making a doll’s house at this class but was having sex with this bloke in the back of his Fiesta. At the end of the course, they had to knock a doll’s house up bloody quick. It was quite a nice little story. About eight hundred words, got subbed down to five. I got four hundred for writing it and permission from the editor to offer the cleaner up to a hundred and fifty so we could name her and get a good pic. I tried a hundred and she took it.’
I shook my head. ‘That won’t do it. This particular bit of information is worth a lot more than a hundred quid. I’d want to write a big, investigative piece. And I wouldn’t want anyone subbing it, either.
’
He pulled an amused face, then put on an American accent and said, ‘Everyone gets subbed, honey. That’s life in the big city.’
‘But what if I had something really good?’ I insisted.
He exhaled. ‘Such as?’
‘Police incompetence,’ I said, ‘and, maybe, Gemma’s whereabouts.’
He opened his mouth in a silent, ah . . .
I felt a small flush of triumph. David Poe thought he had me all taped, some little rural eccentric. Now he was having to think again.
He lifted an arm and scratched the back of his head. ‘I think maybe we should discuss this over a nightcap,’ he said. ‘I’m at the Stag.’
The Stag Hotel was just around the corner. A nightcap? Miss Crabbe’s line occurred to me: I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking.
I shrugged, turned.
I’ve only stayed in a hotel for business once. It was a Posthouse somewhere near Coventry. Shires Periodicals was having a conference on Local News Gathering: Its Purpose and Implementation. Doug sent me, as ‘the Record’s representative on earth’. He didn’t regard it as a perk. Somebody had to go, and he and Cheryl both loathe all that corporate stuff. Doug calls all upper management ‘trouser-pressers’. I had always assumed it was a sexual slur, until I stayed in the Posthouse Coventry.
I thought the conference was great fun – chatted up the Managing Editor, one George Bloomfield, had a room-service breakfast both mornings and power showers twice a day. I haven’t got a shower at home.
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