by Jo Allen
He dismissed the thought immediately. ‘You need to meet Dr Vanessa Wood. I’d be interested to know what you think of her.’
‘The psychiatrist Faye was talking about? How did you get on?’
‘I’m glad I popped in to see her rather than call her. I thought she was impressive and determined to help.’ Vanessa, direct to the point of confrontation, had obviously not liked him.
‘And of course she poured scorn on your theories about a crime.’
Ashleigh was in a niggly mood that evening, as though she wasn’t entirely happy with herself and her behaviour. He saw her scowling at her reflection in the glass front of one of the cabinets and for once it irritated rather than amused him. ‘I didn’t put my theories to her. I was there to listen to what she had to say, not interrogate her.’ Just as well; she’d have been a difficult interviewee.
They’d reached the checkouts by then and discretion silenced them, but Ashleigh was back on the subject as soon as they were out in the car park. ‘So what did Dr Wood say?’
‘She’s concerned, though she didn’t put it much stronger than that. But she thinks there’s someone who’s behaving in a way that I would call criminally irresponsible and which she attributes to a personality disorder.’ As she opened the boot and loaded the carrier bags into it, he outlined Vanessa’s thoughts.
‘Hmm.’ For some reason Ashleigh seemed strangely unimpressed. ‘And do you find that convincing?’
‘I’ll have a look at the blogs when I’ve seen Mikey. But she talks a good game. And although she didn’t mention it, Faye told me she has her own personal reasons for wanting to help.’
‘Do you think she lost someone to suicide?’
‘Faye didn’t say, but it’s possible.’
‘I wonder—?’ Ashleigh began, then stopped herself and slammed the boot shut. ‘Really, don’t worry about Mikey. He hero-worships you. He’ll come to you when he needs help.’
‘He didn’t come to me before.’
‘He was much younger then, and you were the authority figure. It was his rebellion. He must know now that you did the right thing, or he wouldn’t be speaking to you at all. Maybe if he wants to talk to you, that’s what he wants to talk about. And that’s a good thing.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Yes.’ She turned away from the car, then flung her arms around him in the middle of the car park. ‘I’m sorry I was a bit short with you. I’ve got things on my mind, too.’
He held her tightly against him and decided against asking what they were. If she wanted to, she’d tell him. ‘Don’t worry. It happens to us all.’
‘You get off and catch up with Mikey.’ She stepped away from him. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘I’ll see you then.’
He stood and watched her as she slid into the car with the elegance taught by a private school education, then got back in the car and drove up Wordsworth Street to drop off the shopping before he headed out to Wasby to pick up his brother.
‘Are you going to do a dine and dash on me, like you usually do?’ Mikey asked, with what might have been forced cheerfulness, as he came loping down the path of Linda Satterthwaite’s cottage and got into the passenger seat of the Mercedes. ‘Because if you are, I’d better make sure I’ve got enough cash for a taxi home.’
‘I’m not on call today, so I’ll get you home.’
‘Makes a nice change.’
Jude turned the Mercedes in the lane, taking a moment to steal a glance at Becca’s cottage as he did so, but there was no sign of her — only a line of washing rippling in a gentle breeze and the inquiring presence of her cat, Holmes, bounding up onto the wall by the side of the road just a little too late to get the fuss he took as his due. Jude turned the car up out of the village and onto the Askham road. ‘Where shall we go? Askham? Or Pooley Bridge?’
It was a pleasant evening, with the sun and clouds playing chasing games across the fells. Mikey was in an amiable mood. ‘Pooley Bridge. We can sit out by the river.’ This contribution to sociability complete, he turned his attention to his phone.
‘Any plans for the immediate future?’ Jude said, after a few moments of companionable silence had taken them through the village of Askham and up onto the lower slopes of the fell beyond.
‘Nah.’ Mikey checked his phone again, sighed and looked down at it. ‘Get a job, I suppose. A proper one.’ He’d graduated a couple of months before and was working shifts in one of the local pubs. Like Jude, he had a strong affinity to the area and a reluctance to leave it. ‘I dunno what, though. See if something comes up. Media. Comms. Anything, really.’
The road climbed up along the side of Askham Fell and crept down again into the deep trough filled by Ullswater. Jude pulled the car up in the main street and by common consent they made their way to the pub with a lakeside beer garden. Here, taking advantage of seniority, he made himself comfortable and sent Mikey for the drinks. A pint of Coke was all he could risk as the driver, and he found himself looking longingly at the glass of Eden Gold in his younger brother’s hand.
‘Come on then, bro.’ Mikey slid him a sidelong look as he sat down, stretching his legs out into what was left of the sun. ‘I know we’re going to have the pep talk. Let’s get it over with. But I’m okay. Honest I am.’
Jude breathed deeply and took a moment before answering. With Mikey, in the past, he’d never quite known whether an opening like that was a trap or not and, though his brother was maturing, there were occasional flashbacks to the angry teenager. Fair enough; there was plenty for him to be angry about. ‘I can’t help worrying about you.’
‘Why?’ At last Mikey met his gaze — grey-eyed, like Jude himself, with his own variations from the template of their absent father. ‘Because of these suicides? Do you know something I don’t?’
In the silence Jude raised his glass. ‘Of course. But that’s not particularly the reason I’m worrying.’
‘Like, you’ll know for certain they killed themselves. I mean, we all know that even if no-one’s saying it. Do you know why they did it?’
‘No.’ Jude looked down towards the river. Two youngsters, maybe ten or eleven years old, were busy with a futile attempt to dam the wide, shallow river. If they were ten years older, their parents would be having sleepless nights on their account, that was for sure.
‘There’s a lot you need to worry about.’ Mikey blew the froth off his pint. ‘Not you particularly. People in general. But you don’t need to worry about me. Okay?’
‘Who should I be worrying about?’
Mikey drank, and only after that did he reply. ‘Remember what we talked about the other day?’
‘I asked you if you knew Izzy Ecclestone.’
‘Yeah. She’s a good kid, Izzy. I looked her up. Because you asked.’ Unusually, Mikey had gone pink. ‘Met her in town. Had a coffee, that sort of stuff. A chat. What you’d call information gathering.’
‘I’ll make a policeman of you yet. What did she say?’
‘She didn’t say anything, much. She never does.’ Mikey’s sigh was that of a man much older than twenty-one. ‘We just had a chat about stuff. I can see why you’re worried, though.’
‘It wasn’t so much me that was worried.’ Jude thought of Raven, following Izzy down into the woods like the shadow of a shadow, keeping watch over her, luring her out of the darkness by begging a favour from the girl’s kind heart. They couldn’t know for certain whether Izzy had intended to harm herself that night but if she had, either her nerve had failed her or Raven’s intervention had changed her mind. ‘Someone saw her and was concerned.’
‘Yeah. She said. She couldn’t quite remember what happened. You know.’ Shifting in his seat, Mikey gave all the signs of realising he was about to say the wrong thing. ‘She was a bit confused.’
‘I imagine she’d been smoking something,’ said Jude, to help him out. ‘I know these things go on. Let’s be grown up about them.’
‘Yeah, it’s just me you come
down on—’
‘You weren’t even seventeen and you were my responsibility.’
‘I was Dad’s responsibility, not yours. And he was nowhere.’
They glared at one another for a second, while the summer drinkers around them laughed and a dog ran past, wet from the river, shaking itself and spraying them with water. It was enough of a distraction. Jude remembered himself. ‘And was Izzy all right?’
Mikey sat on his silent dignity for a moment longer, then relaxed. ‘I wish I knew. She’s a sweet kid, but she’s easily influenced. She’s studying French and history. Reads a lot of Beaudelaire. He’s a French poet who wrote a lot about death. She was quoting him at me over coffee. The true voyagers are only those who leave. They never turn aside from their fatality, or something.’
Jude waited. Sometimes Mikey took a while to get to the point.
‘She’s fascinated by these suicides’ said Mikey, after a restorative sip of his pint. ‘She knows every detail of them, though God knows where she’s got it from or whether she’s right. You’d know all about that.’
Jude merely nodded.
‘Anyway, she just went on about it. How she’s been fascinated by death ever since she was a kid. She hangs about in the woods to watch owls hunting, though she says she hardly ever sees them catch anything. She watches crows on dead lambs. Weird stuff. She goes up to Cave Wood most days when she’s at home. She loves the dead tree up in the field by Long Meg.’
Jude thought of the tree, its clean, dead limbs bleached white against the green of the woods. ‘I can understand that. I like it, too.’
‘Yeah, so do I. It’s a cool beast, isn’t it? I bet it’s been dead longer than I’ve been alive and it’ll probably still be standing there when I’m gone, unless a storm brings it down. But I’ve never fantasised about hanging myself on it, and I bet you never have, either.’
‘Is that what she said?’ Jude’s heart dipped. He couldn’t worry about every troubled youngster in the district.
‘Yep. In so many words.’ Mikey lifted his chin in defiance. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t just leave it. I couldn’t. After she’d gone I called her mum and told her about it.’
Jude looked at him. Maybe, after all, Mikey was learning something. Maybe he finally appreciated that Jude’s decision those four years before had been the only one open to him. ‘Careful, Mikey. You’re turning into me.’
‘Yeah. Except I told her I was going to do it first.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I can’t stop you.’ Mikey drank again, deeply. ‘But I didn’t think she was too upset. She didn’t storm off or anything. And with a bit of luck I’ll see her again.’
‘You did the right thing.’
‘I know. And I kind of think she wanted me to. Like sometimes when I was a kid and I asked to do stuff that everyone else was doing, and Mum would say no. And I was a bit relieved because I didn’t really want to but I felt I had to go along with it, even if I knew if I did it I might get into trouble. That sort of stuff.’
And then, distracted by divorce and years of ill-health, Linda Satterthwaite had given up the unequal struggle and there had been no-one to haul Mikey back from the edge of trouble until after he’d overstepped it. The simmering resentment which had hovered within him for years might, at last, be cooling as Mikey began to see things through an adult’s eyes. ‘What did her mum say?’
‘Thanked me and said she’d have a chat with her and keep an eye on her. And I will too, of course.’ Mikey turned his eyes towards the river, where the big dog had found a small one and the two were charging into the shallow water in pursuit of a pair of unconcerned ducks. ‘Shame I missed your hike up in the Pennines. But I’m going walking at the weekend. Helvellyn, probably.’
The subject was closed. They chatted about walking and Mikey’s plans and all sorts of other nonsense for a while, had another drink and then headed back to Wasby.
‘We’ll catch up again soon, hey?’ Jude pulled up outside the cottage. A light flicked on in Becca’s living room opposite.
‘Yeah, why not?’ Mikey’s phone tinged with a notification and he glanced down at it. ‘Ah, shit. Not again.’
‘What?’ Jude heard the note of sharpness in his own voice. ‘Has something happened?’ If it had he wouldn’t have heard about it because he wasn’t on call.
‘I doubt it.’ Mikey unclipped his seatbelt. ‘Just a WhatsApp notification. My mates are all freaked out.’ Like everyone else. ‘If someone isn’t in touch every ten minutes there’s someone on the group wondering where they are and whether they’ve topped themselves. That’s the third one today. It’s always the same. No charge on their phone, or no signal. I had someone getting stressed about me the other day and all that happened was that I went out and didn’t take my phone.’ He slid out of his seat. ‘See you.’
Jude watched him up the path and in through the door as if he were a child, then sat there for a moment longer wondering just how far Mikey’s new-found maturity had overtaken his teenage suggestibility. Just because things were wrong didn’t mean Mikey wouldn’t do them. He’d admitted that himself. That made it all the more important that someone kept him on the straight and narrow.
He got out of the car and headed up Becca’s front path. Holmes, the cat, shot out from underneath the low-spreading foliage of a rhododendron and bolted up the path just as the front door opened and Becca appeared on the step. ‘Jude. I was hoping to catch you.’
He stopped. Becca continued down the path and Holmes executed a neat U-turn before taking up his position at Jude’s feet, rubbing up around his shins. It was a declaration of loyalty usually guaranteed to rub Becca up the wrong way but today she didn’t seem remotely bothered when Jude, for something to do, picked the cat up. ‘I was hoping for a word with you too.’
‘It’s about Mikey.’
‘Yep,’ he said, as noncommittal as he could,
‘Not that there’s anything to worry about. Of course there isn’t. I just wondered if you wanted me to keep half an eye on him. Things being what they are around here.’
Holmes’ ecstatic purring drowned out the beating of Jude’s heart. It was as well. He shouldn’t be reacting like that when all Becca wanted to to talk to him about was a good deed. He shouldn’t be reacting like that at all. He was already in a relationship, for God’s sake. His grip on Holmes tightened. It wasn’t the first time. ‘That’s what I was hoping to see you about.’
‘You don’t think there’s any real risk, do you?’
‘To Mikey? No.’ But he thought of Adam Fleetwood nevertheless. ‘None at all. I just thought—’
‘Better safe than sorry?’
‘I know I shouldn’t worry about him. But I can’t help it.’
‘No. But you always will, won’t you?’
‘I don’t want to worry you, and he isn’t your responsibility. But I wondered if you could keep an eye on him. Let me know if he says anything.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll have a chat with him.’
There was a chance Mikey might even be flattered at so many people making their concern for him obvious. ‘Thanks.’ In Jude’s arms, Holmes wriggled in protest.
‘I’m fond of him, and it costs me nothing.’ She took a step towards him. ‘Don’t squeeze poor old Holmes so hard. He doesn’t like it.’
‘Sorry.’ Jude loosened his grip and Holmes jumped down and began to weave round their legs, circling Becca’s, then Jude’s, then Becca’s again, as if he were binding them together. ‘I’d better go.’
‘You know if there’s anything I can ever do, just ask.’
‘Same.’ Jude backed down the path and Holmes sat down in the middle of it, unconcerned and began to wash his face. ‘Brilliant. Thanks.’
‘See you.’
‘See you.’ He reached the Mercedes with relief, got in and slammed the door. When he looked back to raise a hand in farewell, Becca was already on her way up the path.
Back home in Wordswort
h Street, having negotiated the psychological obstacle of Adam Fleetwood, deliberately visible in his living room and giving him an obvious and ironic wave, Jude settled down to his laptop. There was little he could do. The case still remained one of apparently unconnected suicides and he’d come up with nothing to support his theory — if it even merited that description — that there might be a criminal element to it, but he couldn’t let it go. The probability of rolling a six twenty consecutive times he read, is one in 3 quadrillion, 656 trillion, 158 billion, 440 million, 62 thousand and 976.
Numbers he could manage, but these numbers were beyond him. Three consecutive sixes came in at odds of just over 200 — nothing major, but Vanessa had mentioned a fourth suicide and four would take it to one in over a thousand. Of course the numbers didn’t translate to the human problem that was in front of him, but one thing caught him. Every additional consecutive event dramatically reduced the odds of whatever happened being a normal occurrence.
He messaged Mikey. Did you find your pal? And it was a chilling two minutes before the answer came back. Yeah. He turned up.
Jude stared and stared at the numbers in front of him, and then he turned elsewhere on the internet and began to look at Eden Whispers.
Eleven
‘Well, this is brewing up into a nasty one, and no mistake,’ said Tammy, briskly.
Doddsy had stopped on the edge of the clearing in Cave Wood. Jude’s greatest fear — and Doddsy’s own, and Faye’s, and that of every parent in the district — had come to nightmare fruition, and the body of a young woman dangled from the branch of an oak tree in front of him. The branch was about ten feet from the ground and the rope short; the young woman’s feet brushed the long grass and brambles as she swayed slightly in a stiff breeze. Blonde hair hung loose on her shoulders. Thank God, her face was turned away from him. A prayer framed itself inside his head and went drifting off up to heaven, too late to save anything except, possibly, her soul.
