The Primrose Switchback

by Jo Bannister

  “Nothing much happened in Skipley this week?” asked Burgess grimly. “Having to rehash old news to fill the pages?”

  Fear always made Rosie querulous. It would have been wiser to take some of the heat out of the situation. But, not being built for flight, adrenalin made her square up to her enemies. “Is it old news?” she demanded. “Or the reason a girl was murdered in Skipley a week ago?”

  The silence was more than an absence of sound: it filled the hall like fast-falling snow or ash, creeping into all the crevices, setting hard, a thing without substance which, in enough volume, was capable of crushing out life.

  Finally Burgess fought his way through it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Jackie,” whispered Mrs Burgess. “She’s talking about Jackie.”

  Rosie was watching Roy Burgess like a hawk, and she still didn’t see that Road to Damascus moment where the dominoes tumbled, the pieces fell into place, sudden comprehension flooded the eyes and he reached for his piano wire. If anything he looked more mystified than before. “Jackie Pickering?”

  “Of course Jackie Pickering!” exclaimed Rosie. “She’s dead, Mr Burgess! Murdered.”

  “I know she’s dead,” he snarled, “I read the papers. I still don’t understand what you’re doing here. Are you looking for Debbie? She doesn’t live here any more. She never lived at my garage!”

  By degrees Rosie was feeling less like somebody cornering a killer and more like someone who might have made a mistake. “Debbie knew Jackie better than anyone else. They were close friends for years, they still talked every week. Jackie was working on a story, a big story: she didn’t tell anyone at the office what it was but I bet she told Debbie. It may have got her killed. I need to know what it was.”

  Burgess was beginning to see daylight. “And you thought of me. So you’re here to accuse me of … what, exactly? Murdering Jackie? Why? Oh, I see – the judgement of the court wasn’t enough, she wanted to take another crack at me.” His voice developed a dangerous rasp. “Is that it – is that what you thought? That my daughter’s friend intended to expose me for what she believed I did when Debbie was a child, and to shut her up I murdered her? That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you believe.”

  Rosie picked her words. “It was a possibility that needed exploring.”

  “By you?” He sounded incredulous. “Are you mad? You thought I’d already killed one person so you came here to confront me? Why didn’t you tell the police, let them come? Why does it matter to you enough to risk your neck? Because let’s face it, if the man who killed Jackie decided to kill you too, that living advertisement for Care in the Community out there in your car wouldn’t be able to stop him. What … why …?” Torn between fury and incomprehension, he was struggling to find the words. “Why do you care so much?”

  “Because if I can’t find out what happened to Jackie a young man is going to spend the rest of his days in a living hell,” Rosie shot back. “I don’t mean prison; I don’t mean a mental institution. I mean, with violent, insane people inside his head.”

  She saw his expression, caught her breath and shook her head wearily. “I don’t expect you to understand. But that’s why I’m here.”

  He didn’t know what to say to her. Of course he was angry; even so, he could see that she had a purpose beyond making capital out of his family’s misfortune. He wasn’t ready to help her. But he wasn’t ready to throw her out either. “They’ve arrested someone?”

  “Not exactly,” said Rosie. She wasn’t sure how much of this she should be sharing, especially with him, but she was beginning to suspect it mightn’t matter. “He found her. My friend. He was concussed, and now he thinks he killed her. I don’t believe he did. I have to convince him.”

  “You need an alternate suspect.”

  She demurred, unconvincingly. “I’m just trying to contact your daughter. She may be the only person who knows what Jackie was working on.”

  “And you thought you’d find her here? Miss Holland, you do know what the court case was about?”

  “Of course I do. I also know that you were acquitted. I needed to know if that was the end of it.”

  Mrs Burgess said softly, “You’d think it would be, wouldn’t you?” She sounded close to tears. “That bloody man. That bloody, bloody man!”

  It was Rosie’s turn to practise the puzzled squint. What bloody man? Not Shad – who else?

  In another moment she’d have asked, and then the dominos would have begun falling into place. But before she could shape the words all hell broke loose. What she initially took for a rock, but turned out on closer inspection to be a garden gnome, came flying through the pane in the front door surrounded by a halo of shattered glass. The gnome, who was cast in cement with his hat and his boots picked out in red, cannoned off the newel post at the foot of the stairs and dug a divot out of the parquet flooring. Shards of toughened glass spread out, glittering like frost.

  The three people standing in the hall watched the progress of the ballistic gnome and for several seconds thought of nothing but keeping their feet out of his way.

  None of them was looking at the door; none of them saw a pink hand come through the gap where the glass had been and grope for the latch. Neither Rosie nor the Burgesses had got beyond thinking of a flying gnome as a kind of natural phenomenon when Arthur Prufrock flung back the door, filling the aperture rather better from side to side than he did from top to bottom, and bawled, “That boy: stand still! Any more of this and someone’s going home with a note!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  News travels fast. Even in the days before the printing press it had a way of getting around, and what it lost in accuracy it made up in colour. Since the birth of telecommunications it gets round virtually instantaneously, so viewers half a world away can witness events as they unfold in a mid-West playground or an Asiatic desert. But accuracy can suffer as much from speed as it did from delay.

  Alex went out for an evening paper at four o’clock and found her progress observed, up the street and then back, by three pairs of sullen eyes floating like blobs of blackcurrant jam in the semolina faces of three fourteen-year-old girls. From the backpacks and the rudimentary uniform, they had come here after chucking-out time at the local comprehensive.

  Her first instinct was to pass them without comment and get on with her own business. They were nothing to do with her or she with them. But close enough to the Chronicle to put her foot over the threshold she found herself wondering what Rosie would have done. Passed them by in silence? Allowed herself to be stared down by three pasty girls who probably still had Barbie dolls at home? She didn’t think so. She tucked the paper firmly under her arm and turned back.

  “I’m Alex Fisher,” she said evenly. “Can I help you?”

  The direct approach seemed to unnerve them. They looked away and mumbled, and pushed themselves off the wall they were leaning on and seemed about to leave. Then one of them looked up, sullen gaze touched with a mixture of defiance and prurience. “That’s where he works, innit? Is he in there now?”

  Alex felt her heart plummet, worked to keep the dismay out of her face and voice. “Who’s that?” As if she didn’t know.

  “Him as killed that girl.” Emboldened by Alex’s restraint – she appeared to have been ready to dodge a slap – she pressed for answers. “Was it really black magic? Do you know him? Is he really a gypsy?”

  Alex Fisher had been blessed with a demeanour which always seemed cool no matter what the turmoil beneath. This wasn’t the first time she’d had cause to be grateful. If nobody knew she was in a panic, perhaps it wasn’t fair to describe it as a panic at all.

  She breathed steadily for a moment before replying. “You’re referring to the death of Miss Pickering. I’m afraid you’ve got it badly wrong. We don’t know who killed her. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that it wasn’t anyone who works here.”

  “Well, you would say that,” said one of the other girls in a tone o
f deep scepticism.

  “Indeed I would,” said Alex briskly, “because it’s the truth. If you want the full story I suggest you buy the Chronicle tomorrow.”

  “What – for a cover-up?”

  Alex was keenly aware that she was Rosie’s understudy, not her successor. It seemed incumbent upon her to react in Rosie’s image as well as nature permitted her. She tried hard to bristle. “The Skipley Chronicle has nothing to cover up, and wouldn’t if it had. I don’t know where you got this story about black magic but it’s nonsense. The man you refer to – who is a friend of ours but does not in fact work here – is helping Skipley CID. And I mean exactly that: he was a witness, he’s helping them find out what happened to Miss Pickering and who’s to blame.”

  “An’he’s a gypsy?”

  She was damned if she was going to lie: it was nothing to lie about, nothing to be ashamed of. Her back stiffened with disapproval. “I believe his mother is of Romany extraction.” She winced to hear herself say it and didn’t quite know why. Alex lacked Rosie’s robust attitude to political correctness. She worked on the assumption that if anything was capable of offending anybody it was best to look for another way of putting it.

  “Told you!” shrieked the first girl triumphantly, shouldering her bag and swinging off down the street with the others in tow. “Told you it was black magic!”

  Alex watched them go in despair, and was only glad she had nothing heavy to throw at them.

  She went to her office and sat down to check the paper for anything that would reflect on what appeared in The Primrose Path tomorrow. It was too late to change much, except in a dire emergency, but there was always the time-honoured remedy of rendering the offending material unreadable. A dab of acid in the right spot saved many a newspaper from a libel action. Before computer setting a trusty printer used to wallop the type with a hammer.

  After a few minutes Alex found she was unable to concentrate on the paper for thinking of the exchange outside. It had left her uneasy. She didn’t see how anything could come of it, but still … She left the paper spread on her desk and headed for the editor’s office.

  “I don’t expect it’s anything to worry about but …”

  She hadn’t realised Matt was in there too. Their eyes met, kindled and then sheered apart; Alex actually blushed. They were at that bashful stage of relationships where, without being prepared to lie about it, they quite hoped other people hadn’t noticed. Other people, of course, knew exactly what they were up to and took a perverse pleasure in showing no discretion at all. Even Dan Sale, who had as much time for office gossip as the Mothers’Union has for King Herod, couldn’t resist splitting a malicious grin between them. Recent developments could hardly have been more widely known if they’d been caught bonking on top of the photocopier.

  Sale coughed the smile off his face. “Was it me you were looking for?” His gaze strayed towards his proprietor. “Or, urn …?”

  Alex stiffened a perfectly formed sinew and summoned up some blood. “In fact, you should both hear this. It may mean nothing. But I was just talking to some schoolgirls who accused us of employing a practitioner in the black arts.”

  Matt had flashed his engaging grin before he realised she wasn’t joking. He looked quickly at Sale, and Sale wasn’t smiling at all. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them the truth. And to buy the paper tomorrow.”

  “Always a sound response,” nodded Sale approvingly. He looked as if he was going to say something else but then didn’t.

  Matt had known him just long enough to be able to fill in some of his silences. He raised an questioning eyebrow. “Is this what you were afraid of? The backlash – is this how it starts?”

  “With three schoolgirls?” Sale gave a negligent shrug. “Unless their satchels are full of Molotov cocktails, how much damage can three schoolgirls do? They’ve probably gone home now anyway. Have they?”

  Matt, who was closest, moved to the window. He answered with a sharp intake of breath.

  Alex, frowning, said, “Well – are they still there?”

  Matt cleared his throat. “Bit hard to say. I can’t see them, but they could be with the gang from Threatening Crowds R Us.”

  “He used to be a teacher,” explained Rosie, a shade superfluously, when the dust had settled.

  “And what is he now?” asked Roy Burgess carefully. She gave a rueful shrug. “My friend.”

  “You do have some interesting ones, don’t you?”

  When Prufrock armed himself with the cement gnome, he had no idea what he was going to walk in on. But he believed Rosie was in danger, and he could no more have hung back chewing his fingernails than ignore a rude limerick written in somebody’s hymn book. Widely considered a mild-mannered, inoffensive little man, in fact Arthur Prufrock’s scrubbed complexion and neat white moustache hid a soul of adamant. Break a window? He’d have stormed the Bastille for a friend in trouble.

  But he didn’t find what he expected to. No whirling fists or glinting knives; no air-thickening threats and obscenities; not even a vigorous trading of insults. Roy Burgess hadn’t shut the door to keep his visitor from escaping: he’d done it to keep in the central heating.

  Prufrock said stiffly, “I appear to have misread the situation. In which case I owe you an apology, and the Skipley Chronicle owes you a new pane of glass.”

  “Never mind the glass,” exclaimed Burgess in exasperation. “Can we please all stick to the point until, as an absolute basic minimum, I know what the hell’s going on!”

  But Rosie ignored him, her attention on his wife. “What bloody man?”

  The gnome had interrupted her train of thought. Mrs Burgess stared at her visitor without comprehension. “What?”

  “You said, ‘That bloody bloody man’. What bloody man?”

  “The one who started all this. The one who told Debbie she’d been abused.”

  A chink of daylight glimmered through the fog in Rosie’s brain. “Someone had to tell her?”

  “Yes. She didn’t remember because it never happened.”

  The hall wasn’t big enough for four of them and a cement gnome. Mrs Burgess sighed and opened the door to the living room. “Come inside. If we have to talk about this we might as well be comfortable.”

  It began in Debbie Burgess’s second year at university. The course was demanding, she’d had trouble making friends, she became involved in a difficult and ultimately destructive relationship. She got behind with her work, became seriously depressed, went to her GP and was sent for psychotherapy.

  Naturally concerned, her family took care to check out the practitioner first. Between psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists and counsellors, some of them properly trained, qualified and regulated and some not, there’s scope for a crank or two and that was the last thing Debbie needed. The Burgesses were reassured to learn that the recommended therapist was a qualified MD. They believed their daughter would be safe in his hands. Their sessions began.

  She was depressed, anxious, apathetic, her energies stultified and without organisation: in a healthy and intelligent young woman, clearly there was some reason for this. How did she get on with her family?

  Fine.

  She was, in fact, still living at home. Any particular reason?

  Convenience and economy. Her home was convenient for the university, cheaper and more comfortable than digs.

  But what was the real reason?

  Debbie didn’t understand. Those were the real reasons.

  She got on all right with her mother and father?

  Fine.

  Both of them?

  Both of them.

  When did she lose her virginity?

  That came as a surprise. But she answered honestly. Sixteen, with an assistant instructor at an outdoor pursuits centre. Under an upturned canoe, with him scared of losing his job and constantly peeping out from under the spray dodger.

  Enjoyable?

  Had better since.

&
nbsp; But no lasting relationships. Why might that be?

  Debbie Burgess pointed out that at twenty she wasn’t ready to settle down. She wanted fun, not lasting relationships.

  Then why wasn’t she happier with her life?

  She was too polite, too nicely brought up, to point out that this was his field of expertise and the reason she had come.

  What was her earliest awareness of her sexuality?

  She didn’t know how to answer that. He seemed to think she was refusing to answer it.

  Was she aware of research indicating that children were sexual beings much sooner than was often assumed?

  Well … no.

  Really? Or was she avoiding thinking about it?

  There was something about his persistence she was beginning to find alarming. She had no reason to think about it, she said, since she didn’t have any small children and it was a long time since she’d been one.

  Did she remember being a small child?

  Just about.

  Not clearly?

  Does anyone?

  Oh yes, some people did.

  Perhaps they had reason to.

  And perhaps the others had reason not to.

  She bridled at that. He was getting at something, she just wasn’t sure what. Was he accusing her of something? She asked, What kind of reason?

  And he said, “Why don’t we take a look?”

  She’d heard of regression therapy, had thought of it as something out of the drawer marked Weird, along with astrology and crystals, mostly pursued by earnest young women who also took pottery classes. She hadn’t time for pottery classes and she didn’t think she had time for this. She was surprised at him suggesting it. He was a doctor, with letters after his name.

  So maybe she was wrong and it was a legitimate avenue of exploration. She shrugged off her unease and agreed; and when he said it would involve hypnosis, she agreed to that too.

  Rosie got to the climax before the painful tale Mrs Burgess was telling. She’d heard it before, more than once. “And under hypnosis,” she said flatly, “Debbie remembered being sexually abused by her father.”