by Stef Penney
Somehow, though, I’ve had the feeling that Katie was thinking about me, too. I had a feeling that I would see her outside of school again—and not like this, by breaking into her stable—properly, I mean. Because she wanted to. Despite that, I’m very aware that it’s a big risk to jump out at her, which is why I was planning to leave it for another day. But I’m getting worried about my arm. And, I tell myself, it won’t make any difference to her whether I’ve been here for one day or two.
Sometime afterward, the door opens and she walks in. I can’t see her— I don’t dare raise my head, but I can hear footsteps, and I reckon they sound like hers. Then I hear her talking to Subadar in that cooing, baby-ish voice she uses to him. My heart is thumping a mile a minute. I feel dizzy. I raise my head until I can see the glint of her honey-colored head, and take a deep breath.
“Hey . . . Katie!”
I try to make it a whisper that will travel just to her. And it does. She freezes. I can feel her fear from here.
“Katie . . . over here.”
Her head snaps around, her eyes wide and suspicious.
“Stella?”
She looks cross. Why on earth does she think it would be Stella? “Katie, it’s JJ . . .”
“Yeah! I’m just coming . . .”
Stella is outside, that’s why. She walks in through the door; I bury my head in the straw, but it’s too late. Katie can see the voice didn’t come from outside, that it wasn’t Stella.
I sit up, furiously brushing straw out of my hair, in time to see the looks going from one girl to the other, and then from both to me—hard, sharp, suspicious.
“It’s just me. Sorry if I scared you.”
“Fuck!” says Katie. She sounds scared. “Christ on a bike, JJ.”
Stella says, “What on earth are you doing here?”
She looks furious—but she’s looking at Katie, not at me.
I swing my legs over the side of the stack and slide down. As soon as I do, I feel really dizzy, and my legs don’t feel like they’re going to hold me up. With a muzzy feeling that things could go either way, I decide to go with the flow, and sort of collapse in a heap at the bottom. My eyes close, and my head comes to a stop at an awkward angle against something hard and painful—the same bloody bucket that tripped me up last night.
I think, Okay, I’ll just wait and see what happens now.
For a long moment, no one moves or speaks.
I imagine them looking at each other in horror.
“God, do you think he’s dead?” says Katie.
“I think he’s just fainted,” says Stella.
Someone moves toward me.
“What’s he doing here?” Stella is quite near to me. I can hear the sharp edge in her voice.
“I don’t know! I didn’t know he was here!”
“Really? But he’s been here before?”
“Well . . . once! Ages ago . . .”
“We should get your mother.”
“Oh, she’s in a foul mood. She’ll think it’s my fault.”
“You really didn’t know about this?”
“No! God, look at his hand . . .”
“Oh, gross . . . JJ?” Stella kneels in the straw beside me. She prods my shoulder gently.
“JJ, are you all right?”
How long do faints last? They never say in those old books, just talk about smelling salts bringing people around. I have a feeling it’s not very long, though. Plus, they might call her parents at any minute.
I make my eyelids flicker a bit, then open my eyes. I think about groaning, too, but am not sure I can pull it off.
“JJ?”
“Yeah?”
Stella looks relieved but still cross. Katie crouches down beside her and smiles. She doesn’t look pissed off now.
“God . . . What’s happened?”
“Katie . . . I’m sorry about this. Being here. Didn’t know where else I could go.”
“It’s all right.”
I don’t think they’re going to call anyone. They’re both on my side now; I can feel it. Amazing. All I did was fall over.
“What happened to your hand?”
I raise my hand to be the center of attention: it’s purple, bloated, and horrible-looking.
“I was in a fight . . . I had to get away. He threatened to kill me.”
Sharp intakes of breath.
“Who?”
I feel a bit bad about this, but, shutting my eyes as if I can’t bear to think about it, I say, “My uncle. He . . .”
With an effort, I use my injured hand to pull back the sleeve on my left arm. Both girls gasp in horror.
“Oh my God! He did that?”
“JJ, you should call the police!”
I shake my head. There are limits, even with Ivo, that I am not prepared to cross. “No, no, I can’t. Everyone would get into trouble. My mum, my great-uncle . . . They’d get evicted.”
“That looks infected. It’s all red. You have to . . . get it seen to.”
Katie sounds worried. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her sound worried before. It’s kind of nice.
I move my head off the bucket, and both of them hover over me, sort of helping without touching, as I sit upright against the straw.
“I’m really sorry about turning up here, but I didn’t know what to do. I had to get away, and then I ended up near here—it was the middle of the night . . . I just wanted somewhere to sleep, and think.”
“You should have woken me up.”
Katie looks soft now, her lips parted. Stella glances at her.
“We have to get something for that cut. You should really go to hospital. You need stitches.”
I touch my bad hand to my forehead, which brings an entirely unfeigned gasp of pain.
“I don’t want to do anything that’ll get my family into trouble. You mustn’t call the police or anything, please. Will you promise?”
I look them both in the eyes. Both of them nod. Stella more reluctantly than Katie.
“If I can just get some antiseptic . . . and something to eat. I’ll be able to work something out.”
I have no idea what I could work out. But I figure that if I sound like I know what I’m doing, they’re less likely to go and get the council leader. I don’t think he would be too sympathetic, somehow.
“You can’t hide in here forever, though. Her parents are bound to suspect something.”
“I know. I know. Just for a day or two.”
“Does your mum know about this . . . fight?”
Stella is frowning, thinking things through.
I hesitate for a moment. What to say about Mum? I can’t even imagine speaking to her at the moment. What would I say?
I nod. Stella looks shocked.
Katie is, by contrast, businesslike.
“Of course you can stay here. I’ll bring you food and stuff. That’s easy. Then we can think about what to do. You can’t go back home. Not at the moment, anyway.”
Katie looks pleased. I think she’s decided to enjoy this. It’s a game, a secret she can keep from her parents.
“Okay. I’ll go and get some stuff from the bathroom. And then . . . I’ll say we’re going to take our tea with us when we take Subadar out. We can get stuff from the kitchen.”
She grins, excited.
Stella still looks unsure. She chews her lip.
“Thanks, Katie. I really appreciate this. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.”
Katie stands up, her eyes gleaming with plans.
“Stella, come on . . .”
“Okay.” Stella still looks grave.
“Can you get back up there by yourself?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“We won’t be long.”
I feel light-headed with relief. I’m overwhelmed with love for them both. They are angels.
Katie goes back over to Subadar for a moment, as if to reestablish her alibi, then the girls go out, chatting, sounding as natural as though they are walk
ing down the school corridor, and I am somewhere else, miles away.
As soon as I lie down in my little hollow, I start shaking. I haven’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, on top of everything else that has happened. For a minute I think I’m going to be sick, but instead, for some reason, I start crying. Why now, I don’t know. Tears run sideways out of the corners of my eyes into the straw. I must be a bad person. I have done so many bad things—breaking in to somebody’s home, smashing and stealing and lying. But aren’t other people worse than me?
I want to see Mum, and I can’t bear the thought of her, all at the same time. I hope she’s feeling sorry about throwing me out last night, and about saying what she did. I am sorry about the things I said to her, although it seems to me that they’re all true. And Ivo must have come back by now. They’re going to realize that it was me who broke into his trailer. Maybe he will even realize that I went through everything. That I saw what he keeps in his cupboard. So what? I don’t care. I’m never going to see him again. I just need to get a message to Mum at some point, to let her know that I’m all right. Eventually.
One thing at a time, I tell myself. One thing at a time. All I have to do now is stop crying before Katie and Stella come back and catch me.
34.
Ray
The building site at the Black Patch has become a crime scene. I spot the fluttering yellow tape strung across the entrance as I drive up. That’s the first thing you see from the road; the second is the pall of sullen brown water creeping across the site from the watercourse under the alders.
There’s a little green tent on the southern edge of the site. The water hasn’t reached it. Not yet.
It’s not a promising situation. I have to persuade someone in charge that I have something they need. I’ve brought copies of the photographs of Rose; it’s the only bargaining chip I have.
Police figures clad in cheap macs crawl around the tent like ants. The mud sucks at my boots as I wade toward them.
I track down the inspector in charge, a man with hooded brown eyes and brown shadows under them, smoker’s skin, and slightly too-long hair that—he might think—makes him look like an aging Turkish film star. His name is Detective Inspector Considine.
“Ray Lovell.”
I show him my license.
“When did this happen?”
He glares at me with bored superiority, an expression that plainly says he doesn’t have to tell me anything.
“What are you doing here, exactly?”
I’ve already explained myself to two underlings, but it’s part of the game, so I go over it again.
“I’ve been hired to investigate a disappearance. A nineteen-year-old girl who went missing around here about six years ago.”
I hand over the photocopied flyer that features our two photographs of Rose—the race-day one and the wedding snap. He glances briefly at them, not betraying too much interest.
“These don’t even look like the same person,” he says, his voice dismissive.
“They were taken two years apart. This is the most recent.”
I tap the wedding picture. Actually, I now notice that he has a point. Somehow, the photocopying process has exaggerated the differences wrought by those two years: the carefree girl with her solid jaw and secret smile; and the bride, tentative, uncertain—almost as though she was already beginning to disappear.
“It is the same girl. Her name is Rose Wood. Rose Janko when she married.”
“Janko? What sort of a name is that?”
“A Gypsy name. Eastern European origin. English family.”
He grunts. Not in the pejorative way a lot of people would. He’s actually a little more interested. I wonder whether he has Gypsy blood himself, but that’s not something you ask a policeman on first meeting.
“About six years? Can’t you be more specific?”
“The reports are inconsistent. January or February 1980. She definitely disappeared in winter.”
“Well, okay, thanks for that.”
He’s not dismissing it.
“So what happened?”
I take out a packet of cigarettes and offer him one. He accepts, so I take one, too, to keep him company, and produce my lighter. We’re just two buddies standing out here in a muddy field, smoking in the rain.
He’s weighing up how little he can get away with telling me.
“Digger turned up some bits of bone. Someone saw them and called us in.”
“And this is the first time, at this site? I mean, I’ve heard it was an old burial pit for plague victims—they must have got all sorts here.”
“Oh, that. No, it’s the first time. I think the plague pit is just a rumor spread by the locals. Or maybe they’re below the level of the foundations.”
“So these bones weren’t that deep?”
I’m trying to sound casual, but an excitement grips my insides. Considine smiles, man to man, detective to detective.
“Look, I’ll tell you what I know, and then you’ll piss off, right? And it’s not worth much.”
I nod.
“Sure.”
“It’s about four feet down. Digger went right through it, chewed it up—it’ll be a nightmare to piece back together, even if we find all the bits. I mean, we’re talking jackstraws down there.”
“Age and sex?”
“Don’t go together.”
I ha-ha, politely.
“Can’t tell anything like that yet. They’ve got bits of rib and arm and vertebrae. Won’t know till they get it in the lab, and you’d think those bastards were on an hourly rate, pace they move.”
He shrugs.
“I’m just telling you because you brought these.”
He flaps the photos and a fat drop of rain hits Rose’s photocopied face with a splat. I fight the urge to snatch the pictures back.
“Appreciate it.”
“So don’t go blabbing to all and sundry. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.”
Although he has just told me that.
“Of course. When do you think you’ll have some more information on the body?”
DI Considine shrugs. He sucks the dregs from the fag and flicks it into a puddle.
“We’ll let you know.”
He says it grudgingly.
“We would really appreciate it. The family are anxious to know of any . . . news, you understand.”
Considine heads back to the tent, and then turns around, I’m sure, so he can have the last word.
“The river’s supposed to rise again, so we’ll probably have to pack up this lot. Then it’s anybody’s guess. Don’t hold your breath.”
Dismissed, I walk over toward the river, up to the edge of the creeping floodwater. The builders would have had to stop work, anyway, even without the discovery. From here you can see the original course of the river winding through the trees and scrub, even though it has overflowed its banks. The water looks brown and somehow viscous, thick like oil, holding things in suspension: things it has taken from the earth, secrets. A crisp packet is borne along on invisible currents, chased by a carrier bag. Wands of hazel and alder pierce the surface. Anything could be hidden under there. Turning around at the edge of the water, I look back across the waste that used to be the Black Patch.
I imagine there were more trees before the bulldozers moved in, ringing the site, perhaps, possibly along the edge where the little tent now stands. A shallow grave in the woods? Or rather, not that shallow— someone took the time to dig down four feet. That’s not a five-minute job, in fear and haste. Were they trying to do the thing properly? With care and dignity? Or was it simply professional thoroughness?
Beyond the chicken-wire fence is a belt of well-established woodland— field maple, beech, and hazel—that then gives way to farmland, rising away from the river, thus safer from flooding, presumably less of a bargain for land-hungry developers. Here, by the water, standing still for even a minute means that midges and mosquitoes form a cloud around
me. This isn’t somewhere I would have chosen to build a house, but then, the businessmen who chose it and the builders who build it aren’t going to live here.
I imagine stopping here in a trailer, in the old days, what it would have been like. It would have been a lot smaller, largely hidden from the road by trees. It is, in any case, a quiet road, not a direct route to anywhere. There are no buildings in sight, within earshot. As long as other Travelers weren’t stopping here, it could have been a good place to dispose of someone. Of course, I can’t prove that they ever came here. Or rather, the only proof I have is that Tene made a mistake. He said “the Black Patch,” and then tried to divert me by claiming it was somewhere else. Why would he do that? Why would the words come tripping out of his mouth if he wasn’t haunted by them?
I stare back at the tent. One of the tiny creatures flies into my eye; another brushes my nose. I take out another cigarette and light it, just to try to fend off the wildlife.
The rain begins to patter down harder, slapping the smooth surface of the water, extinguishing the cigarette in my hand. I throw the stub into the water, where some hidden current bears it swiftly away. It looks uncanny and purposeful, like a magnet moving under a table. Whatever happened to Rose, I have to find out. Whatever hidden current took her, it must be under the surface still.
“Are you Rose?” I say softly but out loud. “If you are here, tell me. Give me a sign. I know you’ve been waiting.”
