The Body Lies

by Jo Baker

  “I would’ve thought someone would’ve told you,” he said.

  “No one tells me anything.”

  “You can always ask me.”

  “But I don’t know what I don’t know, so I don’t know what to ask. It’s all a bit Donald Rumsfeld. All the unknown unknowns.”

  We stopped at my office door. He looked at me a long moment. “I think of anything you should know, I’ll let you know, I promise.”

  “Thanks.”

  He headed off down the corridor, then turned again, walking backwards as he spoke: “Great lecture, by the way.”

  I covered my hot cheeks. “Thank you, thanks.”

  And I went into my office and put my head in my hands and howled with embarrassment. Quietly, because the walls are very thin.

  Gill House was in a mobile-phone black spot; I had to cross the lane and stand by the field gate to make a call or send a text. I should have got onto BT and had them hook the landline back up, but I rather liked being unreachable. I dropped out of social media like a stone; I didn’t miss the cud-chew of memes, the snapshots of all those perfect lives, the flares of temper, the cod spirituality, not one teensy bit. And I couldn’t pick up work emails even if I wanted to. I felt insulated. Time at Gill House soon took on its own particular rhythm. I’d work while Sam napped, or played, or watched a bit of TV. At the weekends, we’d walk in the woods, we’d throw stones in the river, we’d read books, feed the birds.

  The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes, when down came a blackbird…

  I already recognised the blackbird, the little cheeky sparrows and the blue-tits. But that big dusty-pink and slate-blue one that clung to a branch and swayed there and never joined the others feeding: I didn’t know what that kind was called.

  Some days, Mark leaned in the doorway and watched the birds with us. It seemed to do him good, this place. In London, he’d spend the weekend fretting about school politics and pupil welfare, or just chipping away at a mountain of marking. Here, though, he seemed content to drift along with the current of our days. He’d play with Sam, take him for a walk down to the village shop; I’d hear their chatter as they trundled down the lane. He seemed somehow more present, here, with us, than he ever was when we were together all the time in London. I became hopeful. I started conjuring up fantasies. It’s a bad habit of mine. That he was coming around to the idea of this place. That he saw its benefits for all of us. That the three of us would be together again, and it would be easy, and comfortable. We’d have family life and good work and a proper home. A pipe dream, perhaps, but also not that wildly ambitious.

  Some Sundays, Sam and I made the lunch together; it took forever, with Sam’s assistance, so that on this one particular afternoon we were sitting down to an undercooked gratin of aubergines and courgettes and potatoes at half two, and not one o’clock as I’d intended, and Mark was getting antsy. By the time we got onto the apple crumble it was pushing Mark’s drive back late, into darkness. Four hours in the car. Prep for school when he got home.

  “You could just stay,” I said tentatively. “Take another day here; phone in sick and drive down tomorrow.”

  “You know how it goes. Someone doesn’t turn up, it all goes to sh…” A glance at Sam, a smile. Same as ever. Can’t let anybody down.

  And so we finished lunch and he slung his stuff in the car, and we stood in the fine rain as he squeezed Sam and kissed me and clambered into the driver’s seat. He turned the car, windscreen wipers squeaking. Sam and I stood at the gate to wave him away; I caught a glimpse of his face, profiled, for this last moment still physically here. He looked so different. He looked already exhausted. Trying to do his best by everyone was wearing him threadbare.

  I was chewing at my cheek and we were both still waving after him as the car slowed and then pulled over to one side, to avoid some obstruction in the lane. When the car had gone, a woman peeled herself away from the hedge, and stumbled out onto the tarmac. She was wearing a long blue coat, all the way down to her ankles, and she stood there uncertainly for a moment, as if she had forgotten what she was doing. Then she saw us, and flapped a hand to keep us where we were, and came beetling towards us. I waited, puzzled, Sammy on my hip. As she came nearer, I saw that it wasn’t a coat she was wearing, but a dressing gown; navy blue fleece with a quilted yoke. Her feet were bare. There was rain on her hair. She wasn’t that old, late fifties, maybe; probably a bit younger than my mum. She had an agitated, urgent air about her. She came up weirdly close. I went to step back, but she wrapped her arms around us, held tight.

  “Thank goodness,” she said. She smelt indoorsy and sour. She rubbed my back. “There now.”

  Sammy wriggled and protested. I held him, and she held us, and my eyes filled up. Then she took a step back, released me. Her expression shifted, went out of focus.

  “You’re. You’re…” She was trying to place me and couldn’t.

  “Hi, yes. We’re new here.”

  “Where’s Sarah?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t met Sarah yet.”

  I assumed a grown-up daughter. I assumed that this sometimes happened. That finding her mother gone, Sarah would be scooping up the car keys and heading for the door, to go out looking for her.

  “It’s so cold,” the woman said, but it was mild and wet and grey.

  “You’re just not properly dressed for it. We should get you home, get you warm. Do you know where you live? What’s your name?”

  She drew breath to speak, but another voice called out: “Gracie?”

  She turned towards the sound, her pale feet padding round on the tarmac. John Metcalfe strode up the lane. He had on an old tweed jacket and blue overalls, folded down wellingtons, Moss ghosting along beside him. He was scowling. He reached out towards us, and the woman put her pale hand in his.

  “There you are, Grace,” he said.

  She smiled faintly.

  “You have to tell me when you’re going for a walk, then we can go together. Or else our Jim will take you.” Then he turned to me and said, “I hope she’s not been mithering you.”

  He was gentler now than I could have supposed. “No, not at all. She just mistook me for someone else. She said she was looking for Sarah. Perhaps they missed each other.”

  He blinked, then turned to her: “This is the lady who lives here now, Grace. We talked about it, remember? And this is her little boy, remember? We said it was nice to have neighbours, and we’d go and say hello, one of your good days. Remember.”

  It was like an invocation, like a prayer. Remember. Remember. Remember.

  “You could come by for tea one day?” I ventured. “Sammy loves to meet new people.”

  “Oh, I’m not new,” Grace pointed out.

  “No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

  “Well,” he said, and seemed to be about to say something more, but he just said, “Thanks, lass.” And he drew his wife away.

  A hard and lonely road to walk, that one, and only leading to the dark.

  Winter’s Blood

  By S. D. Haygarth

  Part One

  DCI Winters got out of the Ford Mondeo, stuffed his hands deep into his gilet pockets and sighed. He might have been twenty-five years in the service but it didn’t make it any easier. Death was never easy.

  The woods along the riverbank were a popular dog-walking area, only recently accessible again after winter floods. The call came from a middle-aged woman who’d pulled a stick from a tangle of jetsam to lob it for her Labrador, but saw skin and hair and a brown eye blankly staring back at her. She had to drag her dog away and scramble up the bank to get a signal and call the police, and tell them that she had found a body.

  No. Not a body, he reminded himself. A girl. Because the first step to finding out how she died was finding out how she had lived. You have to work your way back
from the body lying on the ground, follow the threads of her life to find out how she died.

  All this was running through Winters’ thoughts on that chilly November morning as, followed by his partner, Detective Constable Lauren Clarke, he ducked under the police tape and slithered down the bank to where the SOCOs were at work under their white tent; Dave Kitchener was taking photographs. Soon she’d be bagged up for transportation to the mortuary.

  “What’ve we got here, Dave?”

  The girl lay there, naked on the stones. She was white as porcelain, as smooth and flawless, and as cold. Kitchener took a pen from a pocket. He lifted her hair aside, to show her throat. There were blue bruises on her white skin. Winters bit on the inside of his cheek; it was the cold weather that was making his eyes water; that’s what he told himself. DC Clarke peered over to take a look, and then turned her face away.

  “I’ll get onto arranging an ID, boss,” Lauren said.

  “You do that, Lauren.”

  She began the climb back up the bank, getting out her phone.

  Everyone knew who it was already; they just weren’t saying. Posters of her smiling face were on every parish notice board and stuck in every village shop window; they were pinned to telegraph poles all through the town. Her image was shared and reshared, tweeted and retweeted. Rachel Powell was seventeen, medium height, slender build, brown hair, brown eyes. She attended Youth Club in Kirkby, she’d been a Guide and then had helped out with the local troop. Her lovely family were distraught; it was ten days since she had been last seen, nine since she was reported missing. He’d been expecting the worst. She just hadn’t seemed the type to up and go.

  “She didn’t die here?” Winters asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it. My guess is she was washed downriver in the floods. It’s likely all we’ll get off her is silt.”

  “Do your best.”

  “Always do.”

  Kitchener crouched to photograph her hand; the nails were torn. He looked up at Winters. “You okay?”

  Winters nodded.

  “You don’t have to be here, you know.”

  But he did. They both knew he did. He couldn’t run away from this. Not anymore. He couldn’t keep on running and still stay in the one place.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t anticipate the explosion; I was not prepared. It felt like a fairly familiar but also fairly uncontroversial piece of genre fiction.

  “So,” I asked the class. “Any thoughts?”

  Nicholas had his sleeves rolled back on dark skin. He’d been running the edge of one thumbnail over the flat of the other, back and forth: “Couple, yeah.”

  Steven settled in, pulled an I’m listening face.

  “First thought is,” Nick said, one thumbnail still scraping at the other, “does it have to start with a dead woman?”

  “Well, that’s how these stories work,” Steven said. “That’s the story engine that powers the novel, so yeah, it does really.”

  “So, it couldn’t be an old, fully dressed woman then?”

  “Well.”

  “Or a naked man?” That thumbnail still scraping, started pushing at the cuticle. “Could it be an old man’s body, an eighty-year-old naked man washed up with the floods?”

  Steven looked to me, baffled; I widened my eyes at him, half shook my head, as surprised as he was.

  “Explain, Nicholas.”

  “Okay then, so, what about this,” Nicholas went on. “I don’t know this woman. She could be anybody. Literally, Any Body. Sure, Girl Guides and yeah whatever the background bullshit we’re given, but she has no agency, she’s not a character, she’s a device. She’s not real, so we don’t care.”

  “You don’t care?” Steven said laughingly, looking round to scoop up approval from the other students. “What are you, a psychopath?”

  “It’s your subconscious we’re talking about here, pal. Not mine.”

  “What did you say?”

  I raised a hand. “Let’s keep it about the work, gentlemen. Okay?”

  “It’s not my fault if you read it the wrong way,” Steven said.

  “Totally is,” Meryl leapt in. “That’s actually your job.”

  I caught a glance then between Meryl and Nicholas. Spotted the crackle there.

  “Let’s put a pin in this for now,” I said. “We can come back to it fresh at a later date. One more piece to look at.”

  Which was Karen’s short story. “Empire Line” was light on its feet but dark at heart. Her protagonist, off work to nurse her mother through her last days, puts on a ton of weight from comfort eating. On her first day back in the office, she wears her favourite, most forgiving dress, and is mistakenly thought to be pregnant. People treat her differently, generously; she realises that she likes it; she plays along, accepting kindnesses and advice and second-hand baby gear, preparing for an arrival that will never happen. And all the time she keeps feeding herself, feeding her grief and loneliness, so that her shape swells and softens; as the months pass, she no longer feels able to do anything, go anywhere, see anyone. She no longer even wants to eat, but wants to sip sweet milky drinks and to sink into a bath. She no longer even looks pregnant, but has become a grotesque version of the baby will never have.

  Karen might not have liked grit, but she did like acid. Her stuff was vinegar-sharp. I felt a bit overwhelmed by it, to tell the truth, all the female flesh. All the darkness, too, from this and all the other stories. All these female bodies in flux. Dying and decaying, awakening and transforming, washed by floods, ballooning, returning to the womb. And I was struggling with my own question of whether there was a way to write female without writing body, and whether there was a way to be female without being reduced to body, and how you would think a life in books would be one way to live like that, but that there were still days like that sweltering June day in London, an event at the bookshop for an author I’d long loved, me a sweaty sheen of fangirl bookseller nerves, a long shift’s grubbiness upon me; telling him my first book was going to be published the next year, and him congratulating me and wishing me all the best of luck with it, welcome to the club, I’ll teach you the secret handshake later, making me laugh; and then how, after his reading—moving, funny, full of intelligence and warmth—he had come over and taken his seat beside me, and his foot had knocked against my foot, and he leaned down, as if by way of apology, and just touched the toe of my shoe with his fingertips, and then ran his fingertips up my bare summer leg, from ankle to the tenderness just inside the knee, and left his hand there and leaned his damp shirted shoulder against my bare shoulder, and didn’t say a thing at all, and I didn’t say a thing at all either, but after a moment I got up, and made myself busy, picking up glasses and talking to customers and tidying books until he left, with his publicist, who had seemed like such a lovely woman, and I felt hot and chastened and shaky, and have never since read another word that he has written.

  People were being complimentary about Karen’s story. In a quiet moment, Nicholas said that he’d really enjoyed it.

  Steven smiled, irritable. “Not exactly constructive criticism we’re getting from you today, is it?”

  Nicholas looked at him; his jaw slid sideways and his eyebrows went up: “Is that what you think? You think I’m being difficult?”

  Steven shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Because what I had to say about your work was not about being difficult. It’s about asking you not to repeat the lies you’ve heard before; it’s about you telling the truth.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Fellas,” I said, “we gotta finish up here. Tim, next time, be good to see some work from you?”

  Vigorous nodding from Tim. In all the chat and business of departure, Nicholas was still. Meryl followed the others out; she glanced back at him before al
lowing the door to fall shut behind her. And still Nicholas sat there, his notes still on the desk, his jacket still on the back of the chair, his hands clasped in front of him, one thumbnail scraping at the other. I could hear the students in the corridor, their loud and lively chatter; I was willing Nicholas to go and join them.

  “So, um. Sorry about all that. But, bit of a rush here, so…” I had to lock up and drop the key back with the porter before running for Sam. The nursery had draconian rules: fifteen minutes late and they’d charge you for an extra hour. Half an hour and they’d phone Social Services. “Do you think you could come to my office hour in the week—” A quick glance at my watch. “I really have to run.”

  “I won’t keep you,” he said. “And I want you to know, I’m not going to make a complaint. Not at this stage.”

  My attention snapped sharp: “What’s that?”

  “Maybe it didn’t occur to you. I get that you’re new, I mean this is all new to me too. But work like that, like Steven’s submitting.” He blinked his pale eyes. “He needs to put a trigger warning up before it.”

  “Trigger warning?”

  “So you can choose to absent yourself, if you need to. If you feel that it would do you harm, that it would set you back, to be exposed to it.”

  I just said: “You’re right.”

  He raised his shoulders. “I just can’t stand people telling lies.”

  I said, “Leave it with me.”

  I followed him out the door. Karen, Tim and Meryl were waiting there.

  “Coming for a drink?” Karen was still sparkly with her story’s success.

  “Can’t. I have to pick up my son.”

  “Just a quick one?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. If you’re five minutes late for pickup they sell the kids for vivisection.”

  I left the key with the porter, who bounced the keys in his big palm and told me “Safe home, kid.” But I felt uneasy; I couldn’t even smile at being called a kid.