by C K Williams
Local Whispers
C. K. Williams
One More Chapter
a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
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Copyright © C. K. Williams 2021
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Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover photographs: Shutterstock.com
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C. K. Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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Source ISBN: 9780008354428
Ebook Edition © August 2021 ISBN: 9780008354411
Version: 2021-08-06
Contents
Prologue
I. Day 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
II. Day 2
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
III. Day 3
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
IV. Day 4
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
V. Day 5
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
VI. Day 6
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
VII. Day 7
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Acknowledgments
Thank you for reading…
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About the Author
Also by C. K. Williams
One More Chapter...
About the Publisher
To Chris and Lucy
Jolene and Leo
Gareth and Emma
And to my mum
Girls and boys, come out to play,
the moon doth shine as bright as day;
leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And come with your playfellows into the street!
Old nursery rhyme
* * *
“It is the tree originally known as yew, though with other related trees becoming known, it may now be known as common yew, English yew, or European yew. Primarily grown as an ornamental, most parts of the plant are poisonous, and consumption of the foliage can result in death.”
Wikipedia
* * *
Did you know?
The Romans believed that yews grew in hell.
The Woodland Trust
Let me drive you home, I say.
She shakes her head. I’m not scared, she tells me.
I laugh, my neck flushing. I didn’t want to drive you because I thought you were scared.
Oh.
Oh, is all she says.
Right.
I lift both hands. No worries, I say.
No, listen, she says.
Let me get the bill, I say, trying to spare her the embarrassment of having to lie to me about all the ways in which she does not find me attractive.
No, she says fiercely, I am paying.
Let’s just split it down the middle, I suggest.
She looks so relieved.
Were you really worried about that? I ask her a few minutes later, when the bill is lying between us on the table, both of us haphazardly throwing notes on top. Haphazardly in my case, anyway, attempting very hard to conceal my disappointment. She is watching closely, making sure I do not put down too much. Were you worried about me paying the bill? I ask.
She looks at me with an expression that I find impossible to read. Yes, she says simply, instead of lying or making up an excuse or laughing it off, and I like that. For the first time tonight, I feel like we are actually talking to each other.
Why? I ask. Outside, the sun has already set on Queen’s Wharf. Outside the large glass windows, I can see the lights of Stockton on the other side of the harbour, the dark twisted lines of the old pump house and the concrete factory. It is warm out. It is summer in Australia. Everyone is already drunk. I work at a local hostel, reception and cleaning. The former gets me the minimum wage, which is very decent, the latter free board in a single room, more privacy than I have had in months. Which I thought to make the most of.
She is a guest at another hostel. We met at a backpacker party. She is from Belfast, I am from Gelsenkirchen, a city in Germany that she had never heard of and couldn’t pronounce, and I thought this was going somewhere. I thought that was what she wanted.
Because there should be no expectations, she says.
Do men really expect you to sleep with them because they bought you dinner? I ask. It is that time of the night, three pints in, where you can suddenly say things you would not say during the day.
She looks at me carefully, this man having dinner with her, so clearly trying to get her into bed. She is taking measure.
If you wanted to stay for just one more drink, she says cautiously, I could tell you the story of three girls in a backpacker hostel up in Seventeen Seventy-Seven, three girls who had all slept with a man who had bought them two drinks.
Is it a true story? I ask.
The on
ly ones worth telling, she replies.
All right. Was one of those girls you? I ask.
Are you staying for one more drink? she shoots back.
Do you want me to stay for one more drink?
Yes.
Why?
Because you asked. Because you want to know the truth.
I almost grin. That’s all it takes? I ask. Could have saved myself the wining, the dining, the suit?
A smile pulls at the corner of her mouth. It looks mischievous. It is a look I like.
Oh no, she says. I very much like the suit.
Well then, I say. One more drink it is.
One drink turns into seven. Four of those in my room. At the end of the night, Kate and I are friends.
Breaking
01/01/2019 4:39 PM
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County Down, NI: A young woman, aged 17, has been found dead in her parents’ home today. The police have taken in a suspect for questioning. No arrests have been made as of this afternoon.
Day 1
Wednesday 2nd January 2019
05:01
Kate’s voice is firm when she calls. “Can you come?”
It has been nineteen years since we met in an Australian hostel, and her voice still sounds exactly the same.
“Now?” I ask, voice raw with sleep, separated from her by roughly one thousand kilometres of landmass and ocean.
“I’m in police custody. A patient of mine was murdered yesterday.” Her voice breaks then. “She was still a child.”
I book myself onto the next flight to Belfast. Thank God for easyJet. On the way to Dortmund airport, I stop off at the agency and tell my partner. She assures me she can handle the campaigns on her own. Anna has always been like that. I tell her to call me should she need me, then I’m off. Everything takes too long. Especially passport control. Entry check, exit check. I wish Kate was living in Paris or Dublin or Warsaw or Rome, so long as it didn’t oblige me to tell a border patrol officer that I was here for reasons of leisure.
15:41
“I was your phone call,” I say, because there really isn’t anything for me to do but state the blatantly obvious.
We are at Ardmore Police Station in Newry, a city only eight miles from the border with the South. The building is a fortress rather than a police station. Accessible only through heavy gates, rising up high on a hill, walls painted orange, every inch of it under constant surveillance. It could not be more different from the village where Kate lives if it tried, and Annacairn is more of a hamlet even than a village, thirty miles on winding country roads into the Mountains of Mourne. There on the grey slopes, where the old stone walls disappear into mist and twilight, on the very outskirts of the village, stands her small house with the old rowan and yew trees all around like a sacred grove of old.
But there are no facilities in Annacairn to hold someone who is a suspect in a murder investigation.
Kate is sitting across from me at a plastic table. She is wearing her own clothes, thank God, a smart suit, her red Italian. She would look just like herself, if there were still laces in her shoes.
“There is no right to a phone call under British law,” she says. “There is no right to a visit, either.”
“They let you phone me anyway,” I say.
“I have the right to a notified person,” she says. “You’re my notified person.”
I would like to reach out and take her hand in mine. But for some reason, I find that I’m not brave enough.
“What happened?” I ask.
Kate looks at me. We found her first grey hair the very night we met. It has been nineteen years, and her hair has gone entirely white. It suits her. It is bright and elegant and cannot be ignored, just like her.
“I don’t know,” she says. Her voice doesn’t break until the very last word.
She reaches across the table. I hate that it was her who had to do that. I meet her halfway. Our fingers intertwine.
And then she tells me.
16:15
“I was due for a house call.” Kate is trying to sound neutral. She is trying to give me a concise account, even when her voice is trembling.
“Where?” I ask gently.
“At the Walshes. Megan and Patrick Walsh. It wasn’t them I went to see, though. I was there to see their daughter Alice. She’s seventeen. Was. She was… seventeen. I’ve been their GP for years. Known her since she was a baby. Alice Walsh got all her vaccines from me, all her check-ups.”
She swallows. Looks at our hands.
“I drove over there. Her parents weren’t in, still at work. They have a house on Rostrevor Road. I got out and rang the doorbell. No one opened, but they leave the door unlocked, so I let myself in.”
She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, the moment I stepped through the door, I smelled it.”
And then she looks at me: “I smelled the blood, Jan. I know what great quantities of human blood smell like, from the maternity ward. I called out for Alice, but there was no reply. And then I checked. First on the ground floor. Then on the first. And the smell…”
She falls silent again. She has to look away. “She was lying on her bed. If you can call it that. She was…” She closes her eyes. “Her body parts had been severed from her body. Her legs, her arms, her hands, her fingers, her thighs and shins and feet. But each part had been arranged on the bed so that it seemed as if her body was whole. It took me a moment to…”
I can feel the horror rise even as she continues: “I cannot forget it. When I close my eyes, I… Her upper body was twisted. As if she’d tried to escape into the mattress. Her hips had been brought forward, and her head was turned towards the left. She was looking straight at me.”
I press her hand more tightly. Kate looks back at me. “At first I didn’t see the parts had been severed. I thought she was… whole. I rushed to her side. But there was nothing I could do, Jan. There wasn’t. She was already dead. I knew that, even before I realised that someone had cut off all her limbs and each of her fingers and arranged them back together.”
“You called the police?”
Kate nods, with difficulty. “And then they brought me in. Because they think I might have done it.”
“It is a formality, isn’t it?” I tell her. “You were the first at the scene of the crime.”
She nods.
But she doesn’t look convinced.
My heart stutters.
She doesn’t look convinced.
16:45
I settle down at the station to wait. I take out my phone and read up on custody regulations in Northern Ireland. And here is one thing I never thought I would have to do.
Once I am done, I put my phone away. I sit in the plastic seat and look at the wall, glaringly white, freshly painted, offensively clean. I would go and wait outside, but there is a little snow on the ground, and snow reminds me of Kate. It was the first word I taught her to say in German, Schnee.
A couple of hours later, they release Kate on police bail. The Detective Sergeant informs us that the scene cordon at Kate’s house has been lifted, and that Kate has to remain in Annacairn so that they will know where to find her. The Detective Sergeant is standing at the counter, watching us, glancing at the clock every now and again. A bag sits on her chair, a white cap and red gown peeking out, as if she was off to a fancy-dress party later tonight. I’m about to comment on it, that it looks just like the costumes from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Then all I do is say goodbye.
“Let me drive,” Kate says, when we walk up to my rental. She is clutching her shoelaces.
“You’re not insured on this,” I say carefully.
“You’re not used to driving on the left,” she proclaims, an utter falsehood. I always drive when I am here. I drove through all of Australia.
“Maybe it would be best if you just sat down and…” I start, but she interrupts.
“For fuck’s sake, let me drive, Jan!”
Silently, I hand her the car ke
ys. Kate unlocks the doors, sits down in the driver’s seat. She toes off her shoes. There is a run in her tights. The line of her shoulders is brittle. “Would you fix my laces while we go?” she asks, doing her utmost to get herself back under control.
“I would be glad to,” I reply quietly, taking the shoes off her with all the reverence they deserve before beginning my silent work. Kate drives down the busy main road, going past the rec ground opposite the station, surrounded by high fences, the small furniture shops further along the street, the giant Tesco Extra on our right, the one where we always go at least once to get our shopping when I come over. The Coop in Annacairn has household coal in large white sacks, a small post office, dog food, instant Lamlac and a bargain bucket as well as vapor refills, but it doesn’t quite cover a week’s shopping.
