What doesnt break us, p.3
What Doesn't Break Us, page 3
‘And Lee and Aaron were getting the same way?’
‘Fuck no, nothing like.’
‘But then…do you know what Rachel and Pauly were taking?’
‘No clue, mate.’
He looks at Shona and she shakes her head sadly. There’s something tugging at Simon’s mind though, something Shona said. Something Frazer’s witness claims to have seen decades ago. It wasn’t only Abigail Moss she saw in the woods that night. He’d always thought Rachel and Pauly’s death had something to do with drugs, but maybe there’s a different connection he should be following.
THE DIFFERENT WAYS OF BEING ABANDONED
Everything Uncle Walt had is strewn on the floor, room after small, square room, and Trish is in the middle of it all. She couldn’t bring herself to sit in his old comfy chair, she never could, not since she was a little girl and she’d climb up onto his knee, cuddle into him and glance at her mam like it was a victory. No, she’s sitting at the kitchen table where all the files, letters and bills she’s found are haphazardly piled. Uncle Walt wasn’t one for order, not of the filing-his-tax-returns kind, not of keeping a record of his pension or his doctor’s visits or…what is it she’s looking for?
She’s not been able to sleep much since the funeral. Lying awake every night in Uncle Walt’s house, in the room that was her room as a kid, she feels the emptiness of it dragging her down and she understands how her mam must have felt, lying on the sofa for hours, staring at nothing. She never understood why someone would do that before, but she understands now.
The white light coming in through the dirty window is dappling the small square table beneath the small square window in the small square room. It’s one of the old cottages, Uncle Walt’s – hers now, it’s all hers now, she’s the only one left – thick stone walls and low doors, something heavy about it, barely masked by the plants on every surface, in every corner. Uncle Walt loved his plants. Trish hasn’t a clue what to do with them. She’d probably kill them if she tried and they’re looking bad enough as it is, droopy, brown and lethargic. There’s a succulent in the living room dropping whole branches off itself, if branch is the word for the strings of fleshy leaves it’s made of. It used to flower every Christmas, that one, bright red flowers bursting from the tips, cascading like water from a fountain. Now it has the plant version of leprosy.
What is it he’s not telling her? Uncle Walt, her Uncle Walt. It can’t really have been a heart attack, can it? But everyone’s telling her so. His big heart giving in after all that love he showed her when she had no one else; enough love to compensate for a whole family. Then she sees it again: Uncle Walt clasping at his throat, pain shooting through his body as Ricky Barr stands above him.
They say it was a heart attack. But heart attacks can be provoked.
She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. What is she doing? What is she going to do? How’s she even going to earn money? She needs to think.
But the soil is still fresh above him, there in the new graveyard where he’s buried. Her Uncle Walt. It’s been less than a week but sometimes it feels like a year, sometimes an hour. She asked for him to be buried in the graveyard of the old church ruin, he’d have liked that, but there was no space. Apparently they’d closed it for burials last year. She hadn’t known that. Turns out there was a lot Trish hadn’t known.
When her mam disappeared – died, she tells herself sternly – she was too young to manage anything. It all fell to Uncle Walt. It all went to him, too, everything her mam had. It wasn’t much, but there must have been a day like this, Uncle Walt going through her mam’s things. Finding something in her mam’s things. Is that what she’s hoping for? Old photos, her birth certificate maybe, an old dress of her mam’s, a diary, explaining? But there’s nothing. No photo albums she’s been able to find, nothing about when her mam died. Just the weight of knowing her Uncle Walt is gone too.
Georgie was at the funeral. They all were. Simon had given Trish a hug but when Georgie tried to do the same, Trish stepped away.
‘I’m so sorry—’ Georgie started.
‘Why did you have to question him like that?’
Georgie was shocked, she could see that, but Trish had resigned. She didn’t have to be DC Mackie any more; she’d never be DC Mackie again.
‘You scared him!’
‘I was doing my job, Trish.’ Georgie’s voice was gentle, but Trish didn’t want to hear it.
‘You kept suspecting him and upsetting him and he wasn’t in his right mind, was he? If you hadn’t kept pushing, he wouldn’t have run away from the care home to confront Ricky and he’d still be—’
She’d stopped short of saying he’d still be alive, but it was true. Sometimes she thinks it was true. And what was Uncle Walt guilty of, really? He’d killed a dog forty years ago. Trish isn’t proud of it, but at the end of the day it was only a dog. Uncle Walt had believed that a sacrifice would summon the ancestors, the Others, to save the village. Trish doesn’t believe it, of course, but Uncle Walt had. Natalie did, too, and that was why she’d copied him by sacrificing Ricky’s horse two weeks ago. Would she have still done it without Uncle Walt’s help? Yes. Did Uncle Walt help her? Trish presses her fists into her eyes again, but she knows: yes, he did. Was that why Georgie blamed him?
But it wasn’t Georgie who’d watched as Uncle Walt died. It was Ricky Barr. He was there, watching. Then he’d dared to come to the funeral and she’d not been able to stop him and when Trish had got back here, to Uncle Walt’s house afterwards, that carved wooden face still sitting in the window was glaring at her. The vines threaded through the eyes and mouth were a vivid green and she thought for a second it had been a furious self-portrait, that Uncle Walt knew he’d be gone and wanted to leave his image staring out at the village. Judging her for not protecting him. Then something in her snapped and she rushed inside, pulled the carved face from the windowsill and threw it in the kitchen bin. There was no bag inside. He must have emptied the bins before going to the care home. Still, that’s where she left the wooden face he’d carved with his own hands, the trails of vines twisting around the back of it, and she let the lid swing shut and hasn’t been near it since.
There’s someone here, though. Outside. Beyond the metal lines running through the leaded window, fracturing the street beyond: a shadow moving. A person. Georgie’s here, at her house, come to see her, but for what? Then the shadow moves and it’s not Georgie at all, it’s a different face beyond the glass. Andy Barr is looking in at her, his expression all concern and nervousness and he’s pointing as if to say Do you want me to come in, or do you want me to go away? She invites him in with a flick of her head and he gets it, heads to the door and pushes it open slowly.
‘Trish?’ he says, stooping to get inside – the door frames are low in these old houses and Andy’s lanky as can be. ‘Trish?’
‘Come and sit down, Andy.’
Trish realises that’s the first time she’s spoken this morning, and her voice feels awkward in her throat.
Andy stands and looks at her as though he wants to give her a hug, then folds himself into the kitchen chair. He’s carried a flask in with him, seems to be trying to balance it on his knee before giving up and placing it on the table. Christ, she’d have made him a cup of coffee. Mind you, she’s not sure there’s any milk. Or coffee.
‘Are you alright, Trish?’ he says, then thinks better of it, scratches at his cheek. ‘I mean. Not alright, but you know.’
Trish nods. ‘I’ve got to sort all this out,’ she says, realising she’s sorted nothing, emptied cupboards and drawers and found only out-of-date tins of tuna, dusty cassette tapes of folk music that hadn’t been played in years – he’d nothing to play them on – bills and demands for payment, his old clothes, his name stitched into the back of every shirt in case he went a wander. She had tried to keep him safe. She’d tried.
‘The thing is, Trish…’ Andy clears his throat. His eyes look fresh and alert, unlike hers. ‘The thing is…’ His voice trailing off, his hands anxiously folding around the flask then releasing again.
‘What is it, Andy?’
‘This morning, well last night really, I don’t know if you’ve heard but there was a thing and I was the one that called the ambulance see, and I’ve been waiting but—’
This morning, last night, in that shimmering space between night and dawn, Trish had been at Uncle Walt’s graveside. There were shapes hanging from tree branches and shadows moving beyond the gates and she’d known that there was something wrong in the way he died, that she couldn’t let it go; she mustn’t let it go. She has a sudden urge to take the carved face back out of the bin.
‘—so I thought maybe I should come to you, ’cause I can trust you, right, and no one else came to see me but I’ve got something, see?’
‘What are you talking about, Andy?’
He startles and she remembers how he used to cringe away from his dad, how afraid he was. Trish doesn’t know exactly what Ricky has done to him over the years, but Ricky is a bully of a man and that she knows with no doubt.
‘We were all in the caravan. Me and Lee and Aaron and Penny-Ann and Terry and the new girl, Julie, and her and Penny-Ann are like, at it—’
‘Andy, can you start from the beginning? I’m going to need some help here. What were you doing in the caravan?’ Then it dawns on her that these kids, Andy too, are taking whatever it is Ricky’s dealing through the village and on up the coast—
‘Lee had a reaction to it, that’s what I’m saying, a bad one and I thought he was dying, so that’s why I called them.’
‘Wait, Andy, what did you take?’
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Not me, that’s what I’m saying. It looked disgusting. It were something new, they were all excited see so I faked it and I thought, I’ll see what happens here and then I’ll talk to Trish.’
‘And you got this from your da?’
‘Nah, Aaron was passing it round and none of us know where he gets it from, well, maybe Lee but maybe not and I don’t know if the hospital called Georgie but—’
‘They must have called her,’ Trish says, because when she couldn’t take kneeling by Uncle Walt’s grave any more, she’d seen Georgie on her way home. Driving towards the village at first light, with DS Frazer in the car beside her. They must have been on their way back from the hospital. They didn’t see her, and that was how she’d wanted it. It wasn’t only Georgie she couldn’t face; it was Frazer too. The way he’d looked at her when she handed in her notice. He’d come out of the station after her, calling her name, not DC Mackie as usual, but Trish, Trish please.
‘Please what?’ she snapped, for once not caring what he saw in her face.
‘Let me explain. I—’
‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘I don’t want to hear about it right now.’
Even as she walked away, he was still trying to be kind to her, in that way he has, the formality mixed with pity that makes her want to scream.
‘I’m here,’ he was saying. ‘Trish, if you need…’
What she needs is not to need anyone at all.
But there was something wrong in the way Uncle Walt died. She knows it as well as she knows this coast. Her Uncle Walt dying there on Ricky Barr’s land with Ricky Barr watching. She’s on her feet, walking to the bin, lifting the lid.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘Uncle Walt carved it,’ she says, placing it on the table beside Andy’s flask.
Uncle Walt who died on Ricky Barr’s land and now there’s kids in the hospital from something they took in Ricky Barr’s caravan, something she suspects came from Ricky Barr himself and so what she needs, it turns out, is exactly what Andy is offering her right now.
09:45
‘Right,’ Georgie says, back in her office at last, away from the hospital, away from her empty home, with a mug of coffee in her hands. ‘We need to get this all straight. We have three…’
She glances at Simon and he offers, ‘and counting?’
‘Three cases that may or may not be linked. Three cases and counting.’ She manages a smile, and Simon gives her one back. They’re short-staffed for this, with Trish gone. She feels another spike of loss. Trish is so angry with her; she’s not sure anyone has been so angry with her, except perhaps her father in the weeks after Errol died. Or Fergus?
No, Fergus isn’t angry, Fergus is feeling something else. She just wished she knew what.
‘Georgie?’
She nods, puts her coffee down and picks up the marker pen. Pulls off the lid then pushes it back on. She’s asked for Suze back from the Crackenbridge station, an extra pair of hands to help out, a temporary transfer for the week, maybe a couple. Well, a couple of weeks is all any of them have, with the station closure looming. She takes a deep breath before she speaks.
‘First, we have Lee Prowle and the others, taking something that put them in the hospital last night.’
Behind her on the whiteboard she has three columns, each with a title, one in black, one in blue, one in red.
‘They got it from Aaron Prowle who is, predictably, refusing to say where he got it from, despite it nearly killing his kid brother. We’re waiting on toxicology and forensics from Cal. They were in one of Ricky Barr’s caravans at the time, and they’re all still in the hospital, where they’ll be kept for the morning at least. Except for Andy Barr, who was there but not partaking, and who called the police. So this is today’s case. The new one.’
She points to the whiteboard, to the column written in black.
‘Everyone who was there is being uncooperative, so far. The new girl, Julie Alperstein, persuaded them not to talk to the police and has accused DS Frazer of being a corporate city cop she can see right through.’ She lets a smile flicker across her face.
Frazer grins at her.
‘And speaking of DS Frazer…’ She moves her finger to the blue column, to the name Abigail Moss. ‘We have case number two. Frazer, an update?’
He stands, taking her place in front of the whiteboard, allowing Georgie to sit.
‘I know I’ve been on this case for a couple of weeks now, but I think we’re finally about to make some progress,’ he says.
From her chair she can see out of the window to the sky that’s gone white with heat, to the wet, glistening paving slabs stretching from the wall of the station out towards the lane of soggy grass that leads, eventually, to Ricky Barr’s farm. That’s where they found Sonny Riley, the little boy whose burial decades ago feels as raw to Georgie as though he’d been killed yesterday. She feels a child’s hand on her knee and suddenly she can’t move; a little girl’s sore grey eyes are reflected in the window, staring at her, staring until Frazer clears his throat and the image vanishes. She needs to breathe.
‘When Betty Marshall made her statement from the care home, she claimed to have witnessed a murder, out here, when she was a teenager in the 1960s. I’ve made copies of her full statement, and you’ve all got one on your desk.’
Georgie looks at her desk: it’s true. It helps her focus, to take another breath. And it’s efficient of him, seeing as their printer has been broken for months now. Has he paid for this from the print shop in Crackenbridge out of his own pocket?
‘The pertinent points being—’
He holds up his hand to list them on his fingers and for the first time since meeting him at the start of the year Georgie wonders if he might be a little bit of an arse. She can see what might have got Julie Alperstein so defensive. She likes him though, despite it. He catches her eye and relaxes his shoulders a bit.
‘On 24 June 1962, sometime during the night, Betty Marshall saw a group of people in the woods beyond the grounds of Wyndham Manor. They appeared to be dancing and chanting in a language she didn’t recognise, and she believes she saw one of them – a young girl named Abigail Moss – lying on a stone slab and being killed. At least, Betty Marshall claims it looked like she was being killed. She says her eyes were rolling back in her head and there was blood on her neck as though her throat had been cut. She says she saw “at least” a dozen people circling Abigail—’
When he says ‘at least’ his fingers make neat quotation marks either side of his head.
‘Though it might have been more than that. She would have been significantly outnumbered had she approached them.’
‘But none of them saw her?’
‘She was hiding in the bushes and scared enough to creep away while the sacrifice or whatever it was continued. She herself had taken LSD – along with many of the staff that night, which was the night of their midsummer party – and she tried to convince herself she’d hallucinated the whole thing.’
‘But she went looking for Abigail Moss the next morning?’
‘Yes, exactly. She clearly didn’t believe it was a hallucination even then. Abigail’s room had been cleared out and the housekeeper, Mrs Pettigrew, told her Abigail had left her job and wouldn’t be coming back. Betty Marshall never saw Abigail Moss again. She has spent her life fearing she witnessed a murder but thinking no one would believe her.’
‘And do we believe her?’ Georgie says.
‘I believe her,’ Frazer replies. ‘At least, I believe she saw something. The group, chanting, dancing in the middle of the night—’
‘They could have taken LSD as well,’ Georgie says. ‘Betty was in the woods with a group of staff, and Abigail was staff too. Could it have been her friends she saw?’
Frazer holds out his hands. ‘Could be. We don’t know. She says she didn’t see their faces. She was scared. She was high.’
‘So,’ Georgie says. ‘Next steps.’
‘Our best lead is the bench dedicated to Abigail Moss at the playground. I’ve spent the last week interviewing residents of Burrowhead and Warphill, but no one has even admitted to recognising the name.’
‘Then we need a list of companies that supply benches and plaques,’ Georgie says. ‘Start with local places.’
