Where the missing gather, p.35
Where the Missing Gather, page 35
The sight of Simon and Pamali on the bench jolts her back to the moment. Si doesn’t seem to have the anger that she does, at least it’s not coursing through his blood the way hers is and Pamali – she doesn’t know how Pami remains who she is, how she’s kept hold of that kindness of hers.
‘Georgie,’ Pamali says, moving up on the bench so Georgie can sit beside them.
‘It’s good to see you,’ Georgie says, her voice cracking against her will.
‘God Georgie, what’s wrong?’
‘I… I think—’
‘Here he comes,’ Simon says.
Georgie looks up to see DS Frazer reach the top of the path, attempt to brush the wet sand off his trousers.
‘What’s going on?’ he says, facing them all on the bench, looking behind him as though hoping there might be a chair to sit on, so he can stop towering over them.
‘They’re closing the station,’ Georgie says.
Frazer nods – he’d known it was coming, just didn’t know it would be right now.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not.’
The waves are crashing in now, the rain getting in their eyes, soaking their useless summer clothes.
‘What’ll you do?’ Frazer asks, seemingly ignoring the weather. He’s not wearing so much as a hat.
Georgie just shakes her head, stares out to the wild sea below them.
‘Well, I’ve got some news,’ Pamali says eventually, her voice breaking the heavy silence with something lighter, fresher. ‘I’m building a community food garden,’ she says.
‘A what?’ Simon says.
Pami laughs, and her joy seems to lift the air for a moment, though for Georgie something else rushes in to replace it, something crackling with static that makes her shoulders tighten.
‘I’m turning one of the disused fields into a series of vegetable patches,’ Pami says. ‘Anyone who wants can work there, anyone who needs the food can help themselves.’
Georgie shakes her head. ‘It’s not going to work, Pami. You’d be better off…’
‘What, leaving? Giving up? Young Andy is helping me build the raised beds – it’s been really good for him I reckon.’
‘Andy Barr?’
‘Andy Barr.’
‘Andy Barr is helping you build a community food garden?’
Pamali’s whole face lights up.
‘That’s amazing, Pami.’ Simon says. ‘That’s… What a thing to do.’
‘Thanks,’ she laughs. ‘Though now Natalie…we could do with a few more pairs of hands. I might try to inspire some other local kids to get involved, you never know.’
There’s a crack of thunder in the distance and Georgie counts the seconds, like she always does, to see how far away it is, to know how quickly it’s closing in. Natalie might be under arrest, but her boys are two of those local kids Pami is talking about, Lee and Aaron Prowle, and they’re mixed up in something nasty.
‘What will you do, Georgie?’ Frazer asks, quietly.
It’s as though he knows Georgie is backing away, like she’s been pushed so far and now she’s in the shadows, the violence clawing at her.
‘Your Fergus loves it here,’ Si says.
‘You’ll be staying here with him, then?’ asks Frazer. ‘Maybe get a transfer to Crackenbridge?’
Georgie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have an answer. She looks around them; the four outsiders.
‘Here, have a seat, Frazer,’ she says, shifting over.
His face creases in a frown. They all go silent for a second as the waves intensify, crashing against stone as the tide turns.
‘We’ll not bite…’ says Simon.
‘No, it’s not…look here, move over a bit more. What does that say?’
As Georgie moves over, the plaque of the bench is revealed, and they all read it, Georgie, Simon, Pamali, Frazer.
‘That’s her,’ he says. ‘My God, that’s—’
‘Who?’
‘That’s the woman I’ve been asking this whole bloody village about! My witness saw a murder – she says she saw the murder of Abigail Moss.’
Pamali reads the plaque. She’s seen it many times, but she’s not sure she’s ever really read it properly before. She reads it out loud now.
‘To the memory of Abigail Moss.’
‘Someone knows what happened to her,’ Frazer says, his voice loud, his whole body suddenly full of furious determination. ‘Someone put this here,’ he’s saying. ‘It’s not even that old. Look! Someone from this village put this here.’
He looks between them and Georgie shivers at the accusation in his eyes and that’s when she turns, sees her sitting cross-legged beside the bench: a little girl, stringy pale hair, tattered clothes. Georgie blinks and she is gone. Frazer is pacing in front of them and behind him, beyond, the sea is getting rougher and Georgie sees them, the gulls, a whole flock of them, circling high above the tideline.
‘I am not leaving until I find her,’ Frazer is saying. ‘I swear to every fucking God there is, I am going to find out what they did to Abigail Moss.’
Georgie looks from Frazer to Pamali, to her soft, serious expression, then over to Simon’s blue-eyed face lined with loss, making him seem a decade older than he’d looked last year. Frazer’s deep black skin is shining in the rain and there are shapes moving on the beach, birds or shadows or something seeping out from the rocks and there’s a tugging, a tugging at her wrist, at her shirt cuff and she doesn’t want to turn, to see. The sun is gone, it’s gone behind the gathering, blistering clouds and she knows they’re here, the creatures, they’re here and they are gathering around her and there’s a light down on the beach that shouldn’t be there and the dread of it is colder than the sea in the depths of winter. It’s in the way the shadows move across the stones, backlit and stretching closer and she knows: the unnatural light is coming from the cave she’s heard about, the cave she’s seen when she was trying not to look. The little girl is beside her, gently tugging at her fingers. Her dress is in tatters. Her face is bruised and stained with dirt, marks around her neck that shouldn’t be there. She’s pleading. She’s silently pleading, with her eyes and her hand that is pulling on Georgie’s own; she’s pulling at Georgie’s hand and her fingers are cold as the sea and Georgie can taste salt on her lips, stinging her eyes and the little girl breathes, she breathes, her eyes stare and plead and she tugs on Georgie’s hand and she is whispering, she is whispering, Please help my mammy.
THE MISSING
The storm hits in January, the worst they’ve seen in a generation or more. It starts and won’t stop: the gales howling through the houses like screams and the pier smashed to splinters; boats wrecked, homes flooded and left brittle with sea salt and despair. What should we do? the villagers ask one another, what can we do? And they start, for the first time in a long time, to acknowledge the answer. Not with words but with looks, with nods, as a silent understanding passes between them.
All the while, young Amanda Mackie stays at home with her new baby boy, and she holds him close in her arms and lets him sleep beside her, snuggled into her chest. She is keeping him for herself, she’s decided, and that’s how it’s going to be, no matter what her mother says or her father, no matter what the school says or the villagers say. She pushes away anyone trying to tell her otherwise with a glare of daggers.
As the baby sleeps she knits clothes for him to wear and toys for him to play with, using the chunky lambswool that Deborah-Jane Barr gave her: the only gift she received when the baby was born. She loops the yarn into hats and jumpers, stitches it into figures of boys and girls, spacemen and animals: a whole community of friends for her son to play with, so that he’ll never need to play with those waiting for him outside. But outside the storm gets worse and the nights seem endless, sheep drown in the river that burst its banks and the villagers whisper to one another: but he can’t have been from round here. If he was one of us then she would have said. No, the father can’t have been from around here.
What about those workers, from overseas?
They were here and then they were gone.
Oh, that stupid girl, to let her head be turned by the likes of them.
Then, quieter, hushed and under their breath: it has happened before.
But Amanda Mackie stays inside and doesn’t care about what they say, she doesn’t care about school or exams or what she’ll do or who will pay for it. She cares only about her baby, sleeping soundly again in her arms. She shuts her eyes against her mother and shakes her head to her father and slams the door when they say they are calling her uncle to come round too.
Manipulation, that’s what it is, for everyone knows Amanda Mackie loves her Uncle Walt more than anyone, but the storm winds have blown down a tree that smashed into the fountain and now the water won’t flow any more. The angels’ faces are barely recognisable and the stone basin is swirling with rotten leaves and stagnant salt water that no one can drink. Down south, they hear, there’s been another bomb. The Irish again. At the horizon the storm clouds condense to anger and they know, the villagers of Burrowhead and Warphill, they don’t have long left if they are going to act. And act they must.
The sea knows when a wrong has been done, they say to each other, their voices louder now, rough and sure.
The sky knows, they say, the rain and the clouds; who are we to ignore the signs we have always heeded before?
They gather together and listen to the radio, they listen to the words and they nod to one another – we must be on our guard, they say, for it is true, and for days afterwards they repeat those words as their own, talk about how their home is being swamped by people from different cultures. Then they look towards the Mackie family house where Amanda is refusing to give up her child, refusing to name the father, knitting coloured children and animals instead of accepting the corn doll the village gave her. Pretending all the while that the storm outside is not destroying their village. Her own village. Pretending she doesn’t know it is her and her baby who are causing the storm to rage on.
Walt Mackie finds himself surrounded, as they press in around him and the rain pelts the roof over their heads. It must be done, they say, you know what must be done. His brother’s eyes are pleading. His sister-in-law’s are red and raw. The worry, they say. Her future, they say. Her age.
He closes his eyes.
The village, they say, the storm and the boats, our home, we must protect our home. For the good of the village.
Walt Mackie does not want to open his eyes, but he knows that eventually he must.
So it is that Amanda, raw herself and sore and fighting back exhausted tears, looks into her Uncle Walt’s kind face and says the words just once: please no.
It’s for his own good, he says.
It’s for you, too, your life, your future, he says.
It’s for your parents, have you seen the state of your parents?
It’s for the good of the village.
She turns away and holds her son closer.
He’ll go to a good family, he says. To people who will love him.
He will be happy, he says. Then quieter, whispered because he knows these are the words that will win: He will be happier than he would be here.
And for a moment, the briefest of moments, she feels her body relax and her shoulders fall and her face drops to her baby’s head so she can smell his hair and kiss his perfect skin one last time. She’ll never see her baby again, but she will grow up and she’ll even finish school, she’ll fall in love and, twelve years after her first child was born, she’ll have a baby girl and call her Patricia, though she’ll always be known as Trish. Her only child, her little girl: Trisha.
It’ll be to Trish that she writes her goodbye note, when she can’t stand it any more, before stealing her father’s boat from the shed during a storm as bad as the storm that raged when they took her baby. The night will seem endless on that day too, but the sea, the sea will welcome her as she rows out away from the village as far as her strength can take her. She’ll never come back after that, she’ll never go looking for her lost son and she’ll never find out what became of him; she’ll never know her Uncle Walt gave him up under a false name, gave him to a care home in Crackenbridge where he developed asthma and grew a full head of blonde hair. She’ll never know that he was fostered by Nora Prowle when he was just a toddler. She’ll never know that her little boy hated Burrowhead every bit as much as she came to hate it herself. She’ll never know that he was there for all those years, alone, buried under the ground beneath her feet and no one, no one, will ever know that he was hers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my wonderful editor, Jenny Parrott, and to the whole team at Oneworld and Point Blank. Thank you to my agent, the outstanding Cathryn Summerhayes, and to everyone at Curtis Brown. Thank you to my brilliant copy-editor, Sarah Terry, to booksellers and readers everywhere, and to everyone at Scottish Book Trust. Thank you to all my friends and family who have given me feedback and support, with special thanks to Viccy Adams, Jane Alexander, Margaret Callaghan, Ally Sedgwick, Chris Sedgwick and Liz Treacher. And thank you to Hazel and Michael, with my love, as always.
HELEN SEDGWICK is the author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season, which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year in 2018. The opener to her Burrowhead Mysteries crime trilogy, When the Dead Come Calling, was published in 2020, followed by Where the Missing Gather in 2021. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Before she became an author, she was a research physicist with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University. She lives in the Scottish Highlands.
A Point Blank Book
First published in Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Australia by Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld Publications, 2021
This ebook published 2021
Copyright © Helen Sedgwick, 2021
The moral right of Helen Sedgwick to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781786079770 (trade paperback)
ISBN 9781786079787 (ebook)
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Helen Sedgwick, Where the Missing Gather
