by S Williams
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said.
And Jay began to tell her story.
By the time Jay had finished she was famished, and her body was on fire. She had been sitting in front of the computer for more than an hour, laying it all down, and her bones felt like they were welded together.
‘Look, Mum,’ she said. ‘I need to move about, or I’m going to seize up.’
Her mother waved her away. ‘Go! Have a walk by the canal, if you think it’s safe.’
‘It is. No one knows I’m here. If you’re sure no one can connect you to the boat…?’
‘Hundred per cent. Let me think about what you’ve said. Try to see a way I can help.’ She smiled at her daughter through the screen, the lines of worry reverting to a lattice of laughter lines. ‘Bizarrely I have to say I’m very happy.’
‘How?’
‘When Inspector Slane got in touch she said that you had become depressed, and that she was worried about your mental state. She said you blame yourself for wrecking the investigation. Thought you might be suicidal.’
‘What a fuckbucket.’
‘Exactly. A perfect summation of your Inspector Slane. Very rude. She wouldn’t even give me her first name.’
‘When?’ Jay asked, alarm cutting through her pain. ‘When did she get hold of you?’
‘Yesterday. Before you messaged me.’
Her mother’s face had changed at the mention of Slane. Hardened. Become colder, stronger, as if she’d just unzipped an extra part of herself. Jay was suddenly reminded of exactly what her mother was. Of all the years of hardship and sacrifice it had taken her to get from where she once was to where she was now. And why she’d felt so inadequate next to her.
‘Yeah, well,’ she said, jaw clenched. ‘I’m sure they didn’t give you the runaround. What did you say?’
‘I said that we’d had a massive falling out, and I would be the last person you’d contact in a crisis. I have to say she seemed under quite a bit of pressure. I also have to say she didn’t seem to know who I am, which is a bit of an error.’
‘What do you mean?’
Her mother beamed at her. ‘I mean that nobody fucks with my daughter.’
Before she could say anything that might embarrass herself, Jay nodded, and killed the connection.
She stayed looking at the dead screen a moment, then stood and limped to the fridge and surveyed the contents. Inside was a bottle of Tequila, a lime and a collection of energy drinks. There was also a paperback copy of Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. The cover had a picture of Tilda Swinton on it, androgynous and overtly sexual at the same time. Jay leant forward, one hip against the door, and stroked the cover. It was cold and dry and felt like it should be in jail.
‘Must be one hot fucking book.’ Jay reached past it and pulled out a Red Bull. She thought for a moment, then pulled out the lime, the tequila and the book.
‘In for a penny.’ Jay limped to the bed. Now that she had moved she felt the limp was easing up; that the pain in her ribs was probably the worst thing. She found a glass and mixed herself a drink.
‘Who needs painkillers?’ she sneered, settling down and opening the book. For the first time since regaining consciousness in the hospital, she felt safe. Felt like she was wrestling back some control. She looked out of the window. The swan failed to look back at her.
‘I’m going to sort this out,’ she whispered. ‘And when I do, someone is going to get a nasty surprise.’ She took a sip of her drink, then put it on the little shelf by the window and closed her eyes.
Five seconds later she was asleep.
Jay snapped out of sleep, the notification chime on her new phone indicating she had received a message. She groggily checked her watch and realised that she had slept through the entire morning and half of the afternoon. She looked at the book, open at the first page and balanced on her chest. She stroked its cover sympathetically.
‘Maybe you were in the fridge too long.’ She checked to see who had messaged her; smiled when she saw it was her mother.
She read the text.
Don’t panic – he’s very nice
Jay squinted at the message, sleep shredding from her.
‘What the fuck?’
I thought about what you said, and got in contact with an old friend
Jay read the words with increasing alarm.
He’s agreed to help and should be with you pm
‘Pm? What does pm mean?’
Jay swung out of bed and slammed her feet into her boots. After lacing them up she continued reading.
He’s an expert in cults. He’s also had experience with the law. He should at least be able to give practical advice.
Jay read the rest of the message, then looked up. Outside, she could hear the sound of a car pulling up; the slam of a door as someone got out.
‘You don’t fuck about, Mother, do you?’
His name is Joseph.
34
30th October
Jay stared wearily out of the window of Joseph’s car and watched the landscape change as they turned off the A19, and headed into the Yorkshire Moors National Park. They had only moved forward forty miles north of York, away from the canal, but seemed to have slipped back a hundred years. All the houses were built like they’d either been grown from the ground or put there, stone by stone, as some sort of war against nature. With each mile the car encroached onto the moor, the moor seemed to strip another layer of culture away.
‘Christ, do people live here on purpose, or is it some sort of punishment?’ she wondered out loud.
‘It is quite remote. But surprisingly diverse, and beautiful in a brutal way, once you get tuned into it.’
Jay snorted. ‘If you say so, Heathcliff.’
‘Wrong moor.’
Jay ignored him, and stared some more out of the window, not seeing. Instead she was going over the recent past; sifting and cataloguing. Making tables and counting steps. Daisy-ing herself up, she thought grimly.
‘What I don’t understand is how they know what they know, or can do what they do, if they’re not legit.’ She was talking out loud, but mostly to herself.
‘What do you mean?’ Joseph scanned the road, which with each turning became narrower and narrower. Every year the number of road accidents involving deer increased.
‘They recruited me, didn’t they? F-branch. It wasn’t as if they flipped me in a bar or anything.’
During the journey, Jay had told her story for the second time in a day. It felt like she was beating herself up with personal information.
‘They went through my inspector. They must have had access to my psych evaluation: knew I was the kind of person who could get close to Daisy.’ At the thought of Daisy, Jay felt her chest tighten. Felt a squall of sad rain pass over her heart.
‘I’m not sure they can be F-branch,’ said Joseph thoughtfully.
‘Why not?’
‘As far as I know, F-branch were disbanded in the eighties. They were kind of a precursor to the Special Demonstration Squad.’
Jay’s nose wrinkled, as if they were passing a sewerage plant. ‘Fuckers.’
‘Apparently so.’
The SDS were notorious for their methods of infiltrating suspect groups considered dangerous. They had finally been disbanded after being exposed for stealing dead children’s identities to use as their own, and going so deep in their cover that they actually married and, in some cases, had children with the people they were investigating.
Jay felt a coldness seep into her tired bones. ‘But they approached me through my boss,’ she insisted. ‘So they must be on the up?’
Joseph drove, quiet, as if mulling it over. ‘Maybe they kept a skeleton force on. For cases that hadn’t been closed.’
They drove in silence for a while.
‘You know, from what you’ve told me, you have to entertain the possibility that she is responsible, or at least culpable, for some of the events you describe. Daisy, I mea
n.’
Joseph carefully did not use the word ‘murder’. Or point out that when the police arrived, Jay was found alone in Daisy’s bed, looking like a human punching bag.
Jay shook her head violently.
‘No. I got to know her. She’s damaged, yes. If even half the things she talked about that night were true, who wouldn’t be? But no way was she capable of murder. Killing a witness? Why? None of it makes sense. Plus I was drugged. Why would she drug me?’
And, more importantly, how was I drugged? she thought.
Jay placed her hands in her pocket and tightened her jaw. She desperately wanted a cigarette, but Joseph was an ex-smoker and would not let her light up, even with the window down.
‘You said Inspector Slane told you Daisy was part of a cult, The Fishermen,’ he confirmed.
Jay nodded. ‘Daisy said the same. That she’d been there since she was a child.’
Jay gave an involuntary shiver.
‘But from the way Daisy described it, she was a prisoner, not an inductee. She mentioned a mother and father, but it was more like a house matron or something. On the bus I tried to look them up. The Fishermen. See if I could work out the structure. There was hardly anything online.’
Joseph nodded, keeping his eyes on the narrow road. ‘That’s because all of the members died, blowing themselves up in a suspected suicide pact. There was no one left to document what they did. Some scraps were pieced together by the girls they abused, but they were so young, and so damaged, that much of their testimony was considered unreliable.’
They drove along in silence for a while. As the light began to bleed from the sky the colour of the moor began to fade. What had once been green became grey. In the distance Jay could see a storm; rain falling like dirty ash from the blue-black cloud. She guessed it might be twenty miles away. The moor was so barren, the distance was hard to judge.
‘All I’m saying is that Daisy might have been so traumatised by the events in their houses, that she might have developed some form of psychosis. If she was doing internet searches–’
‘And that’s another thing,’ interrupted Jay. ‘Not only was there fuck-all about them on the internet, but Daisy is about as computer literate as a hedge. No way would she know how to do a sophisticated search, or any sort of search.’
‘Okay, but…’ Joseph didn’t know what else to say, so let his sentence fizzle out.
After a few more tense miles, Jay said, ‘So how did you meet my mother, anyhow?’
‘She was part of a paper I was writing,’ said Joseph, happy to be on safer ground. ‘I was doing a follow-up on the Greenham Common peace movement. As you probably know your mother was there in the nineteen eighties, along with thousands of other women, protesting against the nuclear missiles being imported from America.’
‘I don’t remember, but she’s told me all about it.’
Joseph hesitated. ‘But you know you were born there?’
‘How could I forget, with my mother banging on about it all the time.’ Jay kept her eyes on the passing moor, letting the uniformity of it zen out her mind. She didn’t want to think too much about what had happened: the rift that had opened up between them.
‘I can imagine. You were only one of a handful who were actually delivered on site. In some circles, you were quite famous.’
‘That’s why I changed my name,’ Jay said bluntly. ‘To make a separation from my mother. Look, can we stop so I can have a smoke? I need to stretch my leg before I start screaming.’
Joseph didn’t say anything else; just pulled in at the next lay-by and eased the car to a stop. Jay undid her seat belt, pulled the handle and lurched out. Joseph held on to the steering wheel for a few moments, then got out and joined her. She was sitting on a rock, leg outstretched, facing the expanse of desolate moorland and smoking furiously.
‘Sometimes you can see birds of prey hunting from here,’ he said, sitting down beside her. ‘This is just the right time, as the light fades.’
‘Whooperty-fucking-doo.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, but you did ask. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned about where you were b–’
‘No, I’m sorry.’ Jay sighed, wiping her hand through her hair, like she was brushing it with the cigarette. ‘You were very kind to come and get me. So was my mum for asking you. I guess I’m feeling a bit ripped-up at the moment. I feel so guilty. And worried. I’m going out of my mind trying to work out who to trust and how to go forward. If Slane recruited me through my boss, then I don’t know if I can trust him.’ Jay sucked on her cigarette like it was thrown rope. As the day died she felt the wind pick up; cold and bitter from the nearby North Sea. She shivered and wrapped an arm around herself. ‘Him or any other police officer. I don’t know what they – Slane and Grant – have said after I legged it from the hospital. For all I know there might be a warrant out for me.’
Joseph nodded but didn’t look at her; stayed staring out at the moor.
‘As you know, after Greenham, your mother joined the travelling community, ending up being part of the so-called Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge, in 1985. You would have been about three.’
‘I don’t remember it.’ Jay threw her cigarette away and wrapped her other arm around herself. Joseph suspected it had more to do with protection than warding off the cold.
‘There were six hundred new-age travellers, and thirteen hundred police officers with riot gear,’ Joseph said. ‘In a standoff at Stonehenge. It is disputed who threw the first punch, so to speak, but it was an event that changed your mother’s life.’
‘We never spoke about it,’ insisted Jay.
‘Witnessing the clubbing of pregnant women by the state had a profound effect on her. The beating of children too, it was alleged.’
Jay said nothing; just hugged herself tighter.
‘That was when she gave you your name, Jaseran. Literally “chain mail” in old French. Protection. That is also when she left the community and went to university, eventually became what she is now, a campaigning lawyer for human rights.’
‘Old news,’ said Jay; but inside she felt an aching, one that had been there so long she couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t there.
‘Of course.’ Joseph nodded again. ‘Anyhow, I liked your mother, and we stayed in touch. Occasionally our paths crossed. A lot of the work I do ends up having a human rights dimension.’
‘Sorry, Joseph. I’m a right cow sometimes, especially when it comes to my mother. I am really grateful to you and honestly, if you caught me when I wasn’t completely having my melons twisted, I’m really quite funny.’
‘Do you always swear this much?’
Jay smiled, giving him the first genuine sign of pleasure he had seen on her. The effect was electric. She seemed to fizz with life. ‘Fuck, no. I’ve cut down just for you.’
‘Okay.’
‘To be polite.’
Joseph didn’t say anything else after that; just smiled, stood, and got back in the car.
After a moment, Jay followed.
35
30th October
Grize Cottage
* * *
When they arrived at Joseph’s cottage, Jay had a bath while he lit the Esse stove in the kitchen. By the time she finished and came back out wearing the pyjamas he had left out, the room was warm and welcoming. As she sat down in front of the burning box of the stove Joseph handed her a cup of coffee.
‘Instant, I’m afraid. I don’t spend enough time here to bother with ground; always away in-field or at conferences.’
‘I don’t care, as long as it’s got caffeine in it.’ Jay took the offered cup and sipped the hot liquid.
Joseph smiled. ‘Good. I’ve put your clothes in the wash. They’ll be ready in about an hour.’
‘Thank you, but they’re not my clothes. They belong to the woman whose boat it was. As soon as possible I need to pick up some cargos.’
‘We can do that in town.’
He handed h
er a leaflet. She took it and looked at the cover.
‘The Magpie Café : the finest fish and chips in Whitby,’ she read, then looked at him, her expression neutral.
‘Fact,’ said Joseph. ‘They serve over thirty different fish and edible ocean miscellanea there.’
Jay raised an eyebrow at him and flicked through the menu.
‘Well done; you’ve just given me a first. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the words “edible ocean miscellanea” put together before.’
‘You’re welcome; I thought we could go there later if you want? When we pick up some clothes.’
Jay smiled and shook her head. ‘You’ve been really kind, Joseph, but I just want to get my head down for now and try to work out what I’m going to do.’
‘Fair enough.’ Joseph pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. ‘Good idea. We’ll have a few cups of coffee and see if we can come up with a plan.’
‘No, Joseph. You’ve already been sterling, getting me here so I can sort my head out.’
‘And then what? You’ve said you can’t trust your former colleagues. How old was your chief inspector, by the way?’
Jay’s forehead creased. ‘Why do you ask?’
Joseph sighed. ‘The police force wasn’t always like it is now. Back in the day it was more like a club. In some areas, anyway. That’s why the Met in London were so corrupt. Or Manchester. If this Slane and your Chief go back a ways…?’
Jay’s eyes widened. ‘That’s exactly what she said. That they knew each other from the old days.’
Joseph nodded. ‘Before you get your head down I want you to give me names of everyone you can think of who you’ve met, or Slane has told you about. I’m going to get a colleague to do some digging, strictly off-campus. Don’t worry; she won’t raise any flags.’ Joseph reassured her when he saw the concern stamped on Jay’s face.