The Death Knock

by Elodie Harper

  The next morning Jack gets up early and makes them both porridge, a peace offering for being home so late the night before. Frankie had given up and gone to bed by the time he got in. It was hard not to feel a little aggrieved, even though it wasn’t his fault. After such an awful day she had wanted to talk to him.

  ‘At least you should be able to report on something new now,’ Jack says, setting the honey down between them. His hair is still wet from the shower, the dark brown curls leaving a damp stain on his collar.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? Charlie is obsessed with the idea it’s a serial killer. There’s absolutely no way he won’t squeeze a day two out of the story. After all, we haven’t even had a police interview yet.’ With an unerring sense of timing, Charlie’s number flashes up on her mobile. Frankie rolls her eyes and takes the call. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she says to her news editor. ‘You’ve lined up a nice day filming at a garden centre.’

  ‘Ha bloody ha,’ he replies. ‘Can you go straight to Yarmouth rather than come in to the office? Police say the family absolutely don’t want to talk, which is a shame. I suggest you and Gavin go to the scene, see if anyone leaving flowers knew her and will say anything. I think we’ll send somebody else to police headquarters. They’re not taking any questions, so it’s just going to be some copper reading out a statement.’

  ‘Great. So that’s a day hanging out by the Bure talking to bereaved teenagers? Gavin will be delighted.’

  ‘Always happy to oblige,’ says Charlie, ringing off.

  Frankie puts the phone down. Jack is staring at her. ‘Are you going to be OK? Couldn’t he have sent someone else? You had to deal with it all yesterday.’

  Not for the first time, she wishes she didn’t have to explain her job to him. ‘The fact I did it yesterday is the point. It means I’ve made the contacts and know the story.’ She spoons some honey onto the porridge, stirring it in. ‘It’s fine, don’t worry. I’ve got Gavin with me.’ She doesn’t add that in spite of the horror, and although some part of her never wants to think about what happened to Hanna Chivers ever again, another part wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

  The track she drove down yesterday is no longer deserted. A shrine sits at the bottom of it. Tealights in jam jars, bunches of flowers and cards, rest against the mesh in a growing pile. If there’s anything worse than a death knock, perhaps it’s loitering at places of grief, waiting to pounce on unwary mourners. She and Gavin stand as far back as they can to avoid making anyone uncomfortable. They film a short clip with one of Hanna’s teachers, retired now, but a number of the well-wishers have never even met Hanna, they’ve just come to ‘pay their respects’. A few are not averse to being filmed placing their tributes by the fence, staring thoughtfully at the candles.

  Police cars are still parked in the deserted warehouse yard and a white tent has been erected where Hanna’s body lay. Gavin gets some shots of forensic officers busy at the scene. The wind from the Bure is icy, and they are about to pack up and leave when a teenage girl arrives, bearing a service station bouquet. She has streaks of purple and platinum in her black hair and mascara smudged under her eyes. It’s obvious she’s not here to sightsee. She walks to the spot by the fence with her shoulders hunched over as if she’s in physical pain. Frankie waits until the girl has laid her flowers, then approaches.

  ‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ she says. ‘My name’s Frankie, I’m from the Eastern Film Company. Did you know Hanna?’

  ‘She was my best friend.’

  ‘I’m really sorry. This must be terrible.’

  ‘She’d been through so much. Like seriously, so much shit. And then for something like this to happen. It makes me so angry.’ The girl wipes one hand across her eyes as the tears spill over, smearing more mascara.

  ‘What had Hanna been through?’

  ‘Well, you know she was in care? She came to Norfolk when she was thirteen. That’s when we met. We were at school together. She was Hanna Raynott then. Her foster family were all right, I suppose, but it’s not the same. And then they took in some lad, and he was a right twat. Han couldn’t stand him. She moved out after school, lived with me and my mum for a bit.’ She pauses, biting her bottom lip. ‘I just feel so bad, you know? We were best mates and I didn’t even notice she was missing. When she didn’t text me back last week, I just thought she was being a bit crap.’

  ‘You shouldn’t feel bad, it sounds like you were a real friend to her.’ Frankie pauses. ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘Hollie.’

  ‘Hollie, I hate to ask this, and feel free to say no, but would you like to say a little bit about Hanna for the news? My colleague Gavin is just here with the camera. We’re running a piece about her on the programme tonight.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Hollie replies. ‘Not sure what I can say though.’ Gavin, who has been waiting nearby as discreetly as possible, hands Frankie the microphone and hoists the camera onto his shoulder, before the young girl can change her mind. Hollie looks up at him, a little uncertain, pushing the lock of purple from her eyes. ‘Are you going to be filming me?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not live. We can stop and start all you like. Just look at me, not the camera. Try to pretend Gavin isn’t there.’

  With a nudge from Frankie, Hollie starts talking about Hanna, about her kindness, her bravery, about the loneliness she felt in care, the friendship the two girls had, the plans they’d made. She talks quickly, gabbles even, as if determined to make it through the ordeal without crying. And all the while Frankie can see the white tent behind Hollie’s head and feels a growing sense of rage. Somebody out there is responsible for all this pain; they’ve stolen a young woman’s life and left her like trash on the wasteland, and now they’re walking about, free while everyone who loved her is left in agony. She feels so angry she can hardly breathe.

  ‘Did she say anything to you before she went missing? Like, was anyone following or bothering her? Her flatmates said she got sent some glass in the post.’

  ‘Really? Not sure I’d trust them to be honest, she didn’t like them much.’ Hanna shakes her head. ‘There was just the blog. That really upset her.’

  ‘A blog? What about?’

  ‘It was the trial, wasn’t it? Some wanker wrote this whole nasty blog about it, saying that Han made up being assaulted. It was really shitty.’

  ‘I didn’t know Hanna had been assaulted.’

  ‘Yeah, it was some perv when we were fifteen. Grabbed her outside the club toilet. Tried to stick his hand down her pants, but she punched him in the nuts.’ Hollie smiles slightly, and Frankie can hear the pride in her voice. ‘He perved over the wrong girl. She recognised him when he raped somebody else and it was in the papers. Han gave evidence at the trial, got him banged up and everything.’

  ‘She sounds very brave.’ Frankie feels another wash of sadness. All that bravery, and strength, for what? Hollie is squinting up at her, chewing her bottom lip, looking spiky and vulnerable. As Hanna must have been. ‘What did this blog say, then?’

  ‘It was like a riff on what Han said at court. Whoever it was must have got hold of her statement, and then they just put nasty comments all over it, making out how she was a liar.’

  ‘Sounds horrible. Is it still online?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, it is!’ Hollie says, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet. ‘Police are so fff—’ She pauses like a schoolgirl who realises she’s talking to a teacher, and glances over her shoulder in case any of the officers standing by the panda cars might have heard her – ‘so flipping useless, we complained about it, but they never took it down. Said the website wasn’t registered. Or something. So it’s still there. Hanna even changed her name to Chivers, after her nan, just so the stupid blog didn’t come up all the time. How crap is that?’

  ‘That’s awful,’ says Frankie. ‘Do you remember what the website was called?’

  ‘It had the weirdest name, like really weird. Killing Cuttlefish.’ Holl
ie hugs her arms round herself and shudders. ‘Like, what’s that about? Some really gross stuff on there. Makes you wonder about people, doesn’t it?’

  Frankie gets in the passenger seat of Gavin’s car, slamming the door shut, waiting for him to pack the camera in the boot. Her fingers are bright pink from the cold and she has to sniff to stop her nose from streaming. She gets her phone out of her bag, to turn it off silent. Four missed calls from Charlie.

  ‘Can you believe it!’ he says, when she rings him back.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t listen to your messages.’

  ‘The BBC filmed her!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hanna. They filmed a short interview with her at her further education college last year, some report on more government cash for apprenticeships. Somebody over there must have stuck her name in the archive, just in case, and it came up. The lucky sods.’

  ‘I suppose they’re not sharing the footage?’ Frankie asks. Charlie just snorts in reply. She turns as Gavin lets himself in and sits down beside her. ‘Well, we’re on our way back now. We spoke to a teacher, as well as her best friend, and found out a load of stuff about her past. Seems she pissed off some fairly nasty people.’

  ‘Great!’ says Charlie. ‘Well, you know what I mean,’ he adds, obviously realising how he sounds. ‘Fill me in when you get back.’

  It takes Frankie a while to get round to looking up Hollie’s blog. She doesn’t have enough signal to check it in the car, and then back in the newsroom, she gets caught up watching the footage of Hanna on the BBC website, like everyone else. It’s only about thirty-five seconds long. A few shots of her brushing a client’s hair at the college salon, a close-up of her hands, another close-up of her face, with its frown of concentration, and then a brief clip. I think apprenticeships are great, you know? You can earn as you learn and all that. When I’ve got my own salon, I’ll definitely have apprentices there.

  It feels odd listening to her voice; she sounds incredibly young. Frankie plays it several times, trying to wipe out the memory of Hanna’s dead body, without much success.

  She closes the tab with the video and types ‘Killing Cuttlefish’ into the search engine. Some very odd suggestions for videos on YouTube come up, but only one website with the same title. She opens it. At first it’s blank and she thinks maybe it’s been taken down by the police after all, then a blob of ink splatters across the white screen, turning it black. A circle appears, exactly like the opening titles of a James Bond movie, but instead of 007, a female silhouette walks into the spotlight. She stands still. A small red dot appears over her chest, growing larger and larger, until the whole page is red. White text appears.

  Enter Forum

  Frankie clicks on it. A welcome message appears, the letters fading up through the red. Brother, make yourself at home. You are with friends. Here you can rage against the Feminist Gynocracy. Here you can dream. Here you are free. A box in the bottom right hand corner reads: Join the Conversation.

  Frankie enters the forum, a long list of posts, all by different writers with peculiar pseudonyms. She reads a few and finds herself entering a strange parallel world of grievance in which women run everything and men are oppressed; doubly put upon by the constraints of chivalry and feminism. She guesses it must be an extreme version of Men’s Rights Activism, a movement she has heard of before, but knows little about.

  There’s no search bar to pick out Hanna’s name, so she’s forced to plough through the forum and nearly gets lost down the rabbit hole. A series of posts advocate a brave new world that is no longer run by ‘Feminazis’ or ‘The False Principle of Female Consent’. Instead, one blogger called @BetaBloke suggests women should be held in common, thus losing their sexual power over men. Posts below the line are full of rage about the bitches who have made the writers’ lives a misery and the entire site seethes with discontent.

  Even after reading a few posts Frankie is none the wiser about the significance of the site’s peculiar title, and she’s forced to google some of the other jargon; there’s a lot of chat about red and blue pills, which she doesn’t understand. The website is clearly aimed at long-standing believers and no explanations are given. After some research she learns the terms are fairly common in the MRA world, a metaphor based loosely on a film she hasn’t seen, called The Matrix. The blue pill is a drug everyone takes to stay in a state of false consciousness, the world where men are supposedly in charge. The red pill is The Truth, whose takers understand that feminism rules, and that in reality, it’s women who use and abuse men. The premise is so absurd it ought to be funny, but Frankie is starting to find the bile anything but laughable.

  The website seems to be UK based, given the references are almost all British. In amongst articles aimed at specific women – including the octogenarian TV chef Mary Berry – she eventually finds the piece on Hanna Raynott. The writers at Killing Cuttlefish evidently don’t have any qualms about the illegality of naming victims of sexual assault.

  Written by someone who goes by the name @Feminazi_Slayer2, the post’s main target is the woman at the centre of the rape case, Amy Spencer. Her attacker, Jamie Cole, was simultaneously convicted of raping Amy as well as three counts of indecent assault against teenage girls, including Hanna. According to @Feminazi_Slayer2, the trial was a charade. The headline runs Jamie Cole: Another Victim of ‘Rape Culture’.

  So the Feminists claimed another scalp this month: hapless 22-year-old Jamie Cole. Poor old Jamie was set up by a quartet of shrill little sluts, you know the kind I mean. Happy to get pissed out of their tiny minds, running round in little more than their panties, but all too keen to scream ‘Fire!’ as soon as some poor sap takes them up on their offer . . .

  And on it goes. After his opening rant, the blogger proceeds to pick apart all four women’s impact statements, looking for proof that they were lying. Frankie can’t bear to read more than is necessary (she skips the section on Amy Spencer after reading that her cracked ribs were because she ‘liked it rough’) and scrolls straight down to Hanna’s statement. Like all the other women’s stories, the teenager’s simple account – which Frankie imagines being read in the childlike voice she’s just heard on the video – is constantly interrupted by the blogger’s comments.

  So now we get to Hanna Raynott, the youngest of the quartet, but by all accounts something of a wild child. Not that we hear anything about her tearaway, binge-drinking antics in her ‘victim’ impact statement. Au contraire, butter wouldn’t melt, but reading between the lines we can see her little lies and slip-ups.

  I was fifteen when Jamie Cole assaulted me. I was with some friends at a club, having a night out before the start of our final GCSE year. It had been a stressful few months, but I was finally feeling good about myself, and we were all having a good time.

  So first off, what’s a fifteen-year-old doing in a club? Last time I checked, night clubs were for over-eighteens. So we’ve hardly got a little innocent here. Then there’s the entirely irrelevant whinging about her stressful few months. Ah, Diddums. What relevance does that have to Jamie? Zilch, that’s what.

  Jamie came over to the bar and insisted on buying us some drinks but then wouldn’t leave us alone.

  The poor sap ‘insisted’ did he? So by her own admission, they were quite happy to quaff his booze but not to tolerate his company. Charming.

  He got quite abusive and kept wanting to snog my friend Hollie. After we told him to go away, we thought he had got the message, but an hour or so later when I went to the toilet, he was waiting outside the door when I came out.

  Here I think we get to the nub of the whole thing. He wanted to ‘snog my friend Hollie.’ A little jealousy, methinks? Hell Hath no Fury etc. And she admits Jamie was not interested in her while there were witnesses, but suddenly he’s sneaking after her to the loos? More likely she gave him the wink to follow her there.

  When I tried to get past him he grabbed me, and tried to get hold of my breasts. I shoved him away but he jammed
me against the wall and stuck his hand in my knickers. He managed to get his hand inside me, and scratched at me with his fingernails. I was very frightened and in a lot of pain but I managed to punch him and get away.

  All very traumatic, I’m sure. IF IT EVER HAPPENED. I think the last line is the crucial one here – if she’s strong enough to punch him away, how did he get his hand in her panties? By invitation, that’s how.

  What happened really affected me. I was scared to go anywhere on my own afterwards and felt really dirty and disgusted. I worried about getting an infection from his scratches. He made me feel anyone might pick on me at any time, that I wasn’t safe. I already found it hard to trust people and this made it so much worse.

  Blah, blah, blah. The usual spiel. You’d think these ‘victims’ just copied each other wouldn’t you? Same little lines fed to them by the Feminazis to repeat over and over. Dirty, Disgusted, Not safe BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

  I tried to forget all about it, but I couldn’t. My school work was affected and eventually I told my form teacher what had happened. I feel guilty sometimes thinking if I had reported it straight away, maybe he wouldn’t have hurt anyone else.

  Again this is so transparent it’s laughable. She reports ‘the assault’ AFTER her grades drop? Blatantly just looking for an excuse. Honestly, sometimes I wonder how so many twats sitting on juries have been conditioned to believe this crap. It’s the power of the Blue Pill, people.

  That night meant nothing to Jamie Cole, I was just a thing to him, but I have had to relive what happened over and over again in my head.

  Again the language of the woman scorned: ‘That night meant nothing to him’ etc. Upset he never called you after your little fumble were you, sweetie? Looking for a boyfriend? Maybe try not being such a slag.

  I hope one day he understands how much hurt he’s caused.

  Yeah well, the poor bastard’s in jail now honey pie, so I guess he’s having a worse time of it than you, hey? You better hope nobody really gives you what’s coming to you. BITCH.