In seconds, she was calling 999 and was put through to a disembodied voice.
“There’s a body in Pan’s Wood, Little Mort… a girl.”
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that, Miss?”
“I said there’s a girl’s body in Pan’s Wood,” Dakota repeated nervously, looking around.
“Can you give me your name?” asked the lady on the other end of the line.
“No, I’m not getting involved; I’m just telling you she is there, in a grove behind the Witch Tree.”
The voice on the other end began to speak again, but Dakota hung up the receiver, pausing a moment to wipe her hand prints from it. Her mind reeled with scenes from TV crime dramas. She began wiping down every surface she had touched with the sleeve of her sweater, believing that, somehow, they would track the call to the phone box and get her fingerprints. Her mind wasn’t rational enough to realise there would be thousands of different prints in there.
“You OK, sweetie?” asked Lula as Dakota came in the front door. Her face dropped when she looked at her sister’s clothes. “Christ D, what happened to you?”
“Uh… oh, I just went for a run and slipped over in the woods.” She laughed pathetically.
“You went for a run? Your nuts, D. You sure you weren’t meeting a fella for a bit of a snog?” Lula giggled like a schoolgirl. “You look like you were rolling around!”
“Don’t be stupid, I just fell over,” Dakota replied weakly and wandered off into the kitchen.
A moment or two later, Jackson appeared beside her where she was steadying herself on the kitchen sink. The tap running on full washing away the liquids she had just regurgitated.
“What is wrong with you?” he whispered urgently.
“She is dead, Jackson. I found her in the grove,” she managed in a low voice.
“Oh Christ! Why did you go there? What if someone had seen you?”
“Someone did. Mr Goldman was there.” She stopped as she gagged again, her empty stomach twisting in her belly. She filled up a glass with water, drinking it down to rid the taste of bile from her mouth.
“What happened?”
“Well he tried to rape me and warned me off telling anyone again.”
“Jackson!” called Lula from the lounge making them both jump. “I changed my mind. I will have a cup of tea.”
“OK,” he called back. Turning back to Dakota he returned to a whisper: “Did he hurt you? Are you all right?”
“No, I am so fucking far from being all right!” she snapped, raising her voice slightly.
“Shut up! You have to keep your head together. If anything happens I am the one who goes to jail, not you! I’ll be a paedophile. What would happen to Lula?”
“Yeah, I know. You don’t have to pile the pressure on, too. I know what I am doing.” Rage boiled over in her and the glass in her hand shattered, throwing shards of bloodied glass into the sink.
“What was that?” called Lula.
“Oh nothing, I knocked a glass over!” Jackson shouted back. Dakota stared numbly at the cuts in her fingers and the blood dripping into the white ceramic sink. She felt she was snapping, losing a grip on her sanity. Everything was slipping away; the life she had grown to accept was changing again. She wasn’t sure if she could take another big change, another big secret.
And what a dirty secret it was, she told herself. At such a young age, the only secrets she had were of sex and murder. Would she have to take them to her grave? She could not forget the dead girl’s eyes, looking into her, pleading to be rescued, begging to be saved.
“I called the police,” she muttered as Jackson threw the broken glass in the bin.
“What? Are you nuts? They’ll...”
“Don’t worry I made an anonymous tip-off. No names. I just didn’t want her lying out there in the woods to be eaten by wild animals. They’ll catch him eventually...”
TWENTY-ONE: The Ghost of Michelle Taybury
“I feel so sick, I am disgusted with myself.” Dakota sighed, her head in her hands. Betty slipped a lit cigarette in between her fingers and patted her shoulder comfortingly.
“You were too young to be making decisions like that! What would anyone else have done in your position? You might have ended up with no one, Jackson in prison and Lula in the morgue.”
“That’s terrible… as though it was better that little girl died than my sister? That’s so wrong. I made a decision and a little girl died because of it.”
“No, Jackson made that choice. He would’ve probably beaten you black and blue rather than let you go back and free that girl. Anyway, it was her time.” Betty sniffed back some tears and puffed away at her cigarette.
“Her time? How can it be her time to be raped and murdered in a cold forest? That’s not fate.” Dakota wanted to shout out the injustice, but tears caught in her throat.
“Yes, dear, it is! There is no such thing as an accidental death or dying before your time. Everyone dies precisely when they are supposed to and that’s it. They have a plan for us all and we cannot stop it from happening.”
“So, you really can’t cheat death?”
“Nope! These books you hear scratching away all around us? The endings are already written when you actually die. They keep apace with you most of your life, but in the end they go on ahead and finish the story before you get there. Little Michelle Taybury was already dead when she entered that forest. She just had to act out the final scenes.”
Betty fell silent and they both sat and listened to the low roar of lives being written all around them. Dakota thought about how, sometime, not so long ago in earth time, she was waiting to die. Here in Purgatory her book had already fallen silent on the shelf of the library. Here she was already dead, her fate decided by invisible fingers. But back on earth, had she felt it? That moment when the ink stopped forming on the page, the moment when God had decided she was going to die, had she felt it in her heart somewhere? In the dark chambers of her heart, in the dusty corridors of her brain, had she known that her time was almost done? That soon she would cease to be and her body would give up on her?
She wished she could remember.
“Have you been to see Ariel?” asked Dakota.
“Oh yes, I went to see her once and we talked for quite some time. She explained everything to me there and then; I guess she is able to answer most of the questions God could,” she mused.
“How come I never had it all explained to me? I have just learnt bits from different people.”
“Did you ever ask her all the right questions?” Betty asked, a wisp of smoke escaping her lips.
“No, I guess not. She answered the questions I did ask. I suppose I just didn’t think to ask everything.” Dakota stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, trying to think of all the relevant questions. Why do we die when we do? Why am I here? What is life all about?
They were questions she had pondered when she was alive. After her parents died she had thought of every conceivable question she would ask God when she met him. Only then she did not know she might never meet him.
Dakota retreated to the bathroom where she stripped off all her clothes and scrubbed her body with hot water until she was red. No matter how much she washed, she still felt dirty, as though James Goldman’s fingerprints were a permanent mark on her. Looking at herself in the mirror she felt dirty, despicable, akin to the monster next door.
She felt so sick that all she wanted to do was sleep; it seemed the only way to get the day’s events out of her head. Occasionally Lula let her have a glass of wine with her in the evenings; at that moment, she felt sure it was the only way she could relax and get some sleep. Something to blur the images in her head, make it unreal.
By the time she could bear to be around other people, it was early evening. Winter darkness had already taken over the streets, and the smell of Lula’s shepherd’s pie was wafting up the stairs, reminding her she couldn’t recall when she last ate.
Dakota joined Lula and
Jackson at the table, desperate for something normal, and ate dinner with them, using all her energy to act as though she was normal and happy and actually enjoying the food, not just forcing herself to go through the motions.
Jackson went out after dinner with a sour look on his face, murmuring something about the pub and leaving Lula to clear up on her own.
Dakota felt sad when she saw the disappointed look in her sister’s eyes. Lula wasn’t angry with Jackson for not helping her clear up, nor was she angry that he had abandoned them in favour of the pub. She was just sad, it seemed, and lost without her prince, left alone to do the housewife thing and wait at home for him to return smelling of beer and cigarettes, by which time she would have already fallen asleep on the couch, an empty wine bottle on the table, its contents causing her medication to deepen her sleep.
Dakota noticed that it happened rather a lot lately. When Jackson came to her room, he would tell her that there was no way Lula was going to wake up that night. It may have been this sort of behaviour that had stopped Lula’s medication working in the first place. The tablets were just not strong enough anymore to keep Lula in that safe cotton wool world of sleep and dream.
“So, did you get your new medication?” asked Dakota, standing up to help her sister with the dishes.
“Yeah, started them last night, worked like a charm.” She smiled, gratitude in her eyes.
“Think I might need some of them! Can’t seem to sleep properly at all these days.”
“Worried about something? Sometimes that’s all it is, too much on your mind. Is it that Charlie bloke?”
“Oh no, we don’t really see each other anymore.” Dakota thought briefly about him and realised she had used him terribly but it was no different to how he treated her.
“Ah well, best thing really, he was probably too old for you. With your exams coming up, you need to focus more on that. You don’t need those sorts of distractions, eh?” Lula smiled warmly and for a moment looked so like her mother it jarred Dakota. She felt she had stood here a dozen times, wiping up wet dishes with her mother, and her mother throwing in the odd word of wisdom. In that false light, by the soap-filled sink, Lula in an apron damp with dishwater and yellow marigolds on her hands, she could have been her mother, slightly weary around the eyes, but still so ready to love.
“Can I have a drink with you tonight?” asked Dakota, her heart full of pain and regret for her sister and all the lies she had told her over the years. She wanted more than anything for things to be normal. She wanted to get drunk with her sister and watch a girlie movie and eat too many crisps, laugh and remember old times. She wanted her sister back after the many years since their parents’ late night departure changed their relationship. Lula had been trying so hard to be a mother figure, and all Dakota had done was hide from her and lie, that terrible dark secret expanding the void between them.
She wanted those sisterly chats back, when they would lie awake in their darkened bedroom, with the lights of passing cars slanting across the ceiling, and the day’s events and Lula’s secrets unfolding amidst wonder and giggles. She wanted to share everything with her, all her feeling about life and sex and boys, and laugh about when they were children and the games they would play.
But Dakota couldn’t do any of that, for a great secret like a disease had infected their relationship and no matter what happened she would never be able to share anything personal with her again, and everything that would ever happen to her in her life would always lead back to Jackson and what he had made her into with his late night music and his driven hands.
“Yeah OK, let’s have a bottle of wine and watch an old movie. Jackson won’t be back till late now so sod him!” Lula giggled and threw her washing-up gloves down.
“Who does he go out drinking with? I never knew he had friends.” Dakota laughed.
“No one! He just goes and sits in the pub, probably doesn’t even speak to the barman. I guess he just needs to get away from us sometimes. I wonder if he regrets moving in here with us. He must feel like a father to you now, and I don’t think he ever wanted children,” Lula went on as she carried the wine and glasses off into the lounge.
“Oh, I don’t think he regrets it at all, Lula. He has everything he wants right here.”
“Yeah, I know, he does love me. He just has a hard time showing me is all.” She smiled as though someone had lit a fire within her, filling her with renewed warmth and feelings of security. As guilt began to weigh on Dakota like a stone on her chest, she felt the only solution was to get drunk and forget everything. So she did, and that night she fell asleep on the couch with Lula, having the best night’s sleep she’d had in years.
She awoke the next morning in her bed. A small note written in her sister’s hand told her that Jackson had carried her up to bed when he got home. Instinctively, her hands went down to check she still had her knickers on and she was relieved to discover they were still in place.
She trudged downstairs in the weary eleven o’clock morning light. Rain was tapping the windows all through the house like small voices in every room. Her head ached from drinking too much wine, but it felt good to her – something physical she could moan about, something she could lay all anger and ill feeling onto.
Through her mildly blurred gaze, she noticed a pile of letters on the doormat and picked them up, throwing them on the side table. Just as she turned to walk into the kitchen, her own name in bold black letters caught her eye.
A large brown envelope bearing her name was mingled with the bills and junk mail she had just picked up. As she reached out to touch it, fear jabbed at her stomach. Like a premonition, she knew that whatever was in that envelope was not good. Sudden heat in her body transformed into cold sweat and by the time she was pulling the envelope open she was shuddering like a naked child in the rain.
The first seven pictures were of her and Jackson in various positions and stages of a sexual act. From the lighting and the clothing she could tell each was taken at a different time, some when Lula was out of the house, others when Lula was asleep and Jackson had come to Dakota's dimly-lit bedroom late at night. Some were years old now, proof that they had been having sex since she was well under age. Her mind, though racing, still managed to wonder what kind of zoom lens he must have been using to get such close-up shots. It felt odd to see herself naked in a picture, in all those poses and positions.
Then the last picture was of Michelle Taybury.
It must have been taken at first light, as it was quite a dark photo but light enough for everything to be clear. She was dead. But her eyes were still staring.
Seconds later Dakota was vomiting violently into the kitchen sink, the photographs still clutched in her white-knuckled hands.
She felt as though she had had her stomach ripped out. She had truly doubted that Mr Goldman had any real proof of her and Jackson’s affair, a hope that she had clung to despite everything else. But now she knew he had proof, and most probably quite a lot of it.
She also knew that his inclusion of a picture of the dead child was a warning to her and her alone. The photos were a threat to Jackson, a little message to say, ‘don’t even think about turning me in!’ But the photo of Michelle with her blue lips and staring glassy eyes was a threat to Dakota. He was saying that he would have no qualms about doing the same to her as he had to Michelle. Perhaps she would be one in a long line of dead girls, all of them lost to the woods and dead leaves, their skirts ruffled and their knickers missing forever.
She had always been aware of what the consequences of her relationship with Jackson could be; she just never thought it would ever come to that. But seeing the act through someone else’s eyes made her feel sick and dirty. Her tiny body entangled with his much older body in a dark seedy room where the pictures of Jesus and Mary were long buried in her sock drawer, their pitying eyes turned away from her.
For the first time in years she wanted to never see him again. Never hear that song again, hear him clim
b the stairs, see him slink across the dark room towards her.
TWENTY-TWO: Choices
The months that followed were the hardest she had yet faced; her exams loomed ahead of her and beyond that was college and the possibility of university, but all she wanted was to disappear and get a job in a quiet town where no one knew her and she could forget the first sixteen years of her life. She even wanted to forget her parents, for their existence led to their death and the arrival of Jackson in her life. She wanted it all gone.
But she also felt that she wanted her life to be better one day, to have a good job and a world where none of this mattered. So, with every ounce of her determination, she decided to take her exams then leave afterwards, perhaps to Ireland to live with an aunt or something, somewhere far away from Jackson and Mr Goldman.
But these plans she kept to herself, managing to dissuade Jackson from visiting her quite so often and let her revise for her exams. He would not always be told, though, and would force his way in late at night while she was trying desperately to sleep. She even resorted to stealing her sister’s tablets to be sure that she would be in an impenetrable sleep by the time he crept into her bed.
After a few months, he became angry with her.
“But I have been really tired, Jackson. I have to revise so much. I need to pass my exams,” she whimpered.
“You have been making excuses and trying to put me off ever since he sent you those pictures,” he snapped, throwing a used match out of the window.
“Hey, I think about that little girl every day, OK? I can’t forget that she died because of us!”
“No, D. She died because of that freak next door!”
“Why won’t you do something about him then? He could do it again! They found other bones in those woods when they found Michelle. He could have done it loads of times!”
Purgatory Hotel Page 16