Cut to the Bone

by Roz Watkins

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Obviously, if Bex is Violet’s mother, then Violet is Kirsty’s niece, and she’s upset about … it all.’

  ‘Understandably.’

  ‘But then … She told Anna she’s doing an experiment. To put her mind at rest that pigs couldn’t have eaten … a person.’

  ‘Christ. What’s she doing?’

  ‘Anna didn’t want to say, but in the end she told me. Kirsty’s doing it tonight. Replicating the conditions in the abattoir and feeding the pigs …’

  ‘What the hell is she feeing the pigs?’

  ‘A whole sheep. Fifty kilos.’

  I was struggling to get my head around this. She was feeding a Violet-sized sheep to pigs. ‘Get in touch with Kirsty Nightingale and tell her we’d like to be there,’ I said. ‘We’ll come to her farm.’

  19

  The moon glistened on the rocks of Winnats Pass as Fiona and I drove through. It was nearly midnight, but so bright it might as well have been daytime. I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t yet been home to see Dad, but he’d understand. The key was in the safe so he could get in. And Hamlet would hopefully rouse himself from a postprandial sleep on my neighbour’s knee, welcome Dad, and show him around the kitchen, or at least to the cat food cupboard.

  An owl – pale and solid, lit by the moon – glided in front of the car and then swooped through a gap between the silver rocks.

  ‘I asked my granny if she knew the story behind the Pale Child,’ Fiona said.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It originated from a murder in the 1870s. But the weird thing is that it involved this well-off family who lived in a big house in Derwent village, and they were called Nightingale. Tony must be descended from them.’

  ‘Now that is weird. So how does the story go?’

  ‘The people in this house had a daughter.’

  ‘Oh God, the girl’s wearing a red T-shirt, isn’t she?’

  ‘What?’ Fiona said.

  ‘Oh, you know … Star Trek. Never mind.’

  ‘Right. Anyway, the woman – the mother of the girl – was apparently involved in the first wave of feminism. The early suffragists. Gran was obviously impressed, even though she claims not to be a feminist.’

  ‘I don’t see how anyone can not be a feminist.’

  ‘She is quite old, I suppose. Thought you had to burn your bra.’

  ‘That mass bra-burning didn’t even happen. Great way to trivialise an important issue though. But anyway …’

  ‘Anyway, a lot of people didn’t like this woman because her views were pretty radical at the time. They claimed she neglected her child, even though it was normal for children in rich families to be brought up by a nanny. And they said she was unwomanly and against God and so on. Of course there was no concept of the father neglecting the child.’

  ‘Lord, no. It was probably against nature for him to look after them. Separate spheres. There was an article in the Lancet around that time saying that if you educated women, their ovaries shrivelled up and they grew beards.’ If Jai had been around I’d have felt compelled to make a crack about the women who studied science at Cambridge. I was relieved he wasn’t.

  ‘Really?’ Fiona said, because she wasn’t a wisecracking idiot. ‘Well, this poor woman had taken the girl out to get some air in the countryside and she got mobbed by a bunch of anti-suffragists. She argued with them, and took her attention off her girl, who was with a nanny anyway. And the nanny was knocked unconscious and the girl strangled. Nobody saw anything, and the woman got the blame.’

  ‘Bloody hell. A child was murdered in broad daylight and nobody saw anything? And they blamed the woman?’

  ‘You have to wonder, don’t you? It did happen though. I checked the archives.’

  The reservoir slid into view on our left. Black as ink, sucked into the base of the valley by the drought. The drowned villages weren’t visible, but I pictured them. The houses swallowed by the waters. Including the house where this poor murdered child and her mother had lived.

  ‘Is the Pale Child supposed to be the ghost of this dead girl?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. After she died, the story goes that she haunted the big old house. But she was benign. She just wandered around asking for someone to look after her or be her friend.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘It was after the reservoir was built. The house that the child haunted was flooded along with the rest of the village, so she lost her home and got more desperate for friends and for someone to look after her. That’s why, if she sees your face, she claims you. But you have to go and be with her on the other side.’

  ‘Blimey. Is this from your granny?’

  ‘Yes. I had tea with her earlier. She says the Pale Child appears in times of drought, like this year, where the water goes low and reveals the old house where she lived.’

  ‘Your gran’s like a one-woman historical society, isn’t she? We should get her to start a museum. With a tea room.’

  ‘She can’t remember where she left her glasses or whether she fed the cat, but she remembers all this stuff.’

  ‘So the Pale Child was a Nightingale?’ I said. ‘That would mean she really is related to Violet.’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘How strange.’

  ‘I hear Mandy Finchley’s panicking,’ Fiona said, ‘because Gary saw her too.’

  ‘Yes. If anything happens to him …’

  ‘Then we freak the hell out.’

  I laughed and looked at Fiona. An image flitted into my mind. She and Craig at the briefing. The way they looked at each other. ‘Fiona, are you and Craig getting along okay? I mean, I know with Craig it’s never easy.’

  Fiona hesitated and then spoke quickly. ‘We’re fine. Same as usual.’

  ‘Has anything happened?’

  ‘No, nothing. Honestly. I stand up to him more these days and he doesn’t like it. I had to toughen up when I was in charge of the tea-fund.’

  ‘Ah yes. The assertiveness boot camp that is the tea-fund.’

  I wondered whether to persist. Things clearly weren’t fine. But if she refused to talk, there wasn’t much I could do.

  ‘We’re nearly there.’ Fiona pointed out a collection of buildings on our left. ‘I can’t quite believe what we’re here to see. I guess she’s hoping to show it’s not possible.’

  ‘Yes. And I suppose it helps us too. I mean, we all know there have been cases, but for the pigs to leave so little in the trough …’ I had to admit I was intrigued. I wanted to see what would be left of fifty kilos of meat fed to twenty moderately hungry pigs.

  20

  We pulled up in front of a modern brick farmhouse. An outside light cast a dull glow onto a lawn, which was fenced off from a concrete yard. To our right was a vast barn, and beyond that another one. Behind them were the woods, separated from the barns by an area of scorched grassland.

  We left the car and walked up to the house. Moths buzzed around the light, and the smell of manure hung in the still air.

  Kirsty pulled open the door. ‘Come out to the barn,’ she said. ‘It’s all ready.’ She reached behind her and lifted a plastic bag full of something solid and lumpy. She shoved it at me. ‘Give us a hand with this.’

  I took the bag, shocked at its weight and the feel of it. It was room-temperature, possibly warmer, and part of me resisted – told me it should be chilled. Kirsty passed me another one, and then gave Fiona a couple of bags.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This must be hard for you.’

  Kirsty gave a low laugh. ‘Yes, nicely done in the press conference. Not the best way to get the heads-up that one of your relatives might have been eaten by pigs. I shudder to think how her adopted parents felt.’

  ‘It was unfortunate.’

  ‘But for me, I never knew I had a niece so I haven’t exactly lost anything.’

  ‘That’s admirably logical,’ I said. And weird, I thought.

  Kirsty added, ‘It�
�s very upsetting, obviously.’

  ‘This is the sheep?’ I said.

  Kirsty pulled the door closed behind us with a sharp click. ‘Fifty kilo roughly butchered, with all the bones and skin, but no wool. Very fresh. It’s not been refrigerated.’ I could imagine her accidentally lopping off a little finger or popping out a baby or two while making the kids’ suppers.

  We followed Kirsty across the yard to one of the barns. A gentle breeze drifted over the grassy area between the barn and the woods. We waited while she removed a combination lock and pushed the door open. ‘This is intensive pig farming. Some people don’t like it, but there’s a demand for cheap pork.’

  We walked into the barn, and through an area stacked high with straw. As my eyes acclimatised, I saw that the rest of the barn was full of metal cages. Each housed about twenty young pigs, crammed in together, lying on slatted floors. They were slumped in piles, grunting softly.

  ‘They don’t have a lot of room,’ Fiona said.

  ‘It’s all perfectly standard,’ Kirsty said. ‘Red Tractor approved.’

  I’d seen enough videos on YouTube not to be surprised. But what hit me was the smell. Ammonia that tore at the back of my throat, despite the overhead fans that shifted the thick air around the barn.

  ‘Don’t they get any bedding?’ Fiona said.

  ‘If the slurry system doesn’t allow for bedding, we don’t have to provide it,’ Kirsty said. ‘Slatted floors let the waste drop through. But that lot at the end get straw. They’re on a new system I’m trying, thanks to pressure from welfare people.’

  Kirsty led us to the far side of the barn, to a pen that was bedded down with straw. ‘I’ve set it up exactly the same as at the abattoir. The same size, with straw, and with twenty six-month-old pigs.’

  As we approached, the pigs roused themselves, grunting and pushing to the front of the enclosure. They had much more room than the others, presumably to replicate conditions in the abattoir.

  ‘They look hungry,’ Fiona said.

  Kirsty nodded. ‘Pigs are always hungry. But these had a smaller supper than usual. I gave them the same as Anna said the pigs had on Sunday evening.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It won’t hurt them, will it? Eating so much raw meat?’

  ‘No,’ Kirsty said. ‘They have stomachs of iron.’

  ‘Okay. You’re being admirably scientific about this.’

  She hesitated then nodded. ‘I suppose it’s my way of coping with the situation.’

  Kirsty opened up one of her bags and dumped the contents into a trough in front of the pigs. I winced. A sheep’s head, its wool removed. And some large chunks of leg. ‘I got the feet taken off,’ she said. ‘But left the head.’

  I opened my bags and dumped the gruesome contents into the pigs’ trough. Mine contained a stomach and glistening intestines, which slid into the trough with a slap. Fiona winced and did the same with hers. The smell brought bile to my throat.

  The pigs let out delighted grunts and shoved their snouts into the meat. They ripped into it, jostling against each other, pushing and shoving in their enthusiasm.

  ‘Shall we have a cup of tea and we can come back and check later?’ Kirsty said.

  I looked at the pigs tucking in. They were approaching the problem with an extremely positive attitude, but it would surely take them a while to get through the bones, assuming they managed that, and I needed to get away from the smell. I nodded.

  Kirsty took us back to the house and led us inside to a large kitchen. It was scruffy and homely and smelled of fresh bread, a relief after all the meat. A chunky pine table filled the centre of the room. Sheets of drawing paper were spread over it, along with some pencils and a box of charcoal.

  I checked my watch: 1.03 a.m.

  Kirsty made tea, pushed the charcoal, pencils, and paper into a pile in the centre of the table, put the mugs down, and sat opposite us. She exuded an easy charm and I relaxed into my chair. I pictured the pigs in their brutally small cages and wondered how she could do that for a living. As if reading my mind, she said, ‘Everyone has this idea of happy pigs rolling around in the mud – which is fine if you’re a hobby farmer and you already have money, like my dad. But to make a living, you have to do it commercially, I’m afraid. And pigs don’t think like us. They’ll often choose to go back into small crates rather than be in a larger area.’

  I didn’t want to get into a debate with her, given that her experiment was helping us. She’d convinced herself that what she did was okay, and the way she kept the pigs was entirely legal.

  We chatted casually for another half hour, and then Kirsty stood. ‘Stay here if you like. I’ll nip over and see how much they’ve eaten.’ She headed for the door, leaving us in the kitchen.

  ‘This is the weirdest night,’ Fiona said. ‘I keep seeing Violet’s face in my mind. How could someone do this to her?’

  A noise from inside the house. I turned my head. ‘What was that?’

  The kitchen door pushed open and a girl walked in. About eleven or twelve years old and wearing pyjamas. Sleepy-eyed with messed-up blonde hair. She jumped back when she saw us. ‘Where’s Mum? I heard a noise.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Your mum’s outside.’

  ‘Why are you in the kitchen?’ She was holding what looked like a sketchbook in her hand. It dangled towards the floor.

  ‘Your mum’s just … checking on a pig. She’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘Okay.’ Once she’d got over her initial shock, the girl seemed quite unfazed by two strange women in the kitchen. She came and sat at the table with us. Reached and took a pencil and opened her sketchbook, her hair falling forward over her face.

  I looked at Fiona, and she shrugged.

  ‘Would you like a drink of anything?’ I said to the girl.

  She pushed her hair off her face. ‘Some milk?’

  I jumped up, grabbed a glass from a shelf, and took milk from the fridge, only briefly running a scenario in my head in which the girl was allergic to milk and went into anaphylactic shock in the kitchen.

  I put the glass in front of the girl, and looked at the drawing she was working on. A spike of coldness shot through me. It was a drawing of a pig in a tiny individual cage. Lying on her side, her piglets next to her, but separated from her by a barrier.

  ‘Is that one of your mum’s pigs?’ I said.

  The girl nodded. ‘When they have their babies.’ She flipped to the page before. ‘And then the babies get bigger.’ The drawing looked like the set-up we’d seen – groups of pigs housed together in larger cages.

  The girl reached and took her milk. Glugged it all down. She flicked back through more pages of her book, talking almost as if to herself. ‘We have lots of pigs here. Mummy pigs, baby pigs.’ She flicked the pages fast, and the drawings all looked similar. I wondered what her teachers must think if she drew like this at school. The drawings were creepy when all seen together. No houses, no birds, no dogs or cats or images of her family. Just pigs – lots of pigs.

  And then a different drawing. Trees, shaded charcoal-dark, and amidst them, facing away from the viewer, a person. A girl drawn with white chalk, wearing a pale, old-fashioned dress, shining with a luminous brightness out of the page.

  ‘What’s that one?’ I pointed to the picture.

  The girl looked up from the page. ‘The Pale Child,’ she said.

  I sensed the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

  The girl flicked through a few more pages of pigs, and then paused at a strange image, almost reminiscent of Escher. There was what looked like a lake, but in the water was a circular hole, bounded by a concrete wall so water couldn’t get into it. The internal surface of the hole was convex and lined with steps, leading down, as if you could climb into it.

  ‘It’s an edge you can’t see over,’ the girl said.

  I looked again at the drawing. The hole sucked in your gaze, so you imagined walking down into it, except the steps got narrower as they
went into the hole. If you walked down them, you’d soon be in trouble. You’d want to turn around and shuffle down backwards, but as the steps got narrower it would be impossible to go further without falling. The girl was right. You’d never be able to see into the hole.

  ‘That’s a brilliant drawing,’ I said.

  ‘It’s in the reservoir where the boy fell,’ the girl said. ‘Years ago.’

  The front door pushed open and Kirsty appeared. ‘Frankie! What are you doing?’

  The girl shut her sketchbook. ‘I heard a noise. I found these people in the kitchen. They gave me milk.’

  ‘Okay. Well, go back to bed now.’ Robust parenting.

  The girl got up and trailed out of the kitchen, taking her sketchbook with her.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kirsty said. ‘Frankie’s not very mature for her age. She’s thirteen, but sometimes she acts like a little kid.’

  ‘She showed us her drawings,’ I said. ‘They’re very good.’

  ‘Yes. All the damn pigs,’ Kirsty said. ‘The poor girl gets grief about what I do – you know, keeping the pigs in cages. From other kids at the school, I mean. It’s sad. She’s so desperate to be popular but she has to learn to stand up for herself.’

  ‘Her drawings are great. The one of that hole in the water …’

  Kirsty looked up sharply. ‘Did she talk to you about that one?’

  ‘She mentioned a boy. What was that about?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. She talks nonsense. It’s the bell-mouth spillway in the reservoir. The overflow. It’s spectacular in full flow. But yes, Frankie is good. I keep trying to get her to enter an art competition. She’s lost her confidence though. It’s terrible what happens to girls at that age. She used to be so exuberant. Didn’t care what anyone thought. Now it’s all about being thin and pretty and getting likes on bloody social media.’

  ‘It’s awful for teenagers,’ Fiona said. ‘My younger brother’s the same. I know people think it’s not as bad for boys, but he’s obsessed with videoing himself doing stupid things to get attention.’