by Roz Watkins
‘Ooh, you don’t want to let that Pale Child see your face,’ Dotty said.
I looked at her. ‘You believe that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
I took a swig of tea and looked back at Dotty. ‘Who do you think the Pale Child is, then?’
‘I don’t know, but I know she’ll not be seeing my face.’
‘She was a Nightingale, wasn’t she?’
‘That family have never been quite right,’ Dotty said. ‘Too much in-breeding.’
‘What’s not right about them?’
‘Ah, it’s probably just the way the rich classes are. I wouldn’t get on the wrong side of that girl Kirsty, but Tony’s decent enough. His mother took all that compensation from when the manor was drowned and put it towards the village instead of spending it on another fancypants house, and he’s carried on the same way.’ Dotty stood and handed her mug to Daniel. ‘Thank you for that. Things to do.’
Dotty headed off over the rough grass to her guard-caravan, and I got to my feet. ‘Any chance I could use your loo, Daniel?’
His face went white. ‘Oh. No, it’s not … It’s not very good. Chemical loos aren’t good in this weather.’
I smiled. ‘Honestly, I backpacked round India. I’m not fussy.’ I took a step towards the caravan, taking the plastic mask with me.
Daniel put his arm against the door. ‘I’d rather … Maybe you could use Dotty’s?’
‘I think I’ll use yours, please.’
His whole body sagged, and he let me pull the door open. I stepped into the half of the caravan I’d been in with Jai. The divider between the two halves had been smashed.
‘Look, I need to tell you something,’ Daniel said. ‘About the Pale Child. My little brother, Charlie—’
A noise outside. A shout and the sound of running footsteps. Daniel spun round and yelled, ‘No!’
Two men in gruesome meat suits, carrying something. They flung it at me. I shut my eyes and put my hand up to protect my face. Tripped on a board on the caravan floor and crashed to the ground.
Daniel screamed, ‘Fuck off and leave me alone!’
I took my hand away from my face and saw that it was covered in dark, thick liquid. Sticky and red. Metallic.
Blood.
32
Bex – August 1999
After Kirsty screamed, Bex had hidden in her room, listening to the low murmurs from below, too scared to go downstairs and discover what was happening. But now the police had gone and she knew she had to face her family.
She crept downstairs and pushed open the living room door. Kirsty was on the sofa, their dad next to her, ashen-faced.
Bex’s eyes flicked around. Everything was wrong. A vase left smashed on the floor, Kirsty’s expression solid like concrete, their dad’s brow pulled down towards his eyes. Whatever had gone on here, it wasn’t about what had happened to Bex. Her stomach felt cold.
‘Come and sit down,’ her dad said. ‘Sit down, Bex.’
‘Just tell me what happened,’ she whispered.
Her dad started to speak but his voice didn’t come out. All she could hear was the ticking of the grandfather clock, too loud and intrusive. Her dad coughed and tried again. ‘Daniel’s car was found on the edge of the woods. It had gone into a tree. The two of them weren’t wearing seat belts.’
‘Lucas is dead,’ Kirsty said. ‘Lucas was killed.’
Bex staggered back as if she’d been hit.
‘Daniel is in hospital,’ her dad said. ‘He’s broken his back.’
‘Oh my God.’ Bex walked over and sank into the uncomfortable old armchair opposite her dad and Kirsty.
‘They found a lot of alcohol in Daniel’s bloodstream. We don’t know why he was driving.’ Her dad’s voice was controlled. She couldn’t work out his feelings. Lucas was dead. Was that Daniel’s fault? Daniel was in hospital. A broken back. Did that mean he’d be paralysed?
Her dad stood, hauling himself from the sofa like a much older man. ‘I’ll make us some tea.’
Bex looked at Kirsty’s bleached face. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘I can’t believe it’s happened,’ Kirsty said. ‘It feels like a bad dream.’
Bex shifted on her chair, her physical discomfort seeming like nothing now, compared to her sister’s pain. ‘Why would Daniel drive?’ she said.
Kirsty looked up and her face hardened. ‘It was because of you. You’d passed out. It started throwing it down. You were cold and we needed to get you inside quickly. You know how he feels about you, so don’t pretend otherwise. He drove us home and then took Lucas.’
Bex felt the breath leaving her body. It was as if the air had left the room too, as if there was no longer any oxygen. ‘I didn’t know it was raining,’ she said, a stupid, irrelevant space-filling comment.
‘What is this? Four Weddings and a fucking Funeral? It was raining. You’d passed out.’
‘Did we see … the Pale Child?’ Another stupid comment. But wasn’t the Pale Child always there when bad things happened?
‘You thought you saw it. Sent us all off on a stupid wild goose chase. We split up to look for it, and Lucas thought he saw it too, but there was nothing there.’
They split up. They left Bex and split up. Any of them could have raped her.
‘When we came back it had started raining. You were passed out. You looked terrible. We had to get you home. Daniel decided to drive us home, and Lucas said he’d come too. To help with you.’ The last sentence stabbed into Bex.
The door pushed open and their dad walked in with a tray. He placed it carefully on a low table, poured with a shaking hand, and passed cups to Bex and Kirsty, before sinking down onto the sofa next to Kirsty. Nobody said anything.
Bex sipped her tea. Her lips wouldn’t work properly and she spilled it down her front. Opposite her, Kirsty took one sip of tea and then slammed the cup down on the table, splashing tea all over it. ‘I don’t want fucking tea.’ She jumped up and stormed out of the room.
Bex sat with her dad, desperately aware now that they were strangers. The silence between them was too solid to break. Bex looked at the tea on the antique table and wondered if she should mop it up. What a stupid thought, with everything else that was going on.
‘I’m so sorry, Dad,’ she eventually said.
‘It’s not your fault.’
But it was her fault. Kirsty clearly blamed her. She’d seen the Pale Child, sent them running off. She’d passed out, got too cold and wet, made Daniel drive despite him being drunk and stoned. It was her fault. And what about the rest? Was that her fault too? Was it her fault that she’d been raped? She couldn’t tell her dad about that.
‘Why don’t you go and check on your sister?’ her dad said.
Bex stood. She was no comfort to him, that was clear. She left the room and climbed the stairs. Knocked gently on Kirsty’s door and pushed it open. Kirsty was on her bed. She looked up. ‘Oh. Hello.’
‘Can I come in?’ Bex said.
Kirsty waved towards a chair beside an old dressing table. ‘Sit down.’ She looked a little better.
‘Are you okay?’ Bex said.
Kirsty nodded. ‘I’ll cope.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Kirsty sighed. ‘I know. It’s not really your fault. We shouldn’t have let you get so drunk.’
They sat in silence. Bex couldn’t think what to say. She hoped being there might help Kirsty but there was no indication that it did.
Eventually Kirsty said, ‘Seriously, Bex, don’t look so tragic. I shouldn’t have said it was your fault. You didn’t force Daniel to drive. And they could have dropped us and then left the car here.’
Bex looked up and caught her sister’s eye. ‘I suppose so. Thank you.’
‘Life is random and shit,’ Kirsty said. ‘Get used to it.’
‘Kirsty, I …’ She looked at her sister’s porcelain face.
‘What?’
‘There’s another thing. I know it’s nothing
compared to losing Lucas …’ Was that true? It felt like the right thing to say, when Kirsty was suffering so much, collapsed on her bed like she’d been shot. Bex hated to make it worse but she had to do it. Because she couldn’t let him get away with it. ‘Kirsty, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this now, but I …’
Kirsty looked blankly at her. ‘What?’
‘I was raped. Last night I was raped.’
Kirsty frowned and shook her head. ‘No you weren’t. You can’t have been.’
‘But I was.’
‘Jesus, Bex, I can’t cope with this now! What is it with your attention-seeking behaviour all the fucking time? I’ve just lost Lucas. Can’t you give me that?’
Bex felt the tears slipping down her cheeks. ‘I’m not attention-seeking.’ She stood slowly, and stumbled towards the doorway, but her dad had appeared in it. ‘Are you girls okay?’ he said.
Kirsty’s voice was loud. ‘She says she’s been raped, Dad. It’s not true.’
Her dad looked so out of his depth, she almost felt sorry for him. He touched her on the arm. ‘What, Bex? What happened?’
‘She’s making it up,’ Kirsty said. ‘She can’t stand that the attention’s not on her for once.’
Bex tried to push past her dad, but he grabbed her arm. ‘What happened, Bex?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She snatched her arm away and ran along the landing to her room, the gossamer-thin family connections she’d made tearing apart as she slammed the door behind her.
She threw herself onto the bed and sobbed, listening to the soft voices of her dad and Kirsty drifting through the wall. She couldn’t hear what they were saying.
The door opened, then closed gently. The bed shifted with someone’s weight. ‘Please, Bex, tell me what happened.’
She gulped and twisted round to look at her dad. He handed her a tissue and she dragged it across her face. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does. Who raped you, Bex? Tell me. Kirsty’s just terribly upset about Lucas. Forgive her. She doesn’t mean what she’s saying.’
If he’d been her real dad, a proper dad, he’d have hugged her and she’d have sobbed into his shoulder. But he sat awkwardly as if desperate to get this over with, like the stranger that he was.
‘I don’t know who it was,’ she said, as clearly as she could. ‘I passed out. I had too much to drink. I know that’s bad.’
‘Oh heavens. Yes, that is bad. That’s very bad.’
‘We need to go to the police. They’ll take DNA. They can test the boys and find out who it was.’
‘But, Bex …’ Her dad laid his hand gently on her arm. ‘You were wearing an awfully flimsy dress. You had so much to drink that you passed out.’
Bex’s eyes crept up to his face, searching out the shape of the betrayal. ‘What are you saying?’
‘We can’t go to the police with this, Bex. Nobody will have any sympathy for you. You drank yourself unconscious. You don’t remember. The best thing is we all pretend this sorry incident never happened.’
33
Meg – Present day
Wednesday
I pulled up on the cobbles outside my house and scrambled from the car. All I could think of was getting properly clean. I’d washed the worst of the blood off in a communal shower block and bundled my clothes and the doll’s face mask into evidence bags, and Daniel had lent me clean jogging bottoms and a T-shirt, but I could still smell the metallic tang. So much blood. Every time I shut my eyes, I saw it flying at me in a pungent wave of red.
I pushed open my front door, feeling that old twinge of anxiety. I hadn’t quite recovered from having dead-sister dolls shoved through it earlier in the year, and now I was being attacked all over again. Attacked by Justice for Violet for being a vegetarian and now attacked by the Animal Vigilantes because I’d happened to be with Daniel. I was in danger of giving in to self-pity.
My spirits lifted when I smelled cooking. The post had been piled neatly on the bookcase and it even looked like the floor had been vacuumed.
I shouted to Dad, ‘Hello! I’m just having a wash,’ and legged it upstairs and into the shower before he could see the state of me. I turned my face into the warm water and replayed what had happened. I hadn’t seen the faces of the people who’d thrown the blood at us. I remembered Daniel had started saying something which had felt important. About his little brother.
I felt a whole lot better when I’d cleaned myself up. I headed for the kitchen. ‘Wow, Dad, are you making food?’
‘Yes. Sit down, let me pour you a gin and tonic to start and then you can have a glass of wine with the meal. I got us some nice local gin and a bottle of Chablis.’
I certainly needed alcohol. ‘Blimey, you can stay more often.’
I folded myself onto one of my kitchen chairs, still orange pine despite my best intentions, and let him pour me a large gin. When I closed my eyes, I saw blood flying at me, and then the pig’s head on Gary’s shoulders. My mind was full of the case but I felt the need to pretend to Dad that I was a normal human who could forget about work for a while. ‘How was your day?’ I asked.
‘I tidied up the garden and did a bit of cleaning.’
‘That’s very good of you.’
‘It’s fine. You work hard. I’ll leave that to simmer.’ He sat opposite and raised his glass. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’ I tried not to feel suspicious. This was almost too much. But it made a nice change to eat a meal with actual vegetables instead of my normal fare of cereal or beans on toast, with a bit of cheese if I was working at peak domestic goddess.
‘How are you getting on at work?’ Dad asked.
I sighed. ‘Okay. Slow progress.’ I should have been able to share with him how hard this case was, how horrible it was being criticised online, to have a knife at my throat, to see a pet pig being killed because people didn’t think I was doing my job, to be doused in blood. But he’d been out of my life for so long, he was a stranger. I couldn’t confide in him.
‘Oh dear. I hope there won’t be more animals killed tonight.’
I gulped a large amount of gin. ‘Me too, Dad. Me too.’
Dad swallowed loudly. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Meg.’
‘That sounds ominous.’
‘No … It’s not. I’ve been thinking a lot about … when your sister died.’
That old image flashed into my mind. Carrie the day I found her. Feet dangling where feet should never be, sending an immediate stab of horror into my brain. Her neck bent, her head dropped forward, the rope taut above her. I blinked and pushed the image away. I’d been doing so well. Not checking the ceilings. Not having flashbacks.
Dad never talked about Carrie. That had been one of the problems between him and Mum. Not many marriages survive the death of a child.
‘It’s a long time ago now,’ he said, ‘But I still think about her.’
‘Of course. So do I.’
He seemed so far out of his comfort zone he was in Here-Be-Dragons land. He coughed. ‘I thought I might try to help people who’ve been affected by teenage suicide. It’s such a hard thing to deal with.’
‘Okay …’
‘I know our situation wasn’t typical. Poor Carrie was dying anyway, but we all still felt …’
‘Guilty?’
‘Yes. We all felt terribly guilty.’
Oh, yes, I’d felt guilty. I tested myself. Searching for that familiar heaviness in my gut. It was much better now. But it had taken over twenty years.
Dad stroked the side of his glass. ‘I hadn’t realised how badly it affected you, Meg. I didn’t realise you felt responsible. I’m sorry. It was never your fault.’
I sighed. Maybe he would have realised if he hadn’t absented himself so thoroughly from my life. ‘I know it wasn’t my fault,’ I said. ‘But I was horrible to her the day she did it.’
An odd look flitted across Dad’s face and he moved his mouth as if he was going to speak, and then didn’t.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What else happened that day?’
He paused, then said, ‘Nothing. You were ten. It wasn’t your responsibility. But we know first-hand the effect it has on families. I want to help other people.’
I remembered all the times Mum had tried to talk to him about Carrie, before he left. All the slammed doors and seething silences. Maybe Pauline had been good for him. He seemed to have genuinely softened over the years. ‘What do you want to do?’ I said.
‘There’s a group with an office near where I live. They man phone lines, but they keep having to move premises so they’re trying to buy somewhere. They need to raise quite a bit of money. I was going to donate to them.’
‘That’s good of you.’ I wondered if he’d had a win on the poker. After he retired, he’d taught himself memory techniques and with his mathsy brain and knowledge of probability, he’d turned into a bit of a card-shark.
‘Your mother said she might donate some of your gran’s money too,’ he said.
I was relieved that Dad was finally talking about what had happened, that he was doing good, that he was in touch with Mum and she approved. Maybe our family wasn’t beyond salvation.
34
Meg – Present day
Thursday
It was early morning and the station felt empty and echoey and smelled of disinfectant. I was torturing myself looking at the Justice for Violet page, which Facebook in their wisdom had still not taken down. We hadn’t caught the balaclava-men yet.
I scrolled through the newsfeed. Lots of incoherence, and a video which involved a pet goat. I couldn’t watch it. I clicked on a different video. A thick-necked man wearing a black T-shirt and a balaclava. His face was covered but anyone who knew him would surely recognise his voice. He spoke to the camera and I realised it was the same man who’d held a knife to my throat.
‘I can’t be responsible for what our followers are doing, but I blame the police. Why haven’t they made an arrest? Two people have been killed in the most horrible of ways, and no doubt more to come. We wouldn’t stoop so low as to threaten people, but until the murderer comes forward, animals are going to keep dying.’