Her anonymous call having been made, she meandered back towards her allotment, stopping to smile and chat with the neighbours and trade advice on black-spot and greenfly and the eternal war on the slugs. She was talking to Fred Pline about his plans for the Anderson shelter when she caught a glimpse of blue flashing lights between the houses on Hall Road, and said with neighbourly concern, ‘Oh, I wonder what that ambulance is doing outside Shirley Hewitson’s place. Do you think someone should tell Matt? He’s only just over there, look.’
Fred might have been in his seventies but he was nippy on his pins in an emergency, real or fabricated, and she watched him hurry over to the Neary plot, and the mime show that followed: Fred taps Matt on the shoulder. Matt pulls his headphones off and scowls. Fred gestures emphatically towards Matt’s mother’s house, which backs onto the allotments. Matt leaps out of his chair and dashes for the back gate.
Leaving the shed door open and unattended in his panic.
Dennie took a deep breath as she stepped onto the Neary plot and up to their shed. She didn’t know how much time she had but it wouldn’t be much. All she needed was one solid piece of evidence to take to David, or any of them, and say, ‘Here! Look! I’m not paranoid! These people are up to no good!’ She peered in. It looked like a perfectly normal gardening shed – a little on the large side, perhaps, and very neatly looked after. All the tools were hanging up, boxes of fertiliser and slug pellets were stacked on the shelves, bags of potting compost underneath, storm lanterns, paraffin, standard camp kettle and gas stove, mugs, folding chairs, and a rag rug on the floor. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.
In her imagination, Matt was currently watching his mother trying to explain to a very confused paramedic that no, she wasn’t suffering a heart attack. Hopefully this was developing into a predictable mother/son argument, but it was equally likely that Matt was just about now realising that he’d abandoned his post and thinking that he should get back. Dennie couldn’t risk it.
As she left the shed her foot caught on the edge of the rag rug and pulled it slightly to one side, and a gleam of metal from underneath caught her eye. It was a hinge, in the floor. Why would anyone put a—
Trapdoor.
She so desperately wanted to pull the rug away and open whatever was concealed beneath, but for the first time in weeks Sabrina’s voice was screaming in her head he’scominghe’scominghe’scoming just like that time with the car crash, so she straightened the rug as best she could and slipped out of the door, around the corner, and off to her own plot without running and without looking back.
No voice shouted. Nobody stopped her. No pursuing footsteps or a heavy hand on her shoulder.
When she got to her shed she slumped in her chair, exhausted and slightly nauseous from the adrenaline while Viggo, who had been safely tied up, fussed over her. ‘Put the kettle on would you?’ she said. ‘There’s a good boy. I think we might just have got away with it.’
* * *
‘Are you sure?’ Everett’s face was buried in his hands. He and Ardwyn were at the big kitchen table while Matt had not yet been invited to sit.
‘Pretty sure. She was sitting outside her shed talking to that stupid dog like always.’
‘How sure is pretty sure?’
‘I don’t know.’ Matt shrugged. ‘Like, ninety per cent? I don’t get what the problem is. I was gone for like, three minutes, max. There’s no way anybody could have gotten in without me seeing.’
Ardwyn sighed. ‘She played you, Matt. That ambulance wasn’t a coincidence. She knew exactly what button to press and she pressed it.’
‘But she didn’t find anything even if she did get in. Everything was still there when I got back.’
Everett slowly drew his hands down over his face like he was wiping it with a towel and stared at Ardwyn with eyes that looked utterly hollow and exhausted. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’
‘Don’t you dare say “I told you so”,’ Ardwyn said. ‘As you’ve already pointed out, this was inevitable – it’s just come a little quicker than we would have liked. I don’t think we can rely on people dismissing her as a senile old woman for very much longer. She needs a lesson in boundaries, just like Mr Turner.’
‘What?’ said Matt. ‘Do her dog?’
‘No. That will attract the police. She’ll need an accident. Something that can be blamed on her own stupid self.’
‘Burn her shed,’ said Everett. ‘She can’t spy on us if she’s got nowhere to spy on us from.’
Ardwyn nodded. ‘Agreed. Matt, make it happen. And do it from the inside, don’t just go flinging a lot of petrol around and then lighting a match. The investigators can tell that kind of thing.’
‘And what if she’s in there at the time?’
‘So much the better. Still an accident, but with more tragic results.’
‘And the dog?’
‘Take Gar with you,’ said Everett. ‘He could do with something to let off a bit of steam.’
7
3.07
THAT IS THE TIME IN THE MORNING OF THE 14TH OF November 2007, when Sarah calls Dennie and in the flat, calm tones of someone who has gone through shock and out the other side into something resembling waking catatonia, tells Dennie that she’s just killed her husband.
Dennie says, ‘Wait there. Don’t do anything.’
Sarah gives an odd little laugh and hangs up.
Dennie throws on some clothes and drives to Sarah’s house. It’s close enough that she could make the journey on foot, but even in a place as quiet as Dodbury she doesn’t like the idea of going out alone in the early hours. That two-minute drive is stretched out into hours by the chaotic turbulence of her mind. Is Sarah hurt? Is Colin actually dead or just badly injured? Will the house be surrounded by ambulances and police cars?
But the house is dark and quiet, unremarkable in its safe suburban street. The first thing she notices as she pulls the car into the Nearys’ drive and the security light goes on is that one of the front door panels has a splintered crack running down it. Sarah will tell her that it’s because Colin came home from a drinking session with his mates having forgotten his keys, and she didn’t wake up quickly enough to let him in, so he started doing it himself. A few days later Dennie will be back with Brian’s old hand-sander, some wood-filler and a pot of paint to clear this up. There is a bigger mess to be cleared up first, however.
The lights are on in the kitchen around the back so she knocks on the back door and Sarah lets her in. Her eyes are glassy and unfocussed. She has bruises on her cheekbone, a black eye and a split lip, and a trickle of blood has dripped off the end of her chin onto the pink flannel of her pyjama top in a single ruby-red spot. Her belly swells with the tell-tale bump of Josh’s new baby brother or sister. Dennie folds her into a hug to which she does not react, and for the first few moments is so concerned about her friend’s condition that, amazingly, she fails to notice the body on the kitchen floor.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she breathes. She checks for respiration or a pulse, and finds neither. The only blood she can see is from his nose, which broke when he face-planted into the quarry tile floor.
Colin was a big man when alive, and stretched out on the floor like this he is a landscape from the cupboards to the doorway. He is face down, with one arm thrown above his head and the other pinned underneath his torso, and at first she thinks this is why he seems to be propped up a little on one side. She gets right down on the floor – not too close, because what if he turns his dead head and snarls or lashes out at her? – and peers into the gap underneath him, and she sees the knife handle jutting out of his chest. There is much less blood than she would have expected.
She crawls away from the body and holds Sarah again, the pair of them shaking.
‘Where’s Josh?’ Dennie asks.
‘He woke up with all the shouting,’ Sarah replies in a lifeless voice. ‘After I—’ She stops, swallows, and tries again. ‘After it happened I found him at the top of the
stairs, crying.’
‘Oh my God, did he see it?’
Sarah shakes her head against Dennie’s shoulder. ‘I don’t think so. You can’t see into the kitchen from there. I mean he might have, I don’t know. I took him straight around to Michelle’s.’ Michelle was Sarah’s older sister, who lived in Tamworth.
‘At this time in the morning?’
Sarah’s laugh is a small, broken thing. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. I thought I’d just stay there and call the police, but then I thought, what if they take Josh away from me? Colin would love that; he always had to have the last word. So I thought, fuck him, and came back here to sort it out myself, but he’s just too heavy. So, I called you. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this. Oh God, Dennie, I’ve fucked up, haven’t I? I’ve really fucked up this time.’ She clings to Dennie like a shipwreck victim, shuddering.
There really is only one thing Dennie can say. ‘We have to call the police.’
This rouses Sarah. ‘No!’
‘Sarah, look at him! Look at what you did!’
‘They’ll arrest me and put me in a cell, and I can’t face that, Dennie. I can’t!’
Dennie doesn’t know too much about Sarah’s childhood, other than that it was bad and involved her being beaten and locked for hours in a cupboard for whatever crimes she was deemed to have been guilty of. She has learned this from helping Sarah on her allotment, seeing the way she wouldn’t spend any longer than absolutely necessary in her own tool shed, and one incident when the wind blew the door shut so hard that it jammed while she was inside and she had begun to scream – the high-pitched animal wailing of absolute terror – and Dennie had opened it again to find Sarah curled up in a corner, sucking her thumb and sobbing. Dennie cannot understand why it is that some people, damaged for no fault of their own, will seek out relationships with people who damage them even more, but it’s not her place to make other people’s decisions for them, just to help them clear up the mess afterwards.
So she agrees to help Sarah clear up the mess.
She’s not stupid. She knows this is a serious crime – almost as serious as the murder itself. After all, Sarah could reasonably claim to have acted in self-defence and got a relatively light sentence, whereas helping to destroy evidence of a crime and prevent the proper burial of a body is a conscious and deliberate act, but Dennie has a cunning plan.
Dennie goes back to her allotment and returns with two pairs of gardening gloves and a large sheet of thick plastic that she would ordinarily use to protect her planting beds from the winter frosts, and they use it to carry Colin out to her car. The simplest thing would be to drive him out into the countryside and bury him, but then there would be no way to prevent his body’s accidental discovery by a farmer or a rambler. So they take him to the allotments instead.
It is nearly four in the morning and there is precious little chance of them being disturbed. In Sarah’s shed they cut his clothes off (Dennie will burn these in her garden incinerator later, along with her gloves, her clothes and Sarah’s pyjamas) and Dennie pulls the knife from his chest, and then the blood comes. His heart has stopped so it doesn’t come pumping and spurting like in horror movies – it sort of oozes out of the two-inch slit, and it does this for quite a while, but they are able to catch it in the plastic sheeting and take it outside and pour it into the soil. Sarah whispers to Dennie: ‘He gave me fuck-all but bruises when he was alive, he can at least give me some decent strawberries now he’s dead.’
However, what autumn gives them in terms of more darkness, it takes away by forcing them to tackle the frosty ground, and Dennie quickly realises that they are never going to be able to dig a hole large and deep enough to bury the corpse in one piece.
She comes back with another knife and a pruning saw – the kind with the slightly curved blade and heavily serrated teeth designed to cut through small branches. She offers to do the job herself, but Sarah insists, so Dennie hands the tools over and goes out to hack at the ground while Sarah takes Colin apart at the joints. Years later, on the rare occasion when she is feeling strong enough to treat Viggo to a bone, she always feeds him outside because she cannot bear to hear the scraping and crunching sounds, and the smell of raw flesh turns her stomach. She is surprised at how calmly Sarah works at her grim task – she doesn’t break down or betray so much as a sob, but dismembers her dead husband with a solemn intensity that is almost ritualistic.
The thin crescent of a waxing moon rises to watch the two women at their labours, and by the time they have buried Colin Neary piece by piece it is nearly six in the morning. Dennie calls in sick to work and stays with Sarah for the rest of the day, cleaning her wounds, watching over her as she sleeps and twitches in her dreams, and cat-napping herself when she can.
Six weeks later the police will find the decomposing remains of Colin Neary buried in his own allotment, and will arrest Sarah, who will steadfastly refuse to implicate Dennie in any of it. Sarah wants her to adopt the baby, but Dennie knows that isn’t how those things work. Nevertheless, she’s too afraid of what Sarah might do to herself and her unborn child if she refuses, so, to her undying shame, she lets Sarah take all the blame.
Right now, though, when Dennie finally returns to her own home, the first thing she does is go through her fridge and throw out anything that contains meat.
* * *
Dennie waited for the long shadows of the summer evening to stretch themselves over the allotments. Quite a few of her neighbours were taking advantage of the good weather to sit out on their plots in the lingering twilight, chatting quietly, having family barbecues, or just watching the day fade. According to her calendar the moon was waning, but she hadn’t been able to see it because it had set during the afternoon and wouldn’t be seen in the sky until the early hours of tomorrow morning. There was still a week before the newcomers did whatever it was they were going to do, which was also when she expected to have another visitation from Sarah and Sabrina – or at least the part of her mind that was using their shapes to try to communicate with her conscious brain. The strongest and most insistent of those times also occurred at the time of the waxing crescent, but that didn’t help her because by then the deed – whatever it was – had already been done. What Dennie needed was for Sabrina to come to her in advance. Since that seemed unlikely to happen, she had decided to try to force the issue. She had spent an afternoon going through all the boxes in the loft looking for the actual doll, but without success.
‘After all,’ she said to Viggo, ‘as the proverb says: if the bikkies won’t come to the hound, the hound must come to the bikkies.’
Viggo thumped his tail on the floor of the shed hopefully, but since no bikkies were actually forthcoming he sighed tragically and went outside to have a sniff around.
The last of the summer twilight dwindled, and the hangers-on packed up and went home, leaving Dennie alone with the pipistrelles that darted after insects in the sky like scraps of storm-torn handkerchief.
She had to admit to herself that she had no idea what she was doing. It had been well over fifty years since she’d had conversations with her old rag doll, and the fact that she now knew she’d really been having conversations with herself wasn’t helping. Maybe that was what ouija boards and crystal balls were actually doing – not contacting the spirits of the dead but opening lines of communication with parts of the human mind that knew things which were otherwise impossible to know. So, what was her ouija board? What was her crystal ball? What did she do to take her conscious mind off the hook and let in the echoes of the universe?
Well, digging in her allotment, obviously. It had always been the one thing she could rely on to calm her down when she was stressed. Whenever she’d had an argument with Brian, or the kids had been getting on her nerves, or the people at work had been feckless, she’d come down here and dig over a few feet of soil and somehow all the tension was grounded safely away like the atmospheric charge before ligh
tning could strike.
Dennie took her favourite gardening fork and went outside into the gathering gloom.
She talked to Sabrina as she worked, in the hope that it might jog something. Nothing-words and nonsense-sentences like when she was little, a running commentary on what she was doing, ruminations on what tomorrow’s weather might hold, trying to focus on her and yet not focus, to find the middle ground between being aware and zoning out, between being asleep and awake. She pottered between her rows of tomatoes, breaking up clods of earth and flicking out weeds, hardly able to see what she was doing and peering so intently at the ground that she nearly ran into Sarah, who was standing barefoot in the soil.
Slowly, Dennie raised her eyes.
Sarah was wearing the same flannel pyjamas with the single bloodstain and clutching Sabrina tightly. She stared around with wide, frightened eyes. Plainly she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing here.
‘Sarah,’ Dennie said softly. Her head began to ache, as if she’d had too much coffee.
The dead woman’s eyes snapped onto her. ‘He’s coming!’ she whispered. ‘It’s not safe here! You have to go home!’
‘Who’s coming? Do you mean Colin? It’s okay, honey, he’s gone.’
Sarah’s eyes resumed their urgent scanning of the surroundings, and now it seemed to Dennie that she hadn’t been staring around in confusion but was looking for someone, or something. Something hiding amongst the bean poles and greenhouses. Something that terrified her. The headache was growing stronger, throbbing and pulsing in Dennie’s skull. ‘Please, Dennie!’ she begged. ‘It’s not safe! You have to go home! They’re bringing him back! He’s coming!’
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