by M. R. Hall
‘Give it a couple of days,’ Jenny said encouragingly. ‘You don’t want me here, do you?’ ‘I’m just concerned you don’t get into trouble.’ ‘You think I’m shit.’
‘No, Mr Craven. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble I did—’
‘You think I’m a worthless piece of shit. Say it!’
He didn’t give her a chance.
His fist hit the back of her neck like a hammer blow, exploding stars in front of her eyes. She splayed forwards onto the ground, her palms striking the sharp stones as she held them out to break her fall. She tried to scramble away on all-fours, but her legs refused to move. She clawed at the dirt, trying to get some purchase, but Craven kicked her hands from under her and drove another kick hard into her ribs. Drifting in and out of her body, Jenny saw only his feet as he walked around her in circles, ranting and yelling. Flecks of spittle landed on her cheek, but her hand wouldn’t lift to wipe them away. He crouched at her side and grabbed her by the shoulders, rolling her over onto her back. She felt him tugging at the belt of her jeans, scratching her stomach with his sharp fingernails. He dug a knee into her chest and wrenched at the buckle. No! No! The words screamed silently inside her head. He thrust his thumbs inside her waistband, pushing it down with impatient jerks of his narrow shoulders. The rough ground grated against her thighs as his fingers dug into the flesh above her knees. He turned around to face her, one hand forcing downwards on her chest, the other fumbling with his zip.
She felt the low vibration of the engine in her bones before she heard it. Craven looked up, still tugging at his fly, then down at Jenny with a startled expression, a frightened child again. She felt his fingers tightened momentarily on her T-shirt, then he flung himself away from her, crawling crab-like across the track as he scrabbled to his feet and ran, arms flailing, up the hill. Jenny half-rolled onto her side, tasting warm blood in her mouth as the tractor rumbled to a halt and heavy boots jumped down from the cab and came running towards her.
EPILOGUE
JENNY SAT WITH HER BACK to the ash tree by the stream, hugging her bare knees while Steve read the notes Dr Allen had copied for her at the end of their third session of the week. It was important for her to keep reminding herself of what had happened, he had said: conscious recall of buried memory wasn’t always an instant process, it could take time and reinforcement for what had been recovered in regression to make its full journey to the surface.
In the first and second sessions she hadn’t been able to get clear of what had happened with Craven. Each time she closed her eyes she saw his face bearing down on her, felt his cold, dry hands pawing at her legs. On the third attempt Dr Allen had waited a full hour while she wept it out of her system, before pushing her back to another time in her life when she had been helpless. The symmetry of events wasn’t lost on her, but that wasn’t a subject to be dwelt on in the present – perhaps in another thirty-eight years the shape of her life would make sense – for now it was enough just to know, and to work out where it left her.
When the memories finally came it had been as simple as pushing open a door: she was right there in Aunty Penny’s house, aged five, dressed in her knee-length skirt and buckled shoes. She and Katy abandoned the television in the front room with its snowy black and white picture and climbed the stairs to play with their Sindy dolls. The top floor of the house always smelled of cigarette smoke and sickly rose-scented air freshener, but when Dad came to collect her it smelled of him too. It was the smell of his bedclothes first thing in the morning and his dirty shirts in the washing basket. There were noises coming from under Aunty Penny’s bedroom door, frightening noises: Aunty Penny in pain, Dad grunting as if he was hurting her. Jenny pretended not to hear, but Katy stood at the top of the stairs and burst into snivelling tears. Jenny attempted to drag her into her room, where a closed door would separate them from the monstrous sounds, but Katy wouldn’t move. She clung to the banister, her sobs becoming more and more hysterical, and when Jenny yanked on her arm she lashed out and scratched at her face.
She hadn’t meant to push Katy down the stairs – just away – but she couldn’t deny that there had been a murderous intensity to her sudden eruption of rage. Through streaming eyes she had watched her cousin fall backwards, her limbs windmilling as she turned a half-somersault in mid-air. The back of her neck struck the treads with a sharp report, and she flopped in a rag-doll tumble onto the patterned tiles of the hall floor, her skirt thrown up, exposing her white knickers.
Dad burst out of the bedroom, still buttoning his shirt, and raced to the foot of the stairs. Aunty Penny had followed moments later, holding his shoes, her normally sleek black hair in an untidy mess. Dad shouted at her to call an ambulance, but she just stood over Katy’s twisted body and screamed. Peering through the banisters, Jenny saw that something was leaking from Katy’s mouth and that she had wet herself. It was Dad who grabbed the phone from the hall table. He spoke into it with the same tone of voice he used talking to customers at his garage. He seemed to forget about Aunty Penny as he yanked on his shoes and came back up the stairs. Jenny was ready with a lie, she was going to protest that Katy fell trying to push her down the stairs, but Dad didn’t ask what happened. He held her chin in his rough hand, so tightly that it hurt. Quietly, so that Penny couldn’t hear, he said, ‘Breathe a word of what happened to Katy, and you’ll end up like her. Do you want that, Jenny?’
Jenny shook her head.
Steve came to the end and looked out across the stream at the meadow.
Impatient for his reaction, Jenny said, ‘You wanted it to be my father, didn’t you?’
‘It was. And your aunt.’
‘No. It wasn’t. I could have turned away, I could have run down the stairs, I could have shouted at them to stop, but I didn’t . . .’
‘You were five years old.’
‘Age has got nothing to do with it. What I did was in me. I can still feel it, how I felt then . . . the rage.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Jenny.’
A cool gust of breeze caught her legs and gave her goose-bumps. She hugged them tighter, beginning to wish she hadn’t shown Steve the notes after all. ‘It was my fault. And in this life there’s no redemption, only the hope you’ll never do anything like it again. Some manage, some don’t.’
‘You can’t bracket yourself with psychopaths like Craven, Jenny. It’s completely different.’
‘He did me a favour though, didn’t he? It took staring a murderer in the face to understand what was staring back at me in the mirror every morning.’
‘You’re not a murderer.’
Jenny nodded, not because she believed him, but because she was tired of talking about it already. She knew what she was and would just have to live with it. All that separated her from Craven and his kind was a degree of self-awareness, an ability to spend a lifetime striving to atone without delusions of having been cleansed by a higher power.
Steve said, ‘What will you do? Will there be more therapy?’
‘Dr Allen thinks I’m doing exactly the right thing. Every day I go to work I soothe the wound a little more.’
‘Haven’t you ever thought there might be something else, something that doesn’t tie you to the past?’
‘I think it’s you who’s longing to move on, Steve, not me.’
‘Not from you, Jenny.’ He held the notes up in his fist. ‘And not because of this.’
He looked beautiful with the ripples from the water reflected on his face, his body taut and lean beneath his T-shirt. Delicate, that was the word. He looked delicate. She thought she might cry.
Jenny said, ‘You don’t want me to be the mother of your children.’
‘Who said anything about children?’
‘You’d make a good father.’
‘I want you to come with me. Try it for a while, a few weeks. I’m not asking you to leave your job. Treat it as a holiday – you can’t tell me you don’t need one.’
She was tempted, painful
ly so. She could think of nothing she would rather do than run away, but she knew that she couldn’t. It was time to stand and face the truth. Her cure, if there could ever be one, was right here, and in her office, and in the mortuary and the courtroom, one by one laying the restless dead to rest.
‘You know what you should do, Steve? Go to France. Get a new life and a pretty girlfriend, and if she doesn’t mind too much, look me up every now and then.’
She stretched out her legs and got to her feet, moving carefully so as not to jar her sore neck. Steve stepped over to help her up.
‘You’ve got leaves stuck to your back.’
She let him brush them off with his hand, feeling the warmth of his skin through the thin cotton dress, but as he moved to kiss her she dipped her head and his lips grazed her forehead.
She took the notes from him, and eased away.
Steve said, ‘Do you mind if I sit here for a while? I’d like to say goodbye.’
‘Of course not.’ She smiled. ‘Watch out for the ghosts.’
And she left him standing by the stream, watching the brown trout flick this way and that, quick as lightning. But when she stepped inside and glanced out through the kitchen window he was gone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful once again to Maria Rejt for her guiding hand, and to my wife, Patricia, for her unfailing encouragement and support. Also, I would like to thank all those readers who have so kindly written to me from the far corners of the world over the course of the last year, many concerned about Jenny Cooper’s welfare. I will do my level best to look after her, I assure you, but she doesn’t always make it easy.
Also in M. R. Hall’s Jenny Cooper series
The Coroner
The Disappeared
First published 2011 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2011 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-230-75941-1 PDF
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Copyright © M. R. Hall 2011
The right of M. R. Hall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE