‘With a body?’
‘No, no, no. Julia was still alive then. They would have gone to the allotments together from the bingo hall, or even met there before Owen went on his own for his cigarette.’
‘Ah.’
‘Let’s not think about it yet. Chuck the ball over, Annie. Isabel’s piggy-in-the-middle.’
‘No. We can’t do it any more. It’s disgusting. It used to belong to a dog. Look, there are tooth marks in it.’ Annie threw the ball, over arm, down the grassy hill. It bounced off a bump in the slope and disappeared. We stared at the bump.
I realized that the sky was darkening and the rocks and hills were falling into grey shadow. ‘We have to hurry now. We need to go down and look at the allotment.’
Annie staggered towards me, put her arm through mine and leaned on me as we walked over the grass to the track that led back to the village.
‘You don’t have to come,’ I told her. ‘You probably should have gone to the crematorium with your family. I feel bad that we distracted you.’
‘No. This is a better way of settling things and I’m glad I’m here. Come on.’
We stumbled down the hill, slipping sometimes on the mud. Annie planted the brandy bottle in a bush and walked away waving to it. ‘Bye-bye, little friend.’
‘You’d better pull yourself together. This isn’t going to be easy. If you’re not up to it, we’ll walk you home first and you can get some rest.’
‘Stop worrying about me. I’m fine. We’ll need spades,’ she said, ‘and a pickaxe Where will we find them?’
‘There must be plenty of tools on the allotment site. We’ll break into one of the sheds if we have to.’
‘Owen had a spade and a fork. And rakes. All that stuff. And a hoe, no doubt, whatever they’re for. But we’ll only need the pickaxe and spades, I should think.’
And we descended, following the same route but feeling different. We were closer to finding the answer and this made the short journey clearer, more detailed. I noticed every house name from Dale Cottage to Lower Heights, the red, green and blue front doors, the distance people parked from the kerb. When we reached the back-streets that led to the allotment site, we linked arms for a while, walked side by side, our strides as one.
‘I wish I hadn’t drunk so much.’ Annie was in the middle, supported by John and me. ‘The fresh air and chips have helped a bit but not enough. It’s getting a bit dark now, for my liking.’
‘I’m not keen on the dark either,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about danger.’ John patted Annie on the shoulder. ‘I’m sober.’
‘Yes,’ said Annie, ‘but you’re a convicted murderer.’
We slipped from the main road into an unlit tenfoot, let go of each other and proceeded in single file. Annie was now at the front, John in the middle, and I was at the rear. I watched John’s silhouette as he bounced silently along.
‘Are you?’ I tried to sound casual but my voice was tight.
‘She’s exaggerating.’
We passed the backs of gardens, stepped around puddles and pushed aside thin, prickly branches that poked out between fences.
‘What did you do?’
‘I planned to kill someone. It never happened.’
‘Because the police caught him first.’
‘Were you going to do it?’
‘Yes. The gate’s locked.’ John rattled the padlock, wiped his wet hand on his sleeve. ‘We’ll have to jump over it. Can you two manage that in your skirts?’
We didn’t answer him. Of course we could. The gate was chest-high but with metal bars across so it would be no harder than climbing a ladder. I’m not sure that Annie was listening. She followed John and me over the gate. We jumped, one by one, into the mud below. I had never been here before. I knew there were allotments, of course, and had seen them from the street, but I was surprised by the size of the place, the sense of life and order among the rows of sheds, the greenhouses, the squares and lines in the land.
‘Owen’s patch is down there. When he got the allotment he put up his own shed,’ Annie said. ‘But not in the place where the old one was. He laid a concrete foundation at the other end of the plot and put the new shed there. It’s only tiny. There was no need for concrete at all. Not for such a small shed. What do you think, John?’
John was leaning against the gate. His face drooped and his skin was grey-green. ‘Let’s just tell the police. I don’t see what else we can do now. I don’t want to see some young girl’s skeleton. Who’s got their mobile with them?’
‘We can’t do that. They won’t help.’ I told them of my visit to the police station earlier in the day. ‘We need some evidence first. We need to find something.’
‘I don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel good at all.’
‘Then why have you come with us?’
John shook his head. ‘Never mind. Let’s get on with it.’
We squelched along the main path to Owen’s shed. It wasn’t locked. A torch lay on the floor just inside the door. I switched it on and shone it around the wooden walls. There was nothing apart from tools, and an old blue mug by the window. We found a cobwebbed pickaxe and John lifted it outside, gave it a cautious swing. I was pleased to see that he was still committed to the plan. We took out a spade, too, then went to neighbouring sheds to find a couple more, and another torch.
John and Annie pulled the shed down. I couldn’t watch. It was almost an attack on Owen himself – though they did not appear to mind – and I wanted to hide away until it was done. John and Annie seemed perfectly calm. They didn’t gasp or cry out when wood hit the ground. They spoke occasionally: This bit here. Try again but harder. Once the shed was in pieces and kicked out of the way, I joined them to hack up the foundations. The concrete was not thick. Owen must have laid it in a hurry. It was brittle, uneven and cracked easily when John swung the pickaxe. Annie and I lifted the pieces out of the way, made piles of concrete next to the planks.
‘Let’s not talk any more,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s not say a single word until we know, one way or the other. We need to be able to think all our thoughts as we do this.’
So we dug in darkness, in the spitting rain, and in silence. It took some time to forget ourselves and each other but we fell into a rhythm and worked carefully. The soil was lumpy and damp. Small stones clinked, every now and then, against our spades. As the hole deepened, a wall grew around us. I thought that we might never get out, that something would come up from the earth, make the walls fall in and bury us alive. Every so often, I tilted my head back and took a long gasp of fresh air. All the time, Julia’s face – blurred, grey – danced circles inside my head, somewhere near my eyes. Sometimes, when I became afraid that my spade would touch and damage her, I worked with my fingers, pulling with tenderness at a piece of stone, dusting soil away, loosening small pebbles and feeling the texture of the earth.
John scooped a large heap of soil onto his spade and chucked it over his shoulder.
‘Go carefully,’ I said. ‘She might be in pieces.’
John froze, leaning over the hole, then sank his spade into the ground and began to lift the earth in small, delicate movements as if he were skimming hot soup with a spoon.
Julia, crying and crying. She wouldn’t stop. Tears sluiced down her face, drenching every bit of skin. That winter the snow was heavy. The school heating had packed up, or perhaps there was a strike and fuel hadn’t got through. It may have been 1979, the Winter of Discontent. We’d arrived at school in the morning and were sent home before assembly. We ran, skidding on the ice to see how far we could get in one slide, Julia, me and one or two others. I don’t think Owen or Kath was there, just girls whose faces and names are vague now. Julia slipped on the ice and crashed to the pavement. Her bag flew out onto the road and a biology textbook slid all the way to the other side. We laughed at first, since she did not seem badly hurt. Julia was never a cry-baby. It was the kind of fall we all knew, so we laughed. But Julia
would not get up. She pulled herself onto her knees then leaned forward and cried. It must have been the shock of the fall but she did not stop crying. We looked at each other, uncomfortable, not understanding what was so badly wrong. We had the day off school, didn’t we? A fall on the pavement seemed a small price to pay. We picked up her bag and sat with her until the tears had stopped and her sobs were dry echoes of the ones before.
‘We should have stayed at school,’ she said. ‘What right do they have to fuck up our day because of some radiators?’
I don’t know why she cried so hard. Perhaps it was nothing. We were only eleven or twelve and would cry or laugh at anything. I remember things about her family now, the rumours of alcoholism, of parents who weren’t interested. Sometimes I knocked on her door at the weekends and I remember the smell from the hall. I couldn’t identify it at the time and probably didn’t try. All my friends’ houses smelled different, unique, things you couldn’t put your finger on, mysterious combinations of pets, food, cleaning fluids, cigarette smoke. But later when I spent time in hostels, when I got to know Bernadette, I found myself inside the smell of Julia’s house again. Old alcohol, alcohol sweated, excreted, exhaled, spilled, left for days in old cups, soaked into carpets.
Sometimes her mother flopped through the hall in her shrimp-coloured candlewick dressing-gown, said hello to me, then disappeared into the back of the house. The dressing-gown was all I remembered. Julia was so independent, making her own clothes, able to cook her meals, that she didn’t seem to need parents. Years on, I couldn’t help guessing why Julia cried that day. The mild shock of tumbling on the ice might have caused it, but perhaps the reason was that she couldn’t stand to go home.
I had no idea whether I was anywhere near the truth but I could still hear her sobs as I dug deeper.
‘The soil.’ John’s voice, half whispered, half choked. ‘It smells so clean. It’s beautiful, but there’s nothing here to find.’
Bumps that would soon become blisters were forming on the insides of my fingers. Annie had sat down for a rest. She put her head on her knees and wheezed. John looked down on the area he had been digging. He ran the edge of his spade gently over the soil, then in the other direction, a soft caress. He crouched beside Annie. I noticed that the rain had stopped.
‘It’s not there, is it?’ I could not speak of Julia’s body as she any longer. I would throw up if Julia was she again. ‘Is it worth carrying on?’
‘No. If he’d done it by himself, it would be a shallow grave, a little dip in the earth, effectively. He would have done it quickly.’ Annie lay on her back on the ridge of earth. Her head sank a little way into the soil but she did not seem to care. ‘Should I be relieved? Now it goes on. At least if we’d found it and had to tell the police, it would be too late for them to get Owen. But there isn’t anything. That’s good. Yes, it’s a good thing.’
‘It doesn’t have to be under the shed. It could be under the vegetables.’ I looked around. I remembered Owen’s letter and how he had suggested that Julia had taken her own body away with her. There was a whole city here, of sheds and little roads, of human design and natural life. Julia could be living in any part of it.
‘No, no,’ said John. ‘This would be the best place. If it’s not here, it’s not anywhere. We’ve been going for more than an hour.’
‘I was sure,’ Annie murmured. You two convinced me of it. I don’t know if I can trust you both any more. I feel as if I’ve just pulled my insides out and buried them in this hole for nothing.’ There was no anger in her voice. She sounded surprised, and tired.
We lingered a little longer. John stood and began to shovel earth back into the hole. Black clumps tore apart and luminescent worms wriggled out.
Annie patted John’s arm.
‘Don’t worry about the mess. We can leave it. I’ll just tell the council it was me and I’d gone a little mad, or something. I’m his sister. It’ll be fine.’
We laid the tools on the ground and moved away, past neat rows of vegetables, sheds with gingham curtains, glinting greenhouses. Though we had failed in our task, the air between the three of us was peaceful. I looked back at the mark we had made, a sharp, raw gash in the earth.
John waved a hand in front of my face. We tried, Isabel, but we were wrong. We need to stop looking now. I think it’s time to let Owen rest. He didn’t do it.’
‘We don’t know that yet. I can’t give up until I’m sure.’
‘I don’t want to do this any more, Isabel. Owen was my friend. I want to think well of him. Let me tell you something. When I came out of prison, Owen met me on the Isle of Wight. He came all the way down from Yorkshire to meet me and we went to the beach together to set off fireworks. It was his idea. He turned up with a plastic bag full of rockets and we watched them shoot up and explode, one by one, into the night. I can’t explain to you the sense of hope he brought me that day. I was terrified but he made me feel okay. That’s the kind of friend he was, but I had forgotten about it until a moment ago because of your relentless obsession with murder. What I want to do now is go to the pub and have a pint, drink to the good times we had and the jokes we shared. I want to look at the sky and remember the rockets flaring and falling. I want to say, “Goodbye, Owen, old mate” – that’s why I got on the bus this morning – and I haven’t had the chance yet.’
‘You’ve been happy enough to go along with everything so far. Why have you been following me all day? I didn’t ask you to.’
‘I find you very attractive. Sorry. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Oh.’ I had no answer. This had nothing to do with my plans. I was only disappointed that, apparently, John had not been serious about finding Julia.
‘Yeah.’ Annie dusted soil from her skirt, pulled off a boot and shook out dirt and a couple of stones. ‘I’m tired. What a long and weird day it’s been. And how much weirder it would have been if I’d gone to the crematorium and seen all that as well. Maybe this was therapeutic but I’m not sure how it’ll feel when the numbness wears off. I’m ready for the pub. Let’s go up the road to the Crown.’
‘All right.’ John’s words had touched me. I was almost crying and I could not argue with him now. ‘Do you two mind if I have a moment here, by myself? I just want to try and remember Owen a bit. In the church it was hard to concentrate. I’ll follow you soon.’
I stepped into the nearest allotment, knelt down, reached for a lump of soil and crumbled it between my fingers. It was hard on one side, soft on the other. Julia was not here. I knew now that we could not have found her body for I had given up believing that she had ever had one. I took more of the wet soil in my hands. John was right. It smelled clean. I let it run around and through my fingers like water. I rubbed it over my face. I shut my eyes for a moment and found myself back in Istanbul. I could see the domes and minarets, the Galata Bridge crossing the Golden Horn. I saw the fishermen in their woollen hats, the mussel-sellers on the corner at the end of the bridge. Mete was weaving slowly between them and I was following close behind. Why was there a gap between us? Why could I not remember how Mete and I had ever found each other in the first place? I wanted to remember. We were in Izmir. Mete was in his air-force uniform, in a café with his friends, and I was there too. That was as far as I could get. I opened and shut my eyes again. I was on a wet allotment with dirt all over me. This was real. Istanbul was better in every way, but this was my home and I had to be here. I still needed to know what had happened to Julia, whether or not she had left her body behind. For Kath, the disappeared Julia had been a spirit in the air who could be drawn back to us with music and scent. For me she was a lump in the guts, hard and knotted. The lump was poisoning me. It wasn’t Julia’s fault but the poison had been leaking out for years. I could not return to Istanbul, could not be a mother to Elif until the lump was cut out and the poison drained away. I staggered to my feet. I couldn’t find my balance and I had to stand still for a moment. I felt the ground under my feet sway a little. Then
I moved on.
I still believed that I had been right when I first arrived and that I would find the answer at the reservoir. Divers had searched the water but they might have missed something. I wanted to retrace Julia’s steps. I have sometimes imagined that Julia and I had taken each other’s paper rounds that day, that we said, ‘See you back at the shop,’ then Julia took the route through the housing estate and I went down to the cottages by the reservoir. If Owen had been the killer, he would have followed Julia along the other route and perhaps nothing would be different. But if the killer had been a random stranger, then it is likely that I would have been the victim. I like to tell myself that, when faced with danger, perhaps I would have reacted quickly and been able to save myself. This is a fantasy. I know that Julia was stronger and smarter than I and, if she could not survive her attacker, I would not have stood a chance. If I had been in Julia’s place that day, I would be in her place now. So I had to find her. The others could drink without me.
It was not so dark on the road to the reservoir. Streetlights cast a thick, yellow haze and the windows of the cottages were bright, but now the sky itself appeared to be lightening, as if the day were slipping back from evening to afternoon. I could feel the sun’s glow, from low in the sky. My legs carried me past the row of cottages, and then towards the spot where Julia’s newspaper-bag was found. A car engine hummed close behind me. I had not noticed it before. I glanced over my shoulder. It seemed to be about to park, or the driver was pulling up to speak to me. I ignored it but the sound came right up close behind my legs. I turned again. The driver reached across the passenger seat and rapped white knuckles on the window. For some reason I expected to see John at the wheel – he had a strange ability to appear from nowhere at any moment – but the figure was smaller, quicker, and not at all familiar. I jumped back on the pavement, pressed into the hedge. The car passed under the beam of a streetlight. It was light blue. I screamed.
The Missing Person's Guide to Love Page 17