It’s a photograph. It only shows the truth.
She shook her head to clear her mind and went up to the table, spread with images of young girls: girls in red dresses, black dresses, pink dresses, their hair worn high or spilling around their shoulders. Their smiles were all the same.
‘Can I take that?’
A picture was pulled from Angie’s hand. She was in the way, as ever, cramping their style. She recognised the self-pity in her thoughts, decided she didn’t care. Then she heard something that made her stop and listen:
‘Cosgrove, yeah, you’re not kidding!’
‘Fit as anything. You seen his hair?’ A squeal of laughter.
Cosgrove. That was him, the cool teacher.
‘Single an’ all.’
‘That’s not what I heard.’
There was a break in the words – they had moved on or lowered their voices – then:
‘Shagging Whatshername in Beaver’s group.’ There was a high giggle that made Angie think of glass. Beaver: didn’t Chrissie call her form tutor Beaver? Mrs Beavers, her name was.
Shagging Whatshername in Beaver’s group.
‘Dirty bastard.’ This time both voices joined in the loud, shrill laughter that went on for a long time until suddenly the camera flashed, turning everything white once more, making colours garish and faces pale: bringing everything into the light, if only for a moment.
Shagging whatshername in Beaver’s group.
No, Angie thought, it didn’t have to be Chrissie, of course, it didn’t. There were other girls in the class, and other groups; there was always other gossip. It didn’t even have to be true. The man might not be sleeping with anybody, much less a pupil. He surely wouldn’t risk so much for so stupid, so flighty a thing. And then she remembered the way the teacher had looked at her daughter, his eyes flicking up and down her body, the way he’d moved away from Angie without a word. The way he had bent so that a girl could whisper in his ear, so close he must surely have felt her warm breath on his neck.
No.
If she didn’t trust a man such as Cosgrove, she had to trust Chrissie. The girl wouldn’t be so stupid, wouldn’t waste herself that way. Of course it wasn’t Chrissie they’d been talking about; she should think better of her daughter. Chrissie could walk into a room and own it with her million-watt smile. Her daughter.
‘Do you want your picture taking?’
Angie looked up, startled, and shook her head. No, she didn’t want her picture taking; she didn’t even want to be here any longer. She stepped back and allowed someone to take her place. She glanced around the room again. It was all going off exactly the way it should. There was no need for her to be here, not now. There were more than enough adults, and it wasn’t as if Chrissie would notice. Angie was already taking out her mobile phone to call a taxi as she slipped out of the door.
*
If only she hadn’t started to drink after the dance, she would have called Chrissie last night. It wouldn’t have helped, of course – the girl would have recognised the number and ignored the call – but it would have made Angie feel better. Of course, she had realised before too long that her daughter wasn’t coming home. She should be angry, she supposed, but it was difficult to feel anything except lethargy. She could call her now, but she wasn’t ready, couldn’t bring herself to face Chrissie’s antagonism. Chrissie had been with her friend Kirsty, she’d said. She never listened to her mother when she was with her friends.
Angie sighed. At least it was her day off; she could always go back to bed. She’d hear the door bang when Chrissie walked in – she always slammed it – so she could wait until then to rouse the energy for the argument that was no doubt their due.
Angie pushed away the half-eaten cereal. She had a sudden, vivid image of the teacher, Mr Cosgrove: a close-up of his face, the features pleasantly grizzled like some fast-living rock star, and that made her think of the giggling girls. She pushed the thought away. Chrissie would never get mixed up with someone like that; why the hell should it have been her they were talking about? Not everything had to revolve around her daughter, like – like a crowd around a stage.
She heard a sound at the door and waited for the metallic skitter of Chrissie’s key in the lock. Instead she heard the slap of the letterbox, and a moment later the dull thud of something hitting the carpet.
At first Angie didn’t move; she just stared down into the mush that had been her breakfast, then she pushed herself up from her stool and went to see what it was.
*
A brown-paper parcel was sitting on the carpet. It rested at a thirty-degree angle to the door, facing away from her, and there was something wrong with it. It should be fastened with string, Angie thought. It was that kind of parcel, carefully wrapped, carefully folded. She didn’t know what it was about it that was off, somehow – and then she walked closer, and she did: her name and address were printed neatly in black marker, but there were no stamps. It could be from one of her neighbours, perhaps – but then why write her address? Angie shook her head. She was being silly, the result of her hangover; she was looking a gift horse in the mouth.
She picked up the parcel, feeling the dry, clean paper. How long was it since she’d had a parcel wrapped in brown paper? It was nice, a pleasantly old-fashioned thing to do. She shook it and heard something shift inside, kept looking at it as she turned and walked back into the kitchen. She collected the scissors and snipped along a fold, opening the new edges and the slit tape, smoothing out the paper. There was a light grain in it, a diagonal pattern which felt nice under her fingers. She opened the scissors, slipped the blade under the top of the wrapping and slid it down the length of the parcel.
There was a box inside, new and unmarked, not yet reused the way Angie recycled old packaging, taping new addresses on top of the old. The box was pale tan with black elasticised strips around it. As Angie slipped off the bands she thought she caught a faint smell, as if the wrapping had been stored somewhere musty.
She lifted the shallow lid, revealing a spill of white tissue paper, and smiled in spite of everything, the evening she’d had, the headache, the queasiness that lingered in her stomach. Good things come in small packages, she thought, and even better ones in tissue paper, wrapped in layers and layers of it, crinkly like—
—like the lines around your eyes.
Angie pulled a face.
There was a smooth object inside the box, her fingers had touched it: glass. She pulled out sheets of tissue paper and laid them carefully on the breakfast table. She could see the glass now, and it was crimson, the stuff inside it at any rate. She saw it had leaked a little in transit, a dark, almost brown splodge clinging to the last of the tissue, sticking layers of it together. Angie pulled it free with a hiss of frustration and saw what was in the box.
It was a bottle, old and heavily ridged: Ridged for poison, Angie thought. Whatever it was filled with was dark, clotting, the same stuff that had leaked on to the paper. She saw there was some of it on her fingers too, and she pulled her hand away. There was a smell, and she couldn’t think how she hadn’t noticed it before because it was strong, this scent, cloying and tainted and strong. She wanted it away from her nostrils, out of her house, and she moved to push the box away and her eyes flicked upwards and she saw why the bottle had leaked; she saw the thing that had been used to stopper it, and she opened her mouth and froze. She heard the scream, though, she was sure of it; she heard it inside her head, and it went on and on, over and over. She knew it would never stop, that scream; had never stopped—
There was no sound, none at all. Everything was silent, except in Angie’s mind, as she stared at the thing and heard the silence and felt everything going on around her, the leaves outside continuing to grow, flowers pushing their heads up from the earth, and she wanted it all to stop; because this couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t possible, not possible at all.
There was a toe stoppering the bottle, pushed hard into the narrow neck so t
hat the skin had folded back and wrinkled. It wasn’t a big toe, that wouldn’t have fitted, Angie thought, and she didn’t know why she thought that, why it even mattered. She knew whose toe it was; she recognised the pale orange of the nail polish, so carefully chosen, so carefully applied. It was too bright now, a ridiculous colour against the greyish, dying skin – dead, Angie told herself, the skin was dead, and the word wouldn’t register, wouldn’t connect with anything in her mind. She knew this was because she didn’t want it to, not yet: not ever.
It had been the cause of one of their little arguments, that colour. They had been in Leeds – they had travelled up there especially to buy the dress and the make-up (to save Chrissie stealing Angie’s – not that that had ever worked), and they’d stood for hours in the shop, trying this shade and that, and it took so long to choose and it was still orange. Angie had told Chrissie so, said it was hideous, but Chrissie insisted that it wasn’t orange at all, it was coral, and it matched her dress.
It doesn’t match your dead skin, Angie thought, and laughter rose in a fat bubble. Her hand shot to her mouth and she actually got hold of her lips, twisted them to keep that laugh inside.
The nail was almost crushed at one side. It looked as if it had been pinched in something: pliers, maybe.
Angie turned her head away. She felt tears on her cheeks, though she hadn’t felt them coming to her eyes.
She looked back at the thing on the table, the tissue paper scattered around it like handfuls of snow, the smooth sides of the box. It was new, she thought. No traces. And she wanted to laugh again. Suddenly her legs gave way and she found herself on the floor, clinging to the edge of the table. Then she did laugh but it came out in a weird sound, hunh-hunh-hunh, and Angie started to cry.
It’s not her, she thought.
Someone only hurt her. It’s only a toe. Anger rose, a sudden cold fury that someone would hurt her daughter, take thick metal snippers to her daughter’s soft skin. She was chilled right through. Her shoulders shook with it, a sudden cold that gripped tight and wouldn’t let her go. She was alone. She hoped for some kind of anger at that, the old, comfortable bitterness that might drive all of this away into some other place.
But she was gone. Chrissie was gone, and Angie didn’t know where, because she had left the dance, she had allowed her daughter to go off alone just as though she wasn’t Angie’s little girl, Angie’s baby. A pain shot right through her, ripping open the middle of her chest, and she leaned forward, wrapping her arms tight around her body. She rocked herself and a moaning sound escaped her lips. How odd, she thought, how odd to make such a noise, out loud, when I’m here on my own. She knew the box was still above her, on the table. It couldn’t be real, and she didn’t want to look and make it real once more. Somewhere she could hear a bird singing and she half raised her head. Her eyes were blurry. She thought she might be sick, surely she had to be sick, but no, her stomach had settled. It was traitorously stable, when the rest of her was this empty, reeling thing.
She had to call the police.
She gripped the tabletop, making sure she didn’t touch the box – never again – and pulled herself up. It was her legs that were unsteady now, not her stomach. She crossed the room to the telephone, feeling like when Chrissie had persuaded her to go roller-skating, back when her daughter was small. It had been all right when they were out there, gliding around the rink with all the rest; it was when she’d taken off the skates that she’d started to wobble, as if the world had become an untrustworthy thing on which to put her weight.
She didn’t know what she said to them. She remembered having to repeat it three times, and wanting to scream when she was asked to say it again. ‘Her toe,’ she kept saying, ‘it’s her toe.’ She only thought about the blood when she came to explain; she hadn’t consciously recognised, before then, what was in the bottle. ‘It’s blood,’ she said, and that was when she started to cry, hard and out of control. Ugly crying, she had always thought of it, but now she didn’t care. She could be ugly for ever if only Chrissie would come back, healthful and whole and smelling of peaches.
Angie found herself sitting by the telephone and shaking with sobs, the handset back on its rest, and she didn’t know whether she’d finished talking to them or simply hung up. She tried to remember giving her address and found she couldn’t. She felt like they were coming, though; they had to be, because if they didn’t she was just going to sit here until somebody did. She hoped – hoped – that person would be Chrissie.
The thought of her daughter made her stop shaking. She couldn’t sit here, she had to be strong, she had to find her little girl and bring her home, safe and sound as she had always been. Then she remembered Chrissie’s mobile and picked up the phone once more, hitting 1: the speed-dial number that would connect her to her only child, of course it would. She would be there, her tone casual and dismissive as ever, and this time Angie wouldn’t mind, not at all. If she didn’t answer – it would just be Chrissie ignoring her, probably pulling a face at her mobile and laughing with her friends as she let her voicemail pick it up, because she didn’t need her mother, she was with her friends, still having a good time. Still healthy; still whole.
It didn’t ring.
Angie sat with the phone in her hand and looked back at the table. The box was still there, the clouds of tissue paper around it like a bad spell. She turned instead towards the window and was surprised to see everything was the same as always. Her neighbour’s hedge needed trimming. The shrubbery was hazed with pale green buds and the sky was a faint blue; it would be a clear day. Somewhere, a bird was still singing. She became aware of it slowly, heard it grow more forceful before dying away and starting up once more in a shrill chorus. The Fullers’ door needed painting; it was peeling right down to the wood and Angie had always wondered why they didn’t do something about it. Her own driveway was looking messy, the flagstones uneven. She traced the lines with her eyes, the places where the ground was pushing up from beneath. She tried not to think about anything, tried to remember to blink, to breathe.
Finally she heard a vehicle coming up the hill. It was still out of sight but she knew the car would be white, and that it would have neon stripes along its side. She watched the turning of the lane but it wasn’t a car she saw coming around the corner, not at first: it was the postman, his bag loose at his side, a clutch of letters in his hand. He turned in at the Sandersons’ gate. His lips were pursed, as if he was whistling, and Angie knew it was because he was mentally singing along to the tune playing on his iPod – he always did that. He hadn’t even been, she thought. The postman hadn’t delivered the package. Someone else had done that – someone she might have seen, if she had only looked out, if she hadn’t been sitting at the table, hungover and feeling sorry for herself while her daughter suffered.
Hopefully, she thought, and tried to block out the alternative.
The car rounded the corner and she saw it was white, that it did have a neon strip along its side. It had blue lights, too, and they were whirling, momentarily painting the Fullers’ door and the Sandersons’ gate, dappling her own chipped drive.
There were no sirens. Too late, she thought, and forced herself to move towards the door.
CHAPTER TWO
Sandal Magna was an odd place, PC Cate Corbin had reflected as she’d headed down the road towards it. They would go ‘into Sandal’, or ‘down Sandal’, never into ‘the town’ or ‘the village’. She knew this was because the place didn’t have a centre: there was no village green or high street or parade of shops or even a church to form a bull’s-eye on the target. It was prime commuter land, a place where people rested their heads between trips into Wakefield or Leeds or Sheffield or even, on the East Coast main line, as far as London.
Sandal was a few twining streets that slotted between a series of fields and landmarks, and it struck Cate that maybe it did have focal places, after all; it was just that they had been there for centuries, had lost the power and meaning th
ey’d once had. Sandal Castle came up now, a snag-toothed ruin that always looked at its finest just after dawn, when the pink-and-blue sky was reflected in the boating lake at the foot of the hill. At the other end of this stretch of road, if she took a right, was Newmillerdam, the country park that drew day-trippers from across the district. Hundreds of years ago it would have been used by huntsmen. Now most visitors simply skirted the lake, ‘doing the flat path’ as Cate thought of it, before heading to a choice of pubs for a reward in a pint glass. Few ventured into the dark green woodland beyond.
It was a quiet place, an easy patrol, the through-routes and housing clusters divided by long swathes of green. There would be the occasional opportunist burglary or vehicle break-in; car thieves would sometimes come and nick black Audis or BMWs off convenient driveways. Cate glanced at the traffic heading off in the other direction, towards the motorway; people heading to other places, bigger places, where things happened. In a couple of years that would be her, moving out of the small flat she’d rented on the edge of Wakefield, going to Manchester perhaps, or London. For now, it would have to do. It was the place she’d been raised, though since her parents had left, retiring somewhere greener still, she could feel how the ties keeping her here were thinning. Once she’d put in her time building a solid foundation in policing, she could think of moving on for good.
She was still thinking this shift wasn’t going to be any different when the radio burst into life. She acknowledged, flicked the blues on and pulled out to overtake.
*
Cate took a deep breath as she pulled up next to the house. She had driven quickly but forced herself to concentrate through the twists and turns coming onto the estate, glancing at road signs as she took each turn. It was a carefully cultivated habit. Always know where you are, her tutor constable, PC Len Stockdale, had said to her, and it still didn’t seem that long ago. He had sometimes tested her on it, stopping mid-conversation to ask the name of the street they were on. It was his way of teaching her, and it had stuck; if she ever needed to call for help, she would know exactly where she was. This time it wasn’t strictly necessary, since she knew back-up was already being despatched.
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