by Ben Cheetham
The curtain of dusk had fallen low, but the streetlamps hadn’t yet come on. Julian glanced about for a taxi. His gaze locked on a car parked further along the street – a red car. But was it the same car? It was hard to tell in the gloom. Squinting, he slowly approached it. His head snapped forward as something hit him hard from behind. He fell over, instinctively flinging out his hands to break his fall. Hands grabbed him and rolled him over. A hollowed-out face and shaved head swam into focus. Wolfish teeth leered at him. “What the fuck have you done to my sister?” demanded their owner.
“Nothing.” Pain lanced through Julian’s neck as he tried to sit up. A whole galaxy of stars burst in front of his eyes when Jake Bradshaw knocked him back down with a punch to the jaw.
“Fuckin’ liar!”
“It’s the truth.”
Jake raised his fist for another punch, but a shout from somewhere nearby drew his attention. Like a startled wild thing, he straightened and sprinted away. “Wait, I need to talk to you,” Julian gasped, fighting off waves of dizziness. A second later two men’s faces loomed into his line of sight.
“You okay?” asked one of them, reaching to help him to his feet.
“Yes,” answered Julian, swaying a little, licking his lip and tasting blood. After a moment, he thought to look for the red car and saw that it was gone. He thanked the men and staggered to a taxi rank, wondering who’d put Jake Bradshaw onto him. Most likely, he realised, it was Weasel or his girlfriend. During the taxi ride, his eyes scanned the streets constantly for Mia, without hope. By the time he got home, the grogginess had cleared, but the pain in his jaw and neck remained. His mum was in bed; his dad was asleep on the couch. He took some painkillers, quietly lifted his dad’s car keys from the coffee-table and left the house. The fact that Mia’s brother didn’t know where she was had brought home to him even more sharply that she might be beyond finding. But that didn’t matter to him anymore. All that mattered was that he tried to find her, and kept trying as long as he could. And fuck Tom Benson, fuck the future, fuck anything or anyone that got between him and his search.
He drove to the crossroads where he’d crashed, and followed the road to the edge of town. He didn’t see the black Merc, didn’t see anything that struck him as suspicious, all he saw was row after row of neat suburban houses, then fields and the forest edge. He cruised around aimlessly for a while, before heading out of town to the bridge. He scrambled down the bank under the eaves of the huge steel and concrete structure. There was almost no daylight left, so he squirted fluid from the same can Mia had used over the sooty remains and held a lighted match to them. In the light of the flames, he studied his surroundings. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but there was some profound connection between Mia and the place. He felt sure of it. And he felt sure, too, that if he could find out what that connection was it would bring him a step closer to finding her.
Julian noticed something at the base of one of the bridge’s concrete feet. A small, multicoloured Indian-style purse. Inside was a tenner, some loose change and a school identity card with Mia’s unsmiling face on it. He stared at it a moment, hardly breathing, before returning it to the purse. Looking to see if there was anything else of hers there, he spotted words scrawled on the bridge – words that that seemed to confirm the dreadful fear his heart was already sinking under the weight of. They read ‘Mia Bradshaw, May twentieth, two thousand and ten. R.I.P.’. The day after he’d last seen her. “Oh God,” he murmured.
Hesitantly, as if afraid what might be waiting for him there, Julian approached the water’s edge. The river was its usual inscrutable self. He tried to imagine what drowning would feel like – the water sliding over you like an icy blanket, the bursting lungs, the obliteration of consciousness, of everything. He pictured Mia amongst the sludge and weeds at the river bottom, fish nibbling her flesh. Swallowing a thickness in his throat, he phoned Tom Benson. “You got it wrong again,” he said, trembling between anger and tears. “Mia hasn’t run away. She’s thrown herself in the river.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I should never have listened to you. I knew you were wrong all along. I fucking knew it!”
“Calm down, Julian. Where are you?”
“The High Bridge.”
“Stay there. I’ll be there soon as I can.”
Julian made his way back up to the road. He took out the ID card again. “I’m so sorry, Mia,” he said, his voice choked with shame. Tears ran down his face. He swiped them away when Tom Benson pulled up alone, and brandished the card accusingly at him. “I found this under the bridge. And there’s something else down there too.”
Tom Benson took the card and frowned at it. “Show me.”
They clambered down the bank, Julian lighting the way with a torch the detective handed him. Tom Benson studied the writing in silence for a full minute, as if trying to decide on its authenticity, before turning the same scrutinising gaze on Julian. “How did you find this?”
“I came here with Mia a couple of times. This place seemed to mean something to her.”
“Oh this place meant something to her alright. This is where her mother died.” The detective traced a line with his finger from the bridge’s railings to the water. “She jumped. She was only fifteen.”
“Fifteen,” Julian parroted, shaking his head as the grim symmetry of it all became clear to him. “What happens now?”
“We’ll drag the river, see what we find.”
“You really think Mia’s killed herself?”
“Looks like it. I can’t keep you out of this anymore, I’m afraid. I’ll need a statement.”
Julian followed the detective up the bank, his legs heavy as wooden posts. He suddenly felt bone tired, as if he’d grown old under the dusty, graffiti-scarred eaves of the bridge. Fifteen, he kept thinking, fif-fucking-teen. He gave his statement mechanically, then asked, “If she’s in there, will you find her?”
Tom Benson shrugged. “The current’s strong here. As I recall, her mother surfaced after nearly a month, a good thirty miles downstream.”
Something about that shrug sparked Julian’s anger again, but he said nothing. He was too drained for recriminations. All he wanted to do was sleep, blank everything for a few hours. “Can I go now?”
“Yes, but don’t go too far. I’ll probably need to talk to you again.”
Julian gave the river a lingering glance, before returning to his car. He didn’t drive home. He didn’t want to have to explain to his dad why he’d taken the car. He drove to the forest and, wrapped in its silence and secrecy, slid into an uneasy, dream-wracked sleep.
Chapter 12
Julian awoke long before dawn to a gnawing pain, not in any one place, but all over and all through his being. She was nothing to you, nothing at all, he tried to tell himself. But it was no good. Mia had been something to him – something he didn’t understand, but something nonetheless. She’d felt that nameless connection, too, and reached out to him – consciously or subconsciously – for help. And he’d failed her – and, in doing so, failed himself.
Julian started driving. He had no clear idea where he intended to go, but a short time later he found himself outside Eleanor’s house. He made his way around to the back garden and threw gravel at her window. A light came on and she appeared at the glass. “Julian, is that you?”
“I need to talk.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Please, it’s important.”
“It always is when you need something from me. But what about when I need something from you? You wouldn’t talk to me when I called last week. So why should I talk to you now?”
“I know I’ve used you, Ellie. I know that, and I’m sorry for it. But if you’ll just let me in, I’ll explain.”
Eleanor’s forehead wrinkled in thought a few seconds, then she shook her head. “No, Julian, enough is enough. You’ve got to-”
“Mia Bradshaw’s dead,” interjected Julian.
Eleanor’s eyes widened, her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my God. How?”
“Let me in and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay.” Eleanor disappeared from the window and reappeared a moment later at the backdoor in her dressing-gown. She frowned at the sight of Julian’s face in the light of the kitchen. “What happened to you?”
“Jake Bradshaw.” Rubbing his bruised jaw, Julian dropped heavily onto a chair. “I could do with a drink.”
“You want a coffee or something?”
Julian nodded and as Eleanor made it he told her everything that’d happened the previous day. She shuddered, no doubt imagining, as he’d done, what it would be like to drown. He sipped his coffee, staring at the tabletop. “I should’ve known she’d do something like this.”
“How could you know?”
“From the way she looked at the river. Her eyes had this weird blankness.”
“This isn’t your fault, Julian. This isn’t anybody’s fault.”
He shook his head hard. “People don’t kill themselves for no reason. There’s something behind all this – maybe something that goes back to Mia’s mother’s death.” A sudden thought came to him. “When Mia’s mum died it must’ve been in the newspapers at the time. Would it be possible to look through some old copies of The Chronicle?”
“Sure. But why bother? What good can it do now?”
“Probably none, but I need to at least try to understand what’s happened.”
“Why does this mean so much to you, Julian? You barely knew Mia Bradshaw.”
Feeling he owed Eleanor at least an attempt at an explanation, Julian said awkwardly, “It’s hard to put it into words, but I felt something when I was with her that I’ve never felt with anybody else. I’m not talking about love…Or maybe I am. I don’t know. Maybe if I can find out why she did what she did, I’ll know why I felt what I felt.” Eleanor lowered her eyes from Julian’s, the hurt plain on her face. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She managed a smile. “Don’t be, there’s no need.” Raising a finger to her lips, she motioned for Julian to follow her. They went into her dad’s study and she booted up his computer. “The website’s only been online a few weeks,” she said, logging onto the newspaper’s archives site. “I designed it myself. What year do you want to look at?”
“Well Mia can’t have been more than a baby when her mum died. So I guess we’re talking roughly fifteen years ago.”
Mia clicked on 1995 and typed in the search term ‘Suicide. The High Bridge’. “Here we are.” She read a headline, “Missing schoolgirl found dead in river.” Underneath it was a photo of a girl – the same photo Julian had found in Mia’s diary, except that it was black-and-white.
He bent to read the article, which continued ‘Police searching for a fifteen-year old girl have found her body in a river. Deborah Bradshaw was last seen when she left her home on the night of March 23. It’s been speculated that Deborah jumped from The High Bridge because her twin babies, a boy and a girl aged just three months, were taken away by Social Services last month after a family court hearing. A police spokesman said: “At this time we’re treating the death as suicide. However, we can’t be a hundred percent sure, and theories of something more sinister are understandable.” An inquest into Deborah’s death is expected to be opened later this week.’
“Something more sinister,” said Julian, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“It means some people thought Deborah Bradshaw was killed and it was made to look like suicide,” said a voice from behind him. He started and looked over his shoulder.
“Dad, what’re you doing up?” said Eleanor. “We didn’t wake you, did we?”
Mike shook his head. “I’ve been awake a couple of hours, thinking.”
“About what?”
“Funnily enough, about Deborah Bradshaw. I’ve been thinking about her a lot since her daughter went missing.”
Eleanor gave Julian a slightly sheepish look. “I had to tell someone, and Dad promised to keep it to himself.”
Julian barely heard her. Mike Hill’s words were swirling in his head like debris in the aftermath of a tornado. “What people and why?” he asked.
“People who knew her and said she just wasn’t the type to kill herself,” said Mike. “They were convinced her death had something to do with the father of her babies.”
“Who was the father?”
“No one’s ever found out. A rumour did the rounds that it was a much older man, a family man.”
Eleanor wrinkled up her nose. “That’s horrible. It makes my skin crawl to think of it.”
“So this guy, whoever he is, threw Deborah Bradshaw off the bridge because she was going to expose him, is that it?” said Julian.
“Something like that,” said Mike.
“Do you think that’s what happened?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she was simply overwhelmed by everything that happened to her.” Mike motioned at the computer screen. “So what’s got you reading this?”
“Mia Bradshaw’s dead. She jumped off the bridge too.”
Mike’s eyebrows lifted. “How do you know she jumped?” When Julian told him, his eyebrows drew together again and he said, “Well, I must say that sounds pretty conclusive. But it doesn’t have to mean what it looks like.”
“What else could it mean?”
“Maybe Mia wants the police to think she’s jumped when-”
“When she really has run away,” Julian interjected, his voice quick with fresh hope.
“Exactly.”
Anxiety returned to Julian’s eyes as another possibility occurred to him. “What if somebody threw her in the river and made it look like she jumped.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“There’s something else,” Julian glanced at Eleanor. “Something I haven’t told you.” He gave them the full story about Mr Ugly and what’d happened the night Mia disappeared. “I thought maybe she was involved in some kind of prostitution or pornography, something like that. But now I’m thinking, what if it had something to do with her father? What if she found out who he was?”
“How would she have done that?”
“Maybe her mum left behind a letter or a diary.”
“If she had, the police would’ve found it at the time she died.”
“Well maybe someone told her.”
Mike shook his head. “Why would they do that after all these years? It’s tempting to look for some conspiracy, but if you ask me, you were closer to the truth with your first guess. I’d say Mia Bradshaw got mixed up in something unpleasant, and she’s either trying to run away from it or it’s driven her to suicide. Of course, there’s always the possibility she simply couldn’t bear the death of her friend.”
Now it was Julian’s turn to shake his head. “There’s something going on in this town. Deborah Bradshaw, Susan Carter, Joanne Butcher and now Mia Bradshaw. That’s four fifteen-year old girls who’ve gone missing from around here in the last fifteen years.”
“Susan Carter.” Mike looked at Julian curiously. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. What makes you mention her?”
Thinking about the dreams, Julian struggled to maintain eye contact with him. “My grandma was a clairvoyant. She tried to help her parents find her.”
“Yes, I know. I just don’t see how Susan Carter’s connected to this.”
“Her body was never found, right. What if that’s because she ended up in the river, too?”
“Hang on. Let me get this straight. You’re suggesting somebody around here’s killing girls and dumping them in the river?”
“Maybe they are.”
“And Joanne Butcher’s death wasn’t an accident either, right?”
“Well maybe it wasn’t.”
“You’re making connections where none exist, Julian. If there was even a hint of a connection between Susan Carter’s disappearance and the other three, don’t you think the police would’ve spotted
it?”
“Maybe they have.”
“What the hell does that mean?” A crooked smile tugged at Mike’s mouth. “Oh, I get it. The police are in on it too.”
“Well Tom Benson didn’t seem all that interested when I went to him about Mia.”
“Hey, maybe the root of it goes even deeper than the police. Maybe half the town’s in on it as well.” Mike’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“I know I sound paranoid, but I’m just trying to make sense of all this.”
“What if there is no sense to be made of it? Bad stuff happens, Julian, especially to vulnerable kids like Deborah and Mia Bradshaw and Joanne Butcher. It’s hard to take, I know, but that’s the way it is.”
Heaving a breath, Julian put his head down and closed his eyes. “You’re probably right, I’m probably reading way too much into this. Truth is, I don’t know what to think. My mind’s going like crazy.”
“I know I’m right. I’ve been reporting the news in this town for twenty-five years. And believe me, whether it be the work of a lone predator or a whole conspiracy of them, if someone was doing the things you say, I’d have got wind of it.”
Julian thought about Tom Benson. He’d been certain of his rightness, too. “What if you’re wrong though?”
Contemplating the possibility made Mike reach for his cigarettes. He sparked up, took a drag, and looked at Julian gravely. “In that case, you should get out of town today, go back to university, go travelling for a while, whatever. Just put some distance between yourself and this business.”
Julian sat silent a full minute, brow creased. He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“But what can you do to help Mia?” said Eleanor.
“I don’t know. All I know is I can’t abandon her.”
“You’re going to get yourself in serious trouble, Julian, maybe hurt even worse than you already are.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter anymore.”
“Yes you do,” Eleanor shot back, her eyes shimmering with barely contained tears. “You matter to your parents, and to me.”