They went upstairs and got ready for bed. Ruby hadn’t been in hers for five minutes before Mummy came in and sat beside her.
‘I’m so sorry about today, Rubes. Are you OK?’
Ruby twiddled her bed cover while the tree outside clawed at the window. ‘Why was Daddy so cross?’
Mummy sighed. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. Daddy’s had a hard time, you know? Losing a job is very difficult for a man, and sometimes they can get upset for no real reason.’
‘But why did he punch Granpa?’ said Ruby.
Mummy shook her head and bit her lip and started to cry big tears that tipped out of her eyes and down her cheeks in shiny rills.
She held out her arms and Ruby reached up and let herself be gathered up in them and pressed against her mother’s shoulder.
Mummy rocked her and Ruby let herself be rocked. ‘Everything’s going to be OK, Rubes,’ said Mummy. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’
Ruby didn’t think Mummy was lying.
But she also didn’t think it was true.
48
CALVIN TOOK LESS than five minutes knocking on doors to establish where Georgia Sharpe lived, but five minutes was long enough to get thoroughly soaked. He’d lived in North Devon all his life and he couldn’t remember a storm like it. The wind drove rain deep into his ear as he hunched his shoulders and ran up the narrow path to the cottage on the end of the row.
Everybody knew Georgia Sharpe, as he’d suspected. Mostly because she had a pet rabbit. ‘In the house!’ said more than one neighbour. Calvin understood. Around here, rabbits were pests and vermin, not cuddly pets that you paid to feed while they shat on your floor.
He knocked and got no answer and immediately ran round to the back door and knocked there too. He wasn’t messing about in this typhoon.
Calvin noticed the small pane of glass missing in the door and tried the handle. It was unlocked, and he stepped out of the wild elements and into the calm of a well-ordered kitchen. Only a scattering of what he assumed was rabbit food on the floor and a small but untidy pile of books and stationery on the counter interrupted his eye. And the smell of burned meat made him wrinkle his nose.
‘Hello?’
Just the way the word distributed itself through the air told Calvin that the house was empty.
He wouldn’t find Georgia Sharpe here.
Still, he couldn’t put that on any kind of official documentation, so he searched the house, just to rubber-stamp his instincts.
For some reason, the house creeped him out. There was no logic to it. There was nothing out of place, nothing disturbed, no nasty surprises. And yet he felt his hackles tingle on several occasions.
When he found the handbag on the chair in what he assumed was Georgia Sharpe’s bedroom, his heart sank. This wasn’t good. Calvin didn’t know much about women, but he did know that women and their handbags were like conjoined twins. If they had been separated, then anything might have happened.
After he found the handbag, he put on a pair of blue latex gloves and went through the house again – this time opening all the wardrobes.
Nothing.
Back down in the kitchen, he noticed the bag of Bugsy Supreme was upright next to the dustbin. If the rabbit had pulled the bag over to get at the food, it certainly hadn’t righted it. And where was the rabbit? There was a full litter tray in the utility room and a bowl filled with water near the back door, but no sign of the rabbit itself.
‘Here, Bugs!’ he called. ‘Here, Bunny!’
The bunny didn’t show itself.
Calvin sifted through the pile of random items on the counter. Three blue exercise books, a red card covered with gold stars with the handwritten heading For Good Attendance, and a pencil case in the shape of a banana with googly eyes. Inside the banana were two ballpoint pens, a pencil sharpener and the shoe from a Monopoly set. Georgia Sharpe was a teacher, but these were not the contents of a teacher’s bag, but a child’s.
It was puzzling. Something was definitely amiss. Calvin wished Kirsty King were here to work it out, but she wasn’t, so he’d have to do his best.
Calvin picked up the first of the exercise books and smiled. In the top-right corner of the cover, in sloping, uneven handwriting, were the words My Dairy. And then – underneath that – the book’s apparent owner: Ruby Trick.
He knew that name!
He wound back through his memory. He was young and he got there fast. Ruby Trick was the child he’d spoken to in her father’s car. In Instow, on the same night that Steffi Cole had made her last, traumatic phone call home.
Calvin’s neck prickled again and he laughed out loud. Ridiculous! Getting a chill from a child’s diary. There was no connection, only coincidence.
But his hackles wouldn’t let him off the hook so easily.
Feeling pretty stupid – and glad that nobody else was here to laugh at him – Calvin Bridge flicked through Ruby Trick’s diary.
He stopped near the end, and this time the ripple of unease raised every hair on his body.
My Daddy’s got a gun …
Calvin told himself not to be stupid. Not to overreact. This was a ten-year-old girl’s diary, not a treasure map in a pirate film. He needed to be objective. He needed to be cautious. He needed to be modern – because his ancient body was tingling and fluttering with warning.
He read the entry again, then put the diary down with a hand that shook a little. Fuck modern – this was important. This was something – even though he didn’t know what. Yet. Right now he could only see a jumble of fleeting images that skittered about in his head while he tried desperately to grab them and make them fit together.
Kirsty King tapping her teeth with the gall-stone scoop.
Jody Reeves sticking out her thumb for a short ride to death.
Lips moving through the slit in a black balaclava. Call your mother.
Mother-of-pearl stars in a chocolate sky.
Ruby Trick’s father at the boot of his car – squinting into the headlights.
My Daddy’s got a gun.
Frannie Hatton’s bruises.
Frannie Hatton’s bruises.
Frannie Hatton’s bruises.
Maybe they only needed one body, after all…
Calvin felt two pieces fit together like a puzzle, and reached for his phone.
When Kirsty King answered, he didn’t even say hello.
‘I know why he doesn’t shoot them!’ he shouted. ‘The gun’s not real!’
49
THE STORM CAME.
The forest around Limeburn had stood for five hundred years and seen few like it.
The wind and the rain combined to bring more water off the surrounding hills than ever before. Instead of raindrops falling on to leaves and weighing down the branches of the trees, they were immediately dashed from their resting place to the ground, where they gathered together and rushed downhill towards the sea.
The stream broke its mossy banks and flooded the road and the cobbles three inches deep. It filled the Bear Den.
In the clearing on the top of the cliff, the wind was even more punishing. Small things bent double to get out of its way.
Big things fared less well.
The giant oak that bore the swing was alone on the bluff. Unlike the forest behind it, where each tree sheltered its neighbour, this oak had stood on the cliff above Limeburn in splendid isolation for over two centuries – a lookout and a landmark – facing down nature.
But this night would be its last.
It swayed and it creaked and it strained under the assault that was a north wind coming straight off the ocean, sweeping all before it. The frayed rope whipped about until it swung so hard and so high that it got tangled in the branches. The oak started to moan, and then to squeal. If any human being had been crazy enough to be sitting on the nearby bench at the time, they would have felt the ground move beneath them as the mighty roots strained to hold on to Mother Earth. Rising and falling, rising and falling, as if
the land itself were gasping for breath.
Some time just after midnight, a sound like a gunshot fired through the forest and the bench was tilted, then tossed aside by a great upheaval of soil and roots that rose vertically in the sky for ten, twenty feet. They hung there like witches’ fingers, as the tree they’d nourished for so long clung to the only home it had ever known.
With a horrible shriek, the mighty oak tipped slowly forward and peered over the edge at the raging waters below and then – with a final rending sound – it tumbled off the cliff and into the ocean.
The storm was so loud and the sea so wild that when the giant tree hit the waves, it barely made a splash.
Ruby woke at the sound of a gun.
She lay there for a moment, the sweat that was cooling fast on her body the only evidence of a bad, bad dream.
But even though she was awake, something was still very wrong.
The wind and the rain outside were momentous and the branches squealed and banged at her window, but something else was wrong. Something closer.
She frowned in the dark and realized what it was.
She had wet herself.
Ruby sat up in slow disgust and switched on the lamp. Then she pushed her bedsheets down. She hadn’t wet herself in bed for years. Not since she was tiny. She couldn’t believe it had happened now.
It hadn’t.
In the middle of the bed was a small patch of blood.
Ruby slithered out of bed as if she’d found a spider there, then stood and stared at the red spot on the white sheet for a very long time.
She knew what it meant.
Tears rushed up her nose and into her eyes.
She was becoming a woman, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was one of those things you just couldn’t stop.
She finished crying and stood and shivered for a moment in her Mickey Mouse nightshirt. Then she went to the bathroom and took one of the little pads Mummy had shown her and peeled off the strip and stuck it in a fresh pair of knickers. She didn’t know what to do with her old ones so she decided to throw them away. Not here in the little bathroom bin where anyone might see them, but downstairs in the bigger kitchen bin. Maybe even outside in the proper dustbin – although the storm howled so loud around the house that she thought maybe the kitchen bin would be enough, if she pushed them down among the rubbish so nobody knew.
Ruby crept down the stairs and opened the little white door at the bottom. Tried to open it. But something was pressing against it from the other side.
She stopped and frowned. She could hear something on the other side of the door. Something alive.
Something breathing.
‘Daddy?’ she whispered warily. ‘Daddy?’
There was no answer but the trees trying to break in through the roof, and that strange in-out sound of deep, slumbering inhales and exhales.
It made her shiver again – and not because she was cold.
If she hadn’t had the knickers balled up in her hand, Ruby would have gone back upstairs to bed and waited till morning.
Instead she pushed on the door again – hard. This time there was far less resistance. The door to the front room opened suddenly, and Ruby stepped down into the sea.
50
THE STORM AND the highest tide of the year had joined forces with the rain-sodden forest to finally wipe Limeburn off the map.
The rats had come first. Washed out of their nests in the kilns, and dashed against the cottages and cars by the storm. The waves that crossed the cobbles were fringed with the black, seething beasts, some squealing and terrified, some sodden and limp and already dead.
Then the sea came up the slipway too. Further than it had ever been before.
It met the broken stream coming the other way and together they filled the square with three feet of water – preparing the way for the real onslaught.
That final assault came in the shape of the great oak. In this magnificent tree, the sea had found a true weapon of war. It heaved the oak against the bigger of the limekilns like a battering ram. Again and again and again, until – at last – the thick stone walls fell and the kiln burst apart like a bomb, spilling its dark secrets into the ocean.
Ten thousand years from now, the grey stones that once made up the limekiln walls would be smoothed and rolled for miles up the coast to fortify the pebble ridge, in protection of another place entirely.
But their work here was done; there was no barrier remaining between Limeburn and the sea.
And the sea knew it.
It had crossed the square in a single sweep of breaker, leaving only the top windows of the cottages peeping out of the waves. It had set Maggie’s mother’s twenty-year-old Nissan adrift, and – because John Trick’s old piece of junk still wasn’t between them – crashed it into Mr Braund’s new Range Rover.
Then the sea had surged up the shallow hill to The Retreat, funnelled white water through the garden gate and smashed the front door clean off its hinges.
The sea!
The sea was in their house!
It was nearly up to Ruby’s knees and she staggered sideways with shock and almost fell, and got wet all the way up one thigh too.
It didn’t seem real. Everything else was the same: the lamps were on double – in the room and in the water. The front door was part open – hanging drunkenly on its top hinge alone. The spider rug floated gently off the floor and followed the water back outside as it retreated.
Then the sea exhaled and came again. When it came back this time, it came like a gunfighter into a saloon. The door flapped on its hinge and a wave crashed through the house and broke in a roil of foam, then spread itself around the room and slapped gently against the TV, which banged in a shower of sparks, along with the lamps, and everything went black.
‘Mummy!’ screamed Ruby. ‘Mummy!’
The bitter water gripped Ruby’s hips and she staggered sideways and grabbed the handle of the little white door to stay upright as the wave withdrew once more.
As her eyes adjusted to the new darkness, Ruby could see through the doorway and out into Limeburn.
The water was cold, but the chill that ran down Ruby Trick’s spine was even colder.
She’d been wrong.
The sea was not in their house.
Their house was in the sea.
Through the broken front door, Ruby could see the silhouette of an enormous tree rolling backwards and forwards in the square, bashing and banging between the cars and the cottages.
Everything between here and there was water.
‘Mummy!’ she screamed. ‘Mummy!’
All these years she’d been so scared of the woods, of the trees, of the creeping undergrowth and of the mud.
But the real danger all along had been the dark-grey ocean on their doorstep.
Ruby saw the next wave coming. She turned to run back upstairs, but it knocked her clean off her feet and washed her into the coffee table. She banged her head and her shin, and swallowed salt water, before getting to her hands and knees, choking and spluttering and unable to shout for help.
The sea sucked the wave back out of the house and Ruby knelt there and panted for a moment, too shocked to think straight, only aware of the salt in her mouth and the spongy carpet under her fingers.
‘Ruby!’
‘Mummy!’
She scrambled to her feet just as the next surge hit her, but it wasn’t as great this time, and she stayed upright by grabbing the edge of the table, then splashed her way over to the stairs.
‘Mummy!’
‘Ruby! Where are you?’
‘Here!’
Something bumped against Ruby’s thigh. She looked down and frowned. She recognized the thing that was floating in the black water, but she couldn’t understand it. It was beyond her. It was too much.
It was a body.
A woman’s naked body. Face-down and tight with bloat, the shoulders and the buttocks keeping it high in the water.
&nb
sp; Without a face it could be anyone. Mrs Braund? Maggie’s mother? Old Mrs Vanstone? Ruby didn’t know; couldn’t think; didn’t want to.
As the black ocean lapped at the walls of the living room, the body drifted slowly away from Ruby. Then it rebounded gently off the sofa and came back for another pass.
And that’s when Ruby saw the bracelet. The silver chain bit into the bloated wrist, but the charms tinkled the way they always had – the elephant and the crow . . . and the little horseshoe.
Her heart beat hard in her head, and she felt sick.
She’d tried to tell Miss Sharpe her secrets, and now Miss Sharpe was dead.
Just like Frannie Hatton was dead, although her nose ring was in the car, and Steffi Cole was dead in the dunes behind the toilets.
And suddenly Ruby just knew that her Daddy had killed them all.
The wave turned and Ruby braced herself against the little white door as the water started to tug at her legs. The body floated away from her, the arm with the bracelet trailing behind it in goodbye. It bumped and turned slowly in the doorway, and when the tide sucked the sea out of the house, it took Miss Sharpe with it.
‘Ruby!’
She turned and saw Mummy standing halfway down the stairs – her face panicky and her phone in her hand.
‘Mummy! The sea’s in the house!’
‘Come upstairs! Quick!’
Ruby ran up to join her and they hugged on the landing. Ruby started to cry.
‘Shh, baby. We’re going to be fine.’
They weren’t, Ruby knew. She shook her head, but she was crying too hard to explain why.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ she said in sudden panic.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ said Mummy soothingly. ‘I already called him and he’s coming straight home to take care of us.’
The storm that had come out of nowhere was so violent that water spurted up and out of drains and gushed across roads.
In Bideford it created long, axle-deep stretches that halted pedestrians and slowed sane drivers to a crawl.
The Facts of Life and Death Page 25