But the moment she followed Mummy inside, a pulsing red light bounced off the walls.
Mummy cried, ‘Ruby! Oh my God! Turn it off!’ She rushed over and spun Ruby round and felt for the switch on what Ruby realized must be her LED light. Harvey bit Mummy and both of them squealed.
Ruby dropped the pack off her shoulders and found the little plastic button and the room went black.
‘How long was it on for?’ cried Mummy. ‘How long was it on for?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know! What if Daddy saw it?’
Mummy hurried to the glassless window. The floor there was always creaky and Mummy gasped and held the wall for support. Ruby ran over to join her.
Below them was The Retreat, still surrounded by shiny black water.
As they watched, Daddy came out of the front door and waded down the garden path, moving fast, as if he knew where he was going.
Ruby and Mummy held their breath.
Daddy went swiftly to the gate – and then turned and waded towards the Peppercombe path.
Mummy clutched Ruby’s hand. ‘He knows we’re here!’ She looked around the bare room and her voice cracked in desperation. ‘We have to hide! There’s nowhere to hide!’
‘I know where,’ said Ruby.
Calvin Bridge drove down the hill to Limeburn.
The normally dark, eerie lane was now treacherous too. Twice he had to steer around fallen branches, and once a branch crashed down into the ditch right beside them.
‘Shit!’ shouted King, and Calvin would have seconded it, but his mouth was too dry from fear.
They looked at each other, but Kirsty King wasn’t the type to go back, and Calvin wasn’t the type to go back if she wasn’t going back.
So he went on.
They passed the little car park where visitors parked and swung round the final corner down to the village.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said King in amazement. ‘Is that the sea?’
The flagstone in the hearth weighed a ton. Even with Ruby and Mummy trying to move it together. Their fingers could barely get purchase, and risked being squashed every time they lost their grip and dropped the huge slate. It wasn’t a job to do in the dark.
And Ruby didn’t even know what they’d find underneath.
Bare earth? Floorboards? A hole that was big but not big enough? Or a hole already occupied . . . ?
She didn’t have time to care. For now, she needed Adam’s ghost story to be true more than she’d ever needed anything in her life. Their lives depended on it. So she knelt and grunted alongside Mummy, while Harvey – free at last – twitched his nose at the edges of the stone, as if that would help.
Finally they got a good enough grip to lever the slab up and peer underneath, and Ruby felt her tummy flip over.
It was just as Adam had described.
The hole was not big, but it was big enough.
Who knew why it had been dug – for smuggling or family heirlooms or for hiding a priest – but Ruby no longer had any doubt that once the bones of a pedlar had been found here, curled up and grimacing and with knife-marks on his ribs.
She shivered all down her back.
‘Get in,’ said Mummy. ‘Quick!’
Ruby didn’t hesitate. She crouched down so she could slide under the flagstone.
Ching. Ching.
Mummy dropped the slab in terror and Ruby felt her heart stop.
Daddy had come to take care of them.
54
‘HELLO, WHORES.’
Ruby still didn’t know what the word meant, but it made her feel sick to hear him say it.
Mummy stood up. ‘Ruby. Get behind me.’
She did. She was too scared not to.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ said Mummy, and Daddy laughed a laugh that made Ruby go wobbly inside.
He started across the room towards them and Mummy backed away, with Ruby bumping behind her. She stumbled over the backpack and the red light flickered back into life.
‘John, please listen to me. You’re not well. I think you’re not well. Please stop this and we’ll see a doctor together. I promise you, I won’t let you go through it alone. We’ll go through it together. I promise.’
He laughed again. ‘Cross your heart?’
‘Cross my heart.’
‘And hope to die?’
Mummy didn’t answer. She kept moving round, pushing Ruby behind her, and Daddy kept following them. If Mummy moved left, he feinted left. If she moved right, he feinted right, and when she stood still, he kept coming. Mummy was trying to keep the room between them. Ruby understood what she was doing. But she knew it couldn’t last.
And it didn’t.
Daddy backed them into a corner. The corner furthest from the door. Furthest from safety.
As Ruby felt the walls on her shoulders, Daddy stopped.
He widened his stance. His arms moved away from his sides, slightly crooked at the elbows. He stretched his fingers.
He was getting ready to draw.
Mummy didn’t know, because she wasn’t a cowboy, so when he snapped the gun out of the holster, she screamed like in a horror movie.
Daddy laughed and laughed and laughed to see Mummy shrinking, terrified, against the wall.
‘It’s not real!’ cried Ruby. ‘Mummy, it’s not real!’
But that didn’t make Mummy feel better. It made her furious.
‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed. ‘Are you crazy? How could you scare us like that? How could you scare your own little girl?’
‘She’s not my little girl.’
Ruby frowned and looked at Mummy.
‘Is she?’ said Daddy.
‘Of course she’s yours,’ said Mummy. ‘She’s your little girl and you’re supposed to love her and take care of her, not scare the fucking shit out of her!’
Mummy reached for Ruby’s hand and she took it, holding on as if they were hanging off a mountain together.
Daddy shook his head slowly. ‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘Yours. But not mine. I used to think she was mine, but now I know better. The way she betrayed me? The way she’s started sniffing around the boys? The red hair? That’s all you, Alison. Not me. That’s all you and—’
‘Shut up!’ shouted Mummy. ‘You shut your mouth. Ruby’s your daughter and she loves you! Don’t you, Ruby?’
Mummy jerked Ruby’s hand so hard that she winced. ‘You love your Daddy, don’t you, Ruby?’
Mummy’s terror made Ruby nod, even as tears fogged her vision. But Mummy wanted more, and shook her hard and shouted, ‘Tell him you love him!’
Ruby couldn’t. She was so scared she couldn’t speak.
Mummy’s nails dug into her hand. ‘Tell him, Ruby! Tell him you love him!’
Ruby shook her head.
No.
Daddy spun the Colt on his finger, and gave the mean, bitter little laugh that Ruby knew so well.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘She doesn’t love me any more than you do.’
Ruby felt Mummy’s grip ease, and her shoulder slump a little.
‘But we used to,’ Mummy said softly, and Ruby looked up into her mother’s face and saw how tired it was, and how sad.
‘We used to love you, John. We both did. We both loved you so much …’
Her voice wavered and she stopped.
And then Ruby felt her mother sort of straighten up beside her before she spoke again.
‘When you were worth loving.’
Daddy flinched as if he’d been smacked. He looked dazed and very young, and just for a second, Ruby saw him the way he used to be, years ago, when he still had a job and a family who loved him – and it made her feel as if her heart might burst out of her chest with grief.
Then Daddy’s face changed again and he raised the gun and made an inhuman sound and came at them like an animal; like a tiger with its teeth bared, and murder in its eyes.
Mummy screamed and Ruby dropped to a helpless ball on the floor underneath her, her eyes squeezed s
hut and her hands over her ears, waiting to die.
There was a huge cracking, crashing sound and a frightened howl and then a weird, grunting noise.
And then only the roar of the storm.
Slowly Ruby opened her eyes.
She frowned in confusion as her brain adjusted to what she was seeing in the pulsing red glow.
Daddy was up to his waist in splintered, rotting wood, holding himself in place only by his elbows, the gun still in his hand.
He had gone through the floor.
Right in the place where she and Adam had made spy-holes so that they could watch the sea.
If John Trick had done something instead of nothing at all for the past three years, he might have had the strength he needed to haul himself out of the hole in the floor with the gun in his hand. He certainly tried. He gripped and strained and cursed and spat, and on two occasions he almost made it.
But pissing in the sea like a castaway is no kind of workout. Not like scaffolding, or labouring, or fixing the windows or the roof or the walls of a crumbling little house, where a family is cold and getting colder all the time.
Only his anger kept him from falling straight through the floor and dropping silently past the dark cliffs, into the raging sea.
Only his anger and his madness.
Ruby could see it in his eyes, and when Mummy moved instinctively to help him, Ruby cried ‘No!’ and held tight to the sleeve of her cardigan.
They knelt and watched in numb silence as he strained and struggled to save himself. Somewhere in the sky below the house, the Jingle Bobs tinkled. Trick’s head twisted from side to side and he bit his lip so hard he drew blood as he battled to lift his body on one hand and one elbow.
But because he’d done nothing at all for so long, John Trick finally needed full use of both hands.
He laid the gun down and flattened his palms against the splintered planks.
He hissed as he started to raise himself from the hole like an angry snake.
Ruby squealed. If he got out, Daddy would kill them both. He’d said, Hello, whores, and now Ruby knew for sure that Daddy killed whores.
That was just a fact of life.
Daddy hated women, and Mummy was a woman, and now she was a woman too.
He would kill them both.
Ruby’s legs didn’t want to move at first. But when she forced them, she moved faster than she ever had – running on her hands and feet across the floor like a giant spider.
Daddy saw her coming; knew what she was about. He snapped his bloody teeth inches from her face and roared, ‘Touch it and you’re dead!’
Ruby faltered. She’d promised. She’d promised not to touch the gun. Never. She stopped on all fours, mesmerized as Daddy rose slowly beside her – his arms shaking with effort as they straightened, his hips clearing the splinters, his knee starting to worm its way on to the edge of the broken boards, to lever himself out.
‘Ruby, run!’
Her mother’s cry galvanized her. But she didn’t run. Not first. First she snatched up the gun, and then she turned to get away.
She nearly made it.
Daddy’s fingers snapped shut round her ankle in an iron grip and he collapsed back into the hole in the floor – this time dragging Ruby with him.
‘BITCH!’ he screamed. ‘FUCKING BITCH!’
He was up to his armpits, with her leg in his fist.
Life slowed like syrup.
Ruby twisted on to her back, trying to get purchase on the floor. Her Mickey Mouse T-shirt rumpled and hitched, and her bottom scraped painfully towards her father as he sank into the hole – his elbows rising like chicken wings, his teeth gritted, his throat on fire, his hand locked around her bare ankle.
Sinking. Sinking.
Slowly.
Slowly.
Ruby’s heel tipped gently over the splintered edge of the hole. If she had tied her own laces, her shoe would have slipped off her foot. But because Mummy had tied them, she was following him. Following him down into the dark.
She started to cry.
‘Daddy,’ she sobbed. ‘Daddy, please let me go.’
John Trick said nothing, but a high noise started from inside him like a kettle whistling up to the boil. Jagged splinters dug into his arms and ribs like barbs, slowing his descent and staining the perimeter of the hole with blood.
Ruby’s foot twisted painfully as her ankle tore slowly over the piercing edge, and her knee lifted to keep her ankle from breaking.
‘Daddy! You’re hurting me!’
His mouth opened just enough so Ruby could see his bloody teeth. ‘I’m not your Daddy,’ he said. ‘I’m not your Daddy.’
Then Mummy was there. Mummy smashed the china dog into his hands and arms until it shattered. Then she got Ruby under the arms and pulled.
The slide stopped.
‘Let her go!’ Mummy shouted. ‘Let her go!’
But Daddy didn’t let Ruby go.
Instead he started to climb up her leg.
Ruby shrieked. It wasn’t the pain of being stretched between them; it wasn’t the agony of the twisted foot or of the splinters, or of her father’s nails digging into her soft flesh …
It was the horror of the thing that used to be her Daddy crawling up her wounded leg. Up her calf, her knee, her thigh.
And when it had used her to pull itself out of the hole in the floor, then it would kill her.
The gun was heavy in Ruby’s right hand. It didn’t feel like a toy – it felt real. It felt real when she raised it, and real when she pointed it with both shaking hands, and real when she squeezed the trigger so hard she thought her fingers would break.
The noise and the shock of the recoil knocked her backwards into her mother’s arms and flattened them both.
Ruby opened her eyes and for a moment she stared at the sagging ceiling. Then she scrabbled backwards across the room, slapping hysterically at her own leg, as if her father’s hand was still there.
It wasn’t.
He wasn’t.
All there was was an empty black hole in the floor, in the place where she’d once kissed Adam Braund.
55
THE SEA HAD taken the worst of Limeburn, but it left other things in its place.
First of those were hundreds of dead rats. So many that even the Labradoodles got tired of tossing them in the air, and the council had to send a bulldozer to scoop them all up.
Then there was the sand and mud and kelp and splintered wood and debris, knee-deep in every house, and the giant oak in the square that took four men nearly two weeks to cut up and haul away, until only the rope from the swing was left rotting on the cobbles.
Finally, there were the bodies.
Bodies that John Trick had hidden in the dark, stinking limekiln, and that the sea had found and returned to their families.
Miss Sharpe had not gone far after keeping her promise to help Ruby Trick. After the tide went out, she was found wedged behind the garden wall of The Retreat, her not-pretty face further uglied by unhealed, concentric burns that the pathologist later matched to the stove in her kitchen.
Old Mrs Vanstone looked out of her window the morning after the flood to see Jody Reeves hiding near the Bear Den. Her face had been eaten by rats, but she was still wearing those stupid shoes.
And when the stream had subsided once more between its own banks, Steffi Cole was found jammed under the little stone bridge, with what Professor Mike Crew later said was ‘half the Instow dunes’ in her lungs.
The sea never returned John Trick to Limeburn – or to any other place, as far as anybody knew – but the police came down the hill in waves. They ebbed and flowed around The Retreat for days, but – apart from the bullet they took from Pussy Willows’ dead eye – only one piece of physical evidence linking John Trick to the murders ever came to light.
Fittingly, it was Calvin Bridge who found it as they searched The Retreat. It was in a twist of toilet paper, hidden among a dead man’s underwear.
>
When he unfurled the paper and saw Frannie Hatton’s nose ring, Calvin felt an unexpected surge of emotion. He kept his back to PC Cunningham and DC Peters as sudden tears threatened to make him a laughing stock.
They were tears for Frannie Hatton, whose own beaten-down mother had ignored her last phone call, and they were also for Shirley, because he’d had to hurt her to preserve his own happiness. But most of all they were from sheer bloody relief that this case could now end, and he could be released from the shackles of serial ignorance and get back into uniform. Drink, drugs and debt awaited him and he would embrace them with new affection. After the past two months, constant ironing seemed a small price to pay.
Calvin half-laughed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. All this from finding a little silver ring.
‘Got something?’ said DC Peters.
Calvin Bridge turned to show him but, before he could speak, there was a loud rumble, the floor shook – and the whole front wall of The Retreat fell into the garden.
After that, the crumbling, sea-softened house was cordoned off and nobody ever went inside it again.
Only children, of course.
And trees.
56
ALISON AND RUBY Trick left Limeburn, and never went back. They didn’t go to stay with Granpa and Nanna though – not even for a night. They stayed at the Red Lion on the curved sea wall at the foot of Clovelly until Mummy sold her earrings and necklace, and Tiffany brooch, and then they moved into their very own little cottage halfway up the hill.
Ruby loved it. She only had to look out of her bedroom window to see little grey and brown donkeys pulling sledges up the street, loaded with tourists’ suitcases, and Mummy promised next summer they’d have window boxes filled with red geraniums.
The bruises on Ruby’s legs faded from black to purple to brown, and finally to banana yellow. One morning, she examined her legs in bed and couldn’t see a single mark. It was one of several improvements. Her chest still ached now and then, but she got used to reading in a chair, and walking up and down the hill twice a day to stroke the donkeys in their big green paddock chased away the last of her puppy fat.
The Facts of Life and Death Page 27