Georgie looks down at the notebook with a feeling of dread.
‘Oh, Pami,’ she says.
She almost doesn’t want to open it. Her hands run over the home-made tie-dye cover, swirls of yellow and orange, with a pale green ribbon as a page marker. It’s lovely. She glances up at Pamali then opens the notebook. Each page has a date and a time, followed by a description of the incident. It starts last November.
‘That wasn’t the beginning,’ says Pamali. ‘Just when I thought to start keeping the record. There had been a few things before. Today was the second time, with the eggs. It’s disgusting. I’ve had enough. I’ve decided…’
Georgie looks at the words. At the description.
Arrived at work 7.45 to open shop at 8 a.m. Raw eggs smashed against front window. Still runny. Cleaned windows with soapy water. Didn’t see anyone on street. Bit of yolk visible on pavement, shell between the stones – nothing I could do about that. Opened late, 8.10 a.m. No one noticed.
‘Oh, Pamali,’ says Georgie. She has a slow way of speaking, Georgie, slower than most of the folk in the village. Her words have a weight to them, a slight twang that marks them out as something different. ‘This is…’ She shakes her head, like the way Walt Mackie shook his head earlier today. ‘I’m so sorry, Pamali.’
Pamali is sitting tall.
‘I’m fairly sure it wasn’t you,’ she says.
Simon carries in a chair from the kitchen, sits down opposite them. She glances at him then continues looking through the notebook. It’s been regular, the harassment. Every few weeks something new. She must have been afraid, going into work of a morning, wondering what she would find. A green bag of dog poo pushed through the letter box. Drawing pins and chewing gum dropped in front of the door. Things that had been happening to her friend for months and Georgie had missed it all. She feels that surge again, in her belly, that nausea, but she pushes it down; she wants to do her job well. Georgie is someone who believes, deeply, in doing her job well. Best way to do that is by staying calm.
‘Did you see who’s been doing it, Pamali?’ she says.
‘I thought I saw someone running away once. They were wearing a hood. Fairly tall. Probably a man, but could have been a tall woman. Running like they knew how to run, you know? But I don’t know who it was. Could have been anyone really.’
‘And you cleaned it all up this morning?’
‘There were raw eggs smashed on the window, of course I—’
Georgie reaches for her hand, and Pamali lets her take it at last.
‘I’m just asking because of the evidence.’
‘I know,’ Pami whispers, and for a fleeting moment Georgie thinks she’s going to cry. She doesn’t, though. She pulls her hand away instead.
‘I don’t suppose you got a photo, on your phone or…?’
Pamali shakes her head, goes back to looking determined.
‘I wanted it cleaned,’ she says. ‘I wanted…’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I thought I could fix it myself,’ she says, quieter now. ‘I didn’t want everyone knowing.’
It’s not like her, though, Georgie knows that – Pami always smiles and waves at people from the shop, always has a friendly word, is always chatting to folk. She stands out, of course, same as Georgie herself. There have always been comments. But that’s all it used to be, in Burrowhead at least. Wasn’t it?
‘Thank you, Pami,’ she says. ‘That’s helpful, what you’ve remembered there.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really helpful.’
Pamali looks unconvinced and Georgie can’t blame her. She decides to email the super, right after this. Follow up on the voicemails she’s already left. Whatever it is that’s going on, it feels bigger than her and too big for them to ignore.
‘Well,’ Pamali says, standing up suddenly. ‘My lunch break’s over. I’m going back to work.’
She looks around like she’s forgotten something, then her eyes fall on the notebook and she looks away.
‘Shop gets busy in the afternoons, with the schools out. They’ll be wanting their cans of pop.’
‘You can stay here a while,’ says Georgie. ‘Another cup of tea. Stay for a chat?’
Pamali shakes her head, already pulling on her coat. ‘You’ve got everything written up in there.’
‘Pami … we need an official statement. And we need to send someone round to check for any evidence. CCTV. See if we can’t find out who’s doing this.’
Pamali hesitates for a second. Georgie wants to give her a hug but something holds her back, something in the way Pamali’s avoiding eye contact.
‘They’ll miss you, but those kids can live without you for one afternoon.’ Georgie smiles.
‘I want to keep going,’ she says. ‘I need to keep—’
‘I know.’
‘But it is happening, isn’t it?’
Georgie nods.
‘I’ll make an official statement now then,’ she says, straightening up again.
‘Thanks, Pami. That’ll really help us—’
‘But the important thing is that I’m not frightened, Georgie,’ she says. ‘I want you to know that. I’m not frightened of them at all.’
SOME THINGS CAN LAST TEN THOUSAND YEARS
Fergus feels pretty pleased with his photos as he looks over them on their home computer. He and Georgie, they share the computer now, seeing as how he sold his laptop last year so he could afford to upgrade his bike. Georgie would have given him the money, of course, but he didn’t like to ask. Didn’t like to raid the joint account – the cycling was his hobby, nothing to do with her and anyway, it’s good to have a decent-sized screen. Fergus feels it’s important to recognise a silver lining when you’ve got one. He’s got plenty to be positive about. Though sometimes there are whispers in the village.
There was a group standing about on Church Street as he cycled home, right enough. He’s not sure who they were. Collars high, dark scarves pulled up. They must have been cold. Fergus rarely feels the cold himself – in fact he’s finding it quite clement today – but that group on Church Street, he could hardly see their faces at all. Just heard the laughter, low and bitter, when they saw him. Well, no matter, they moved on soon enough and Fergus continued through the village, stopping outside Walt’s, who was watching the street from his armchair by the window. Good to see a friendly face. He waved, but Walt looked startled. Then overhead he saw what he suspected was the largest bird he’d ever seen, in the wild at least. He can picture it now, just can’t identify it. He knows his birds quite well; he can tell a kite from an osprey, he’s comfortable enough with buzzards. But whatever it was circling high over the village, it wasn’t anything he could recognise. Then it swooped down viciously and disappeared above Church Street. Everyone was disappearing down Church Street today. But not Fergus; he rode home with his mind focused on the work ahead, made a quick cuppa, then uploaded his photos to the computer, where he is now studying them one by one. It’s a shame he doesn’t have a proper camera – a powerful zoom is what he needs – but what he’s got is a smartphone and some software and a place like this to photograph.
You can see all the way up to Warphill in a couple of them. It looks small, grey and blocky, and on the southern edge there’s the field with the single standing stone. He clicks on the oval icon and draws a ring around where the stone must be. Admittedly, he can’t actually make out the stone itself, but he’ll go there in person tomorrow, get some close-ups of the markings; get a sense of the size and shadow of it. The stories say the menhir was part of a series of ancient standing stones, leading to the site of a sacred henge. It kept the rains true, they say, kept the harvest full and the birds at bay. No one knows where the henge is though, or where it was. No one knows which way the menhir is supposed to point. To the south there’s the cup and ring stone buried in the woods, and further on lies Burrowhead itself. To the north, there’s Warphill and the road to Crackenbridge, the border – this
is the photo he has. In the foreground there are the old council flats, which he thought would add a modern perspective, but actually, looking at it now, he decides to crop them out for the website. Warphill’s got more atmosphere surrounded by soggy brown fields and the laden sky. It’s a brooding place, there’s no hiding that; might as well make the most of it.
To capture a proper bird’s-eye view of the whole place, the standing stone leaving its deep shadow in amongst the lines of the land, the clearing of the cup and ring, the fractured curves of the coast, that’d be quite something. Like those pictures you see of crop circles, where up close they’re nothing but trampled corn and then from high above: the eerie magic of vast shapes that seem to belong to the land even though they shouldn’t.
He stops, leans his elbows on the desk and presses his fingers into his forehead. This headache he’s had for weeks, he can’t shift it. It’s settled in deep behind the eyes. He’s not sure how long he sits there for, time seems to change on him, but after a while – minutes, he hopes, not hours – he straightens his back and pulls himself together, opens his eyes wide and tells himself to get to work. It’s worth doing. He says that out loud. Just ’cause he’s not getting paid doesn’t mean it’s not a thing of value. A website like this might attract visitors to the villages, or archaeologists even. That’d be a thing, to get a fresh excavation going. Maybe the school will be interested. He could show kids around the sites. He’d be good with the kids.
His panoramic shot came out pretty well too: the sea and cliffs starting on the far left, thrashing greys melting into the soggy brown of earth before resolving into the blocks of Warphill, then the insistent streak of the road leading past the motte to Burrowhead, following the whole circle of the village to the splash of colour at the playground and finally joining the sea and cliffs again on the far right.
The Archaeological Society of Burrowhead and Warphill – that’s the name. He types it in bold, dark green Copperplate Gothic. Then he tries to imagine it, back through wars and starvation, back to the standing of the stone and the people once buried in the Iron Age tomb inside the motte. It was surveyed, back in the 1980s. They even dug a trench on one side, found some Celtic artefacts. They’re in the local museum in Crackenbridge – that’s where he’ll go in the morning, before visiting the standing stone. Though now he thinks of it, he’s sure the menhir is older than anything they found. The layers of history around here, nothing stands alone; everything is laid on top of everything else. He alters the colour balance of his photo, increases the contrast to make it look more dramatic.
The villagers need something like this archaeological society to remind them of their shared history. There was such a sense of community when they first moved here, him and Georgie, the kind of community that went back through the generations, tying folk together. Now there’s graffiti spreading across the closed shopfronts of Warphill, encroaching on the school walls and bus stops, edging closer to Burrowhead; now he gets angry glances from the men smoking outside the pub in the afternoons. But he doesn’t want to think about that. Better to make plans instead. There’s the spring fair this weekend – that’s the place to recruit folk. He’ll choose the best photos and print them out big to attract people over. Hand out flyers and membership forms, get people to sign up to his newsletter. He’s not sure yet what the archaeological society is going to do exactly, but it’s a new project and Fergus loves to get started on a project. A sense of purpose, that’s what it is. He could give free membership for the first twenty sign-ups. He’s quite excited about it actually. Then he remembers poor Alexis. He’s ashamed of himself now, getting carried away when such a thing has happened here, in this village, in his home. And poor Simon, too. He’d been meaning to invite them both over, for a Sunday roast or something, a woodland walk. Somehow he’d never got round to it. Now he’ll never be able to.
Fergus stares at the photos he took looking over to Burrowhead playground. There’s something yellow, a smudge, nothing that could be recognised, except that he’s realised it must be police tape: the crime scene. He zooms in, the screen becoming a mosaic of tiny coloured squares. Georgie could be in there somewhere. And Alexis. The grey of the sky isn’t grey any more, it’s… Suddenly he can’t take his eyes off the screen. There’s that huge bird again, an eagle, he’s sure of it. The same one he saw over the village. It’s swooping low in the sky above the dead body hidden in the pixels of his photograph.
SHOULD HAVE BEEN TIME FOR TEA
Georgie knows it’s time to take Simon’s statement. What with him a PC and first on the scene, in a relationship with the victim, possibly the last to see him alive as well, it’s not good. She’d be a friend to him now, if she could, she’d talk to him off the record, maybe invite him round for some home-made stew with her and Fergus tonight. Instead, she’s got to put him on the spot and catch him off guard if she can, like she would with any other suspect. He might not even be expecting it. He’s been crying at his desk this afternoon, though he said he’d been doing last week’s paperwork – when she glanced in his office door, pretending to be passing down the corridor, she saw his body slumped forward, keyboard pushed away, shoulders shaking. And there he’s sat, waiting for her to knock. He doesn’t know she knows about the Kingfisher yet. He’s probably expecting her kindness. Georgie hopes that her officers think of her as kind.
She knocks on his door, pushes it open without waiting for a response.
‘Time for a chat, Si…’ She leaves it hanging, part request, part question.
He pushes his chair back and stands.
‘Of course,’ he says. His eyes are dry, though the skin around them looks raw. ‘I’ve been trying to piece together his movements—’
‘Next door,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘We’re all set up.’
She steps out of the room backwards, keeping her eyes on him, but suddenly there’s someone behind her, taller than her, and she spins round fast, barely keeping her balance.
‘Andy!’
‘Sorry, boss,’ he’s saying, ‘I thought you were going in, I mean, didn’t think you were walking back—’
‘What are you doing here, Andy? I told you to stay home.’
His face falls from hopeful to rejected in an instant.
‘I want to help, boss.’
‘Help with what?’
He’s folded in on himself, all long gangly limbs and awkwardness.
‘With the’ – he looks over his shoulder; Trish has heard the commotion – ‘with the, you know…’
‘No, Andy. I don’t know, and you shouldn’t be here.’
‘With the murder!’ he says, suddenly stroppy. ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’
‘Everyone who?’
Georgie steps forward and Andy steps back; she’s keeping Simon and the office out of reach, and her own door is shut.
‘Well, boss,’ he says, recovering himself and trying to look official, like he has important information for her, ‘my friend Lee told me, and he heard it from his brother who works in the butcher’s and he starts early, right, and he saw that van, the forensics van from Crackenbridge driving along High Street like it was coming from the playground—’
As he talks Georgie is edging him back along the corridor to the reception area, Trish helping her do it – she must have realised what Georgie’s up to, can’t have a work experience kid back here, not now.
‘—we all know the forensics van, see, from what happened last year, with Pauly and Rachel, and he was like, what’s happened now? So on his fag break he walked up the cliffs and Suze was there, in her uniform and that – she was the one who gave me the idea I could be a policeman – and there was yellow tape and no one was allowed in. And on his way home Mrs Smyth and Mrs Dover were talking by the fountain and Mrs Dover was saying she’d seen the police car heading through the village and she’d followed, because she’s a right to know what’s happening in her village, and she thought it might’ve been the vandals but when she got to the top
of the lane she saw several policemen kneeling next to a body under the swings, and one of them was taking photos and there was the van and you were there and she didn’t want to interfere or nothing so she went round to her neighbours’ for tea and toast. I think all those old ladies like to have breakfast together.’
Georgie exhales slowly, through pursed lips, and pulls the hall door closed behind her. The three of them are standing in reception now.
‘But then also Gav Bennett from Warphill popped by the farm and he said he’d heard from Bobby who hears everything in his cab that someone had been killed down in Burrowhead and that’s why the police were out asking questions and it’s all anyone’s talking about today, and that was when I decided I’d better come in, you know, to help. So can I help with the investigation?’
‘No,’ says Georgie. ‘You can’t be here today, Andy. I’ve told you that already.’
‘But… Please, boss?’
That smile he has. It makes her hear another voice, from another time, another teenager saying, ‘Come on, sis?’ with his disarming grin. She softens, a little.
‘Head on home now, Andy. Help your dad with the farm, eh?’
Trish is looking at her, and though Georgie can see she doesn’t want to overstep the mark, her expression reminds her of what Trish told her that morning, about Andy’s dad beating him up, and he’s a good kid, she knows that. Still, he can’t be anywhere near this investigation.
‘Maybe…’
‘You got an idea, Trish? ’Cause we’ve got to do this right.’
‘I know. I was just thinking maybe he could answer the phone, out here in reception. If folk are talking already—’
Georgie closes her eyes, shakes her head. ‘No.’
‘What about cleaning out the store cupboard then—’
‘Trish—’
But there’s Andy, looking hopeful. It’s been a rough day for Georgie. For all of them. This violence, it doesn’t belong here, in their village. Taking Pamali’s statement this afternoon, she kept thinking, what is happening to this place? Georgie loves her job when it involves helping folk. Out here, that’s what she gets to do sometimes. Finding Walt Mackie when he goes walkabout, talking to the high school about responsible drinking and the dangers of drugs – she’ll get through to some of those kids, one of these days. Setting up the 20 mph zone to keep the village safe when the Burrowhead community council came to her and asked if she could. No money for speed cameras, she was told, so she got Trish to set up fake ones; should be good enough to fool the tourists. Though she feels a stab of anger thinking about that – they’d have actually had some road camera footage to help them now if there was ever money available for Burrowhead, instead of these constant cuts. It’s been a rough day and it’s making her sick, but here maybe there’s a chance for her to show a bit of kindness after all.
When the Dead Come Calling Page 5