When the Dead Come Calling

by Helen Sedgwick

  ‘Okay,’ she sighs, and Trish beams at her. ‘Only when one of us is here to supervise. Got it?’

  Andy’s face lights up, arms rising in excitement as he almost jumps on the spot, his long legs bending and stretching. ‘I can do it, boss,’ he says. ‘You can trust me.’

  ‘Listen carefully now. If people ask you what’s going on, folk from the village or anyone else, you tell them no comment, alright? It’s important.’

  He’s nodding like he’s lost control of his head.

  ‘Good lad. Trish here will help you get set up. Okay?’

  She turns to get on with the interview, but Trish catches her arm before she leaves reception.

  ‘Thank you, Georgie,’ she says, under her breath.

  ‘No more favours, alright?’

  Trish lets go of her arm, steps back.

  ‘And if anyone comes into the station, keep them here in reception. No one gets through that door.’ She points to the internal door leading back to the offices, to where Simon’s waiting. ‘We follow the rules. Do you understand?’

  BEFORE GEORGIE CAME OF AGE

  Georgie glances behind her, checking they’ve not been followed, pulling him along as she sprints her way down the sidewalk. She’s got his hand clasped tight but he’s wriggling his way free – course he is, he’s her little brother. They’re both fast. The teachers probably haven’t even noticed they’re missing yet. Another foot down, check, leap. Sun’s blistering today, roads runny like tar. He slips his hand out of hers. Her knapsack’s clinging to her back, stuck with sweat and excitement.

  ‘Errol!’

  S’not easy looking after a ten-year-old, leading him astray.

  ‘Stay with me!’

  But Errol has spotted a Labrador pup along the road and he’s running for it, arms outstretched. It’s okay, so long as no one finds them and sends them back to that school – she’s not having that. She wasn’t the one who started the fight, and they deserved it anyway. Calling her names was one thing, but she wasn’t going to take what they said about her mom. Only reason they didn’t get in trouble was ’cause Troy’s the mayor’s son and Georgie knows that’s wrong and if the teachers aren’t going to do anything about it then she’ll have to do something herself.

  Up ahead, Errol has reached the puppy and knelt down to stroke its head, to smoosh his face into its coat. Then around the corner come the pup’s owners, old Jess and Margaret – the new pup a replacement for their old collie who was hit by that truck last month that drove on through town without even stopping – and the alarm in their eyes when they see Errol and then look up and see Georgie is enough to make her ball her hands into fists; she’s had one fight today already, she’s not afraid of another. This town never did forgive her dad for leaving the way he did, and far less for coming home again with an Algerian wife, even if he was from one of the oldest families hereabouts – that only made the fall further, her mom gets that just fine and Georgie gets it too. Jess and Margaret put on their polite faces though, call the pup away. He’s an obedient little thing. Georgie’s going to leave this town one day, and she’s taking Errol with her. But first they’ve got to get beyond the graveyard.

  He’s slowing down already, her little brother. He’s still afraid. Even Georgie can hear her mom’s voice, hold your breath as you pass, but she laughs it off – there’s not a spirit in the world going to make its way inside her body.

  ‘Come on!’

  She grabs his hand, runs with him ten, twenty, thirty paces till they’re past the dead, and then they’re catching their breath, creeping along beside dirt yards and low wooden fences until they see the mayor’s house. It’s taller and whiter than the rest, the roof rising over the next block up ahead. Georgie leads them the long way round to the back of the house, because out front the mayor’s mother sits on her rocking chair and watches all day long. The white porch circles the house and there’s a big full garden with bright green grass and trees and plants she doesn’t recognise. Georgie picks a few stones from the gravel path that they’re avoiding and puts them in Errol’s outstretched hands. Holds her finger to her lips and crouches low, crawls her way to the shrubs where the redbirds are pecking at seeds scattered from the feeder. She moves slow, so slow and careful and silent she can hear Errol’s breath behind her, she can hear the creaking of the rocking chair out front and the beat of the sun’s rays on the back of her neck. She moves a hand closer, then a knee. Her bare skin on the grass, the prickle of it. They’re arrogant, the redbirds, sure of their place – they’re not afraid. She edges closer. Bright red feathers, black eyes, red beak. They even look like the devil. Peck peck at the ground. She reaches out her hand and stretches her arm and at the last second moves fast as a whip and grabs the nearest bird, the rest in the air with a scratch of wings and the shrill chip chip chip of warning but it doesn’t matter: she’s got one. Its wings try to lash out against her palm, her fingers are clenched tight. She’s on her feet. Its claws scratch.

  ‘Go!’ she mouths silently at Errol and he hesitates – they’re not supposed to throw stones, and he doesn’t like being in trouble, her little brother. ‘Go on!’

  With her other hand Georgie grabs a fistful of stones and hurls them at the back window: the shout comes from the front porch, the creak of the rocking chair emptied, footsteps on wood. Georgie moves fast, Errol beside her. They race round to the front and she’s up three steps with a single leap, in the open door and her arm high and the bird released with its angry cry and desperate flight to the ceiling, the wall, the closed window, a bright red feather floating through the air. Georgie turns, sees Errol waiting on the steps, grabs his wrist and they run, Georgie thumping her fist on the rocking chair on the way past, and they’re round the corner and no one saw them and she feels a laugh rising up her throat and flying out into the world as they keep sprinting, round another bend, through the trees, until her legs slow and she stops, leans back against a trunk, gasps for breath. Errol is staring up at her. Eyes big and black and scared.

  ‘That’ll teach them!’ she says, gasping for breath.

  Errol is still clasping his stones in his hand.

  She opens his palm, grins at him.

  ‘You can drop them now,’ she says. ‘We did it.’

  He turns his hand upside down and his stones fall to the dust by his feet and he looks up with wide eyes.

  ‘Now we’re free for the whole afternoon,’ she says. ‘What shall we do?’

  She brushes the dirt off his palm, only then noticing that her own hand is all scratched and bleeding from where she held the bird captive. But Georgie’s not afraid of a bit of blood. She wipes her hand down her skirt and puts her arm gently round Errol’s shoulders.

  ‘You did well,’ she says.

  He grins up at her at last.

  ‘I’m proud of you, you know that.’

  She leads him through the trees and down to the river, where they can get their feet wet and sit in the shade of the willows till it’s time to go home and pretend like they’ve been sat in school following the stupid rules all day.

  AN INTERVIEW WITH PC SIMON HUNTER

  Staring out the window. Dense cloud and low light, not a patch of blue in sight, just that stormy grey blowing through the sky and sinking deeper all the while.

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’ Simon says. His voice is different to how it used to be. Flatter, somehow. The recorder is on. He looks anxious.

  ‘Where were you yesterday evening?’ Georgie says.

  He closes his eyes, and without them his whole face looks drained of colour. She can tell he hasn’t eaten all day. She wishes she could put her arm around him, offer a smile, but the best she can do now is wait and listen.

  ‘Yesterday,’ he says. And he takes a deep breath, lets it out. ‘After work I walked straight home, not paying much attention to the street, got a change of clothes. I didn’t have that much time seeing as I was getting the bus up to Crackenbridge and there’s only the one an hour, you
know? Well, course you know. I was getting the bus, ’cause Alexis was supposed to be driving there to meet me so…’

  Georgie nods at him to keep going.

  ‘So I got the bus, fairly empty, took about forty-five minutes, like normal. You know how it goes through all the villages and that. Through Warphill. I got to the Kingfisher about quarter to eight. Alexis…’

  Simon looks at her, his pale eyes still red around the edges, in the cracks at the corners. The salt wind wouldn’t have helped. It bites down by the coast, but even through the dim light it’s obvious how much he’s been crying. At least he’s told her about the Kingfisher without her needing to ask. He’s not hiding anything. Well, not anything she already knows about.

  ‘Alexis had booked a table for eight. It was, er…’

  He breathes a few times, swallows.

  ‘It was going to be our celebration, see. He’d got his citizenship and I’d thought, well we’d both said it could be a new start. Things had been…’

  Georgie knows better than to finish his sentences, and he’s taken enough of these statements to know how it works.

  ‘Things had been a bit strained, what with the interview coming up and that. I thought we should leave. Well, I don’t know if we’d really have left, but it’s what I’d been saying. Alexis wouldn’t go, though. He’d not leave until he had no other choice.’

  ‘Why do you think he wanted to stay so much?’

  He shakes his head. Hand through his hair.

  ‘It wasn’t for me,’ he says. ‘That was the problem. I thought there was someone else. I mean, I thought he was seeing someone else. I thought they were the reason he was set on staying here.’

  ‘Why’d you think that?’

  ‘I could just tell. You can, when someone’s lying to you. He’d be late coming round… We’d make plans and he’d show up late to the pub. It wasn’t like him – he always used to be on time. Then he never wanted to say where he’d been. He claimed to have a client he had to visit at home, who wanted things kept confidential. He was seeing someone away from the office, that’s for sure, but I doubted it was a client… Oh Christ, I don’t know what he was mixed up in. We’d had some fights about it, but I thought…’

  The silence hangs between them for a minute.

  ‘So what happened in the Kingfisher?’ she asks.

  ‘Well’ – Simon purses his lips, like an acknowledgement of something, a kind of helplessness – ‘he never turned up. I waited. At first I thought, you know, I was a few minutes early, but then…’ He rubs his hand over his face, forehead to mouth. ‘Anyway, he never turned up. I texted – no reply. Tried calling. I think he had his phone switched off. It kept going straight to voicemail. I waited an hour then left. I put a fiver on the table for my drink and walked out. I think I knocked a chair over on my way. Trish saw me outside, from over the road. She tried to wave, but I stormed off. I was angry. With Alexis, I mean – I was angry with him. I’ll not deny that.’

  The way he sighs then, it’s enough to make Georgie want to cry. Just twenty-six and some part of him destroyed.

  ‘I’d to wait for ages at the stop for the next bus, and it was bloody raining and, well, that’s partly why I was pissed off. He was meant to be driving us home, see, but instead he left me there to get the bus. Stood me up. Sounds stupid now.’

  ‘No,’ Georgie says. ‘Doesn’t sound stupid at all.’

  She’ll track some people down from the bus. The driver too. Should be able to get proof that Simon left Crackenbridge alone. That’s assuming he’s telling the truth, of course, and he doesn’t look like a man who could lie, not in this state.

  ‘What time did the bus arrive, d’you remember?’

  ‘Just after half nine. I checked at the stop. So I could yell at him about it.’

  ‘That would have got you back to Burrowhead after ten then?’

  He nods. It’s close, the timing of it. But if Cal’s right about the time of death, that would place Simon in Crackenbridge, or on the bus, when Alexis was killed.

  ‘Got home about quarter past ten, drank a couple of beers, went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. Kept running through it all in my head and imagining the worst case… It wasn’t, of course, I just mean… Eventually I decided to go and find him. Have it out. I went to his house, but there was no answer. I went right inside, because the front door’s never locked, but his flat door was and there were no lights on. I knocked. I shouted. He wasn’t there. So I went outside and started walking around. I don’t know, trying to walk it off.

  ‘It was quite light out, I remember that – the moon was bright. The sky had a blue glow to it, even though it was the middle of the night. I sat by the fountain for a bit. No one was around. Started walking up High Street. I don’t even know why, just started walking to the coast. But then I got to the playground. There was… He was… I called it in. Guess it was about seven by then.’

  ‘It was,’ says Georgie.

  ‘I keep thinking, why’d I not go looking for him immediately, you know? Maybe I could have… If I’d got there sooner or if I’d realised something was wrong.’

  ‘I doubt there was anything you could have done, Si,’ says Georgie, but she knows it sounds hollow. There’s never anything anyone could have done, and yet there’s always something they could have done differently. That’s the thing about the world. What happens has happened, but that doesn’t mean it was inevitable.

  ‘But whoever it was that Alexis was seeing,’ Simon says, leaning forwards now, his face paler than ever, ‘well, they could have done this. They could have killed him.’

  ‘Hold on there,’ Georgie says, though she’s glad to see some energy from him. Still, no use jumping to conclusions.

  ‘Or they’ll know something,’ he says, desperation in his voice. ‘They might know something. They were the last person to see him alive.’

  ‘That’s for us to look into,’ she says. ‘Unless there’s anything else you can tell us about Alexis’s movements that evening?’

  He shakes his head. ‘That’s everything.’

  She can see it in his face though, what he’s thinking. That it should have been him. That the last person to see Alexis should have been him, and then all this could have been different. She pauses for a minute, waits for him to lean back a touch; to decide the interview is over.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Alexis alive?’

  There, the tension in his jaw – he’s defensive now, a little angry.

  ‘Sunday,’ he says. ‘He was preparing for the interview Monday morning.’

  ‘Interview?’

  ‘This citizenship crap.’

  ‘So you saw him Monday morning as well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t stay the night?’

  ‘I…’ Simon shakes his head. She can see him taking a deep breath. ‘I saw him Sunday afternoon and we got into an argument. I wanted us to move to Greece, he wanted to stay. I thought he was seeing someone else, like I said.’ His eyes, staring at hers. ‘I left his place before dinner. Didn’t know when I’d next see him. He left a message Monday lunchtime to tell me he’d passed the interview, invited me to the Kingfisher. That explain everything?’

  ‘That’s all for now. Thank you, Simon.’

  She terminates the interview, switches off the recording. Simon’s lips are pursed tight, but she doubts that’ll last more than a few seconds.

  ‘What about Alexis’s phone records?’ he blurts. ‘Incoming calls on Monday?’

  Georgie shakes her head. She’s already checked, and the calls were all from Simon.

  ‘Forensics? Did you find something pointing to me, is that it?’

  He stands, then sits back down again.

  ‘There could be, of course.’ As quickly as it flared up, his anger is gone. In the silence between them a car revs its engine outside and the gulls that must have been on the ground by the
window suddenly rise, the noise of them setting Georgie’s teeth stinging.

  ‘Get some rest, Si,’ she says once the birds have gone, her voice soft again. ‘Trust me, okay? I will find whoever did this.’

  Georgie hates making promises she’s doesn’t know for sure she’ll be able to keep. But he needs to go home, and she needs to confirm his alibi. That’s all either of them can do right now.

  LATE AFTERNOON, GETTING ON

  Trish has been pacing back and forth between her office and the interview room. Kevin Taylor. There, in the day planner this morning – she knew she’d recognised his name. Didn’t want to say something stupid, not when it was just a hunch, but now, well, now she’s got something. The kid has a record, doesn’t he. Georgie’s going to be pleased.

  He was at the same school as her, good few years behind, and God knows some of the boys at that school were no good, fair number of bullies among them. Trish hated that school, couldn’t wait to get away – never thought she’d choose to come back here, but here she is. Uncle Walt, maybe. The way home seems different, once you’re away from it. The city just didn’t fit. They didn’t get it, those cops, what life was like out here. Or, if they did get it, they certainly didn’t care. It’s not the drink, it’s the boredom that leads to it – like kids have decided it’s hopeless before they’ve even reached their teens. One time, when Trish was at school, they were all called to assembly to have their bags searched. Cigarettes, of course. Weed. Speed. Knives – Christ, the number of penknives. She’d put money on it being worse now. What did Kevin Taylor carry round in his rucksack, besides what he’d stolen on the way to school that morning?