There must have been a night, they whispered, when the slave ships docked further up the coast, though they didn’t usually, wasn’t the norm around here; but there must have been a night when the minister travelled to the harbour by moonlight and bought himself what he thought he needed. His mother had died, you see. Less than a year back she’d withered away and they’d noticed how the minister became withered himself, spindly like willowherb but without the flower. Until he bought himself what he thought he needed. Her arrival marked a change in him, they were sure. They just didn’t quite know what it meant.
It was on a Sunday he first showed her off in public. In his church. On a Sunday morning in his church, it was. All the village there, waiting for their sermon, shivering on the stone pews and watching how the winter sunlight came through the arches and made her skin shine. There were plenty of whispers that Sunday morning in church, but the minister carried on regardless, and the girl stayed right where she was, her eyes fixed upon him. After, he walked over to her and offered his arm. This they all remember seeing – how he’d offered his arm like he was courting her. And he walked her like that down between the pews and out into the churchyard, where he stood by the beautiful old cherry tree to shake the hand of all the villagers as they left. It was a strange Sunday, they all agreed later. None of them shook her hand, as they might have done a minister’s wife, but they all stared long and hard. He’d dressed her up in his mother’s deep green gown and petticoat, with pale lace up to her neck. It was very peculiar, they all agreed, though probably best not to pass judgement one way or the other.
And so the villagers continued on with their lives, they ploughed their fields and cooked their broth and attended their church on Sunday, they dealt with the new sheep and the rising rent of the land and they worked hard – they worked very hard, make no mistake about that – and they watched as the minister became fuller again, his face bearded, his eyes bright, his belly bulging from his black jacket as he strolled from his church to the village and out again to the coast.
He spent a lot of time at the coast, they whispered to one another. They both did, him and the girl. They went on long walks, like he used to take with his mother. She’d been a silent sort of woman, they knew but didn’t say; she’d always followed him, always stayed a fraction of a step behind. Or maybe he’d always stayed a fraction of a step in front. And yet, remember how he had withered when she was gone? Perhaps he got his strength from knowing she was behind him, they thought, and now there was the black girl, following his steps, and it did seem to be agreeing with him.
Her name, they learned, was Mary. Oh, they said, surprised, that’s a good name. Wasn’t that the minister’s mother’s name, after all? What a coincidence, they said. What a happy coincidence. Or perhaps it was something to do with God. But then again… They hushed their voices, and soon enough they’d all developed the habit of turning the other way when they saw them out walking together, along the coast track on the cliffs. Though it was more to do with the changing crops, they said, the turnip and the cabbage, with the work needed on the land, increased demand from the city, preparing the sheep for the market. A time of change, no doubt about that. A time of new landlords and new laws from the city. Some folk left. Some folk stayed. The village slipped through another summer barely noticing it had arrived and greeted autumn with a bitter shudder.
Mary never spoke, though she would nod if ever they stared long enough to be caught staring. Her eyes never seemed less wide than the day they first saw her; she wore the petticoats and gowns but she did not lift them out of the mud. Then one day it happened that she wasn’t there in church on Sunday. He came out on his own to give the sermon, they all thought, but he didn’t preach to them that day. I need your help, he said to the people of the village. Mary has disappeared. We need to form a search party. We need to bring her back home safe. His eyes, they noted later, were darkened; they had lost their light. It seemed portentous, after the event. No one really wondered why Mary would have gone missing, and no one questioned the need to bring her back.
So it was that the villagers of Burrowhead found themselves scouring the fields and hedgerows, on a bleak Sunday morning almost a year after she had arrived, the sky fallen low to the ground and the frost nipping at their toes. She was not in the village, she would not have been given a place to hide in any of the village houses, that much was understood. They searched the woods inland, looked for fallen trunks that could provide shelter, and when the woodlands turned up nothing but fungus and weasels, they turned to the coast, to the long clifftop walks they used to take together. Maybe, they whispered, she fell.
Climbing down, down the cliffs by the path which had no rope, no chiselled step back then, the villagers scrambled to the stone beach that offered neither shelter nor harbour nor safe passage for a boat with any kind of cargo. It was a wild, desolate place the villagers preferred to ignore; no good to be found down there, they knew, just rotting weed and the crash of salt waves onto rock. But he led them across the beach, nonetheless, striding high over stones, cursing when he almost fell but refusing to slow, ignoring the creep of the tide. Looking back, they would wonder if he knew, all along, where he was going. If he wanted them to see. But down there on the beach, with the sting of salt in their eyes and the wind screeching as it was, all they could do was follow him along the dark crust of high tide until he found the cave.
The entrance was a slit in the cliff, nothing more, like a slanted eye cut up the sleeping rock face, and the ground smoothed out before it, from slimy pebbles to sheets of stone, a dark platform leading the way inside. She was in there, of course. They kept their distance but they could hear her wordless cries, the pleading of them: the villagers had formed a wide semicircle around the cave’s mouth but the minister had gone right inside, to get her. One by one they took their steps back but made the decision not to leave. They could taste the salt on their lips, like destiny. They wondered if it had something to do with God.
She went quiet, after a while, and the minister came out with her on his arm, looking almost like she did after his sermons, except for how everything was wrong. Her clothes were drenched, clinging to her body, her very bones, her eyes bloody and swollen and the pale lace at her neck stained, and he stopped in the middle of them all and said, Mary would like to apologise now.
That’s what he said.
They talked about it, afterwards, about why he said it, why he felt the need to say it. They wouldn’t have said that, they’ll tell each other. If they talk about it at all. But that was the moment Mary pushed him, pushed him away hard and he stumbled on the rocks and she ran, she ran to the circle of the villagers, around and around inside the circle of villagers who were watching her until the minister was on his feet again and he grabbed her arm and knelt on her back where she fell and he held her face down into the water. It was a rock pool. A finger’s worth of water, no more. Salted, like they could taste on their lips. Like the air that was stinging their eyes. Her feet kicked up for a little while, but pretty soon they stopped.
Over the winter, one by one, the villagers stopped going to the church on the outskirts of Burrowhead, and by the spring they had all joined the congregation at Warphill, despite the hour’s walk on a Sunday. It made them feel better, not to have to listen to his sermons, but they still saw him, taking his walks, withered again, out along the cliffs. Their whispers were replaced by looks; the questions of children were left unanswered. After all, they were not the ones who had done anything wrong. Why should they carry the burden of explanation? But occasionally they would think to themselves that Mary couldn’t have been her real name; that of course they never knew her real name. Even more reason not to speak about her, then.
That year, potatoes came out of the ground shrunken and rotted black with blight, and bloated brown slugs could be seen gorging themselves on crops from beside the churchyard all the way out to the woods beyond the motte. Every time the people of Burrowhead saw the minister out wal
king through their village, the gnawing hunger in their stomachs reminded them of what he had done; they felt sickened by him, and by the relentless taste of salt in the air. And although no one is quite sure exactly when it happened or exactly who it was that tied the rope, by the following winter they had hung him up from the cherry tree in his own graveyard and slit his throat for good measure. He didn’t protest, that much they all understood. His feet kicked out for a bit, but soon enough they stopped.
They buried him then, in the flooded ground next to the grave he had made for Mary, that he had marked with a headstone engraved with angels, like he had done for his mother. They buried him, as the villagers of Burrowhead tend to do with all their shame. It is the way of the village of Burrowhead. But shame has a way of its own, too. The scientists say it is something to do with the soil, but no one in Burrowhead believes that, not in their bones, not where the salt can reach them. What they do know is that the graves in the old churchyard of Burrowhead inch their way, year by year, back to the surface of the land in grassy mounds marked by sunken, weathered gravestones. You can see the shapes of the coffins in the ground itself. If you look, that is. Some people, even now, prefer not to look.
And so it is that, two hundred and fifty years after the congregation deserted the old church of Burrowhead and buried what they did not want to see, young Andy Barr finds himself tripping over a mound of earth in the old graveyard that he could have sworn wasn’t there before. He lands, hands in the mud, then springs up before anyone could have had time to notice, hurriedly wiping his palms down his trousers and pulling his hood up against the rain. Looking over his shoulder once, twice, he shakes his head and gives the ground a quick kick where it tripped him. Then he enters the roofless ruin of the old church that sits simultaneously on the outskirts and deep within the heart of the village of Burrowhead.
A FRESH START
‘Dawn Helmsteading,’ says Trish, slapping a folder down on Georgie’s desk. Inside, there seem to be medical records of some kind. ‘I’ve found plenty, plenty information about our missing Dawn Helmsteading.’
Georgie has not yet had her coffee, and it was a sleepless night for her, what with the noise of the bees scrambling blindly around their box, and then tripping over that damned drone when she went down for a glass of water. There was Fergus too, the noise of him all the time beside her, and the way her memories kept creeping up from where she usually kept them locked down. Yes, it was a scratchy, sleepless night for Georgie.
‘Ready?’
Trish is marching up and down the cramped office, all restless energy and impatience.
‘Sit down, Trish, please,’ Georgie says. ‘Take your time.’
With two dead people and another missing, they all need to stay calm.
Trish pauses, running her fingers repeatedly through her fringe in that way she does when the world’s not moving fast enough for her – and the world rarely moves fast enough for Trish – before eventually sitting down. ‘Where’s DS Frazer this morning, anyway?’
‘Called me first thing,’ Georgie says. ‘Apparently he’s stuck behind some sheep on the B4762.’
Trish snorts.
‘Right then.’ And without waiting any longer, she starts at the beginning, with Dawn’s average school reports. Her nurse’s training. Her job at the GP’s.
‘Nothing unusual there? When she was at the school, I mean?’
Trish shakes her head. ‘Bobby got sent off to some boarding school when he was thirteen, Dawn was left at the local primary and continued on where she was. But he was the eldest, and he was the boy. So that’s not unusual really.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘I mean, infuriating. Sexist. But not unusual.’
Georgie nods.
‘And the surgery know to call me if they hear anything.’
‘Good.’
‘Things get interesting when Mr Helmsteading, Dawn’s father, gets admitted to hospital.’
‘Interesting?’
‘Or rather, when he’s discharged from hospital. Cancer. Dawn was the one to take him home, sign all the release papers. She even moved back in with her parents so she could be there, see, to look after him. Needed a lot of care, he did. Feeding, bathing and so on. Even still, they expected him to live for a few years.’
Trish pauses here, to make sure Georgie is with her. Which she is.
‘He was dead within a few months.’
‘Months?’
‘Now her brother’s dead too,’ says Trish. ‘Murdered.’
Georgie is taking it all in, and Trish keeps on going.
‘I checked out the cottage before coming into work, couldn’t find much of interest there – other than the fact that there was no sign of our Dawn. The door had been locked behind her when she left. Found the key under a stone in the front garden. Inside it was bare, characterless. Not so much as an ornament, no pictures on the walls. Clothes all neatly hanging in the cupboard. Kitchen that looks rarely used. No wallet, no money, no phone. Beige everywhere—’
‘We should send Cal over—’
‘Already left him a message.’
‘Good. And arrange a uniform to watch the house, in case she comes home.’
‘Will do,’ Trish says. ‘Though in my opinion, no one has been in there for quite a few days. Got that deserted feel about it. There was a letter postmarked Tuesday sitting on the front mat. Opened it – junk mail. But still, that tells us she’s not been there since Monday at least. Monday, see?’
Georgie nods again.
‘Now look what else we’ve got. I’ve been saving the best bits for last, you know.’
Trish actually seems to be enjoying this.
‘Cal phoned first thing with some very, very good news. They found something in Alexis’s paperwork after all, buried in among a load of council tax reminders apparently, and they’ve just couriered it over. Our Dawn,’ she announces, ‘was a patient of Dr Alexis Cosse.’
Georgie takes the patient registration slip Trish is holding out for her. It’s handwritten. She reads it slowly, from top to bottom, shaking her head. Then she reads it again. ‘This means she’s connected to both bodies,’ she says.
‘That she is.’
‘Her brother and her therapist.’
‘Yep. Turns out there was a file hidden in his cabinet, for his extracurricular patients, so to speak. See, his records for folk in for the usual therapy – like Uncle Walt – were all kept on his computer, electronically. Nothing suspicious there. Appointments were put in his day planner, like we found. Nothing hidden. All above board.’
‘Right.’
‘And then there were a couple of others. Their admittance files in the back of the cabinet, handwritten, hard copy only. No sign of them on the computer. No records of the sessions that we’ve been able to find.’
‘What do you mean, extracurricular…?’
‘Well, there were only two of them, see. One, dated over four years ago, was for Dawn Helmsteading. The other, admittance dated just a few months ago, was for one Elise Robertson.’
Georgie says nothing. What does it mean? Why was he seeing them both off the record – if that’s even what was happening? And what was it Elise said, that he was trying to get her to remember something about her dad…
‘Do you see?’
‘I’m thinking, Trish.’
‘She’s connected to both bodies. One was her brother. The other was her therapist. She’s gone missing. She has to be our suspect.’
‘Maybe.’
‘She has to be our number one suspect. Look at this: reason for admittance,’ Trish reads from Dawn’s patient registration form that Georgie is still holding in her hand. ‘Childhood trauma. You know what that means, right?’
Georgie nods, slowly. Blows her breath out through pursed lips. Not as rare hereabouts as it should be. Like some other things.
‘Abuse,’ says Trish. ‘Got to be.’
Georgie could swear she can hear those bees, even here.
> ‘So, let’s say Dawn’s dad was abusive,’ Trish continues. ‘She goes to Alexis because she’s trying to come to terms with it. To face up to it, right? But her Dad’s in the hospital, frail and sick… Now he’s the one who’s helpless.’
‘You’re jumping to conclusions, Trish.’
‘I’m talking through an idea.’
‘Then why would Dawn hurt Alexis?’
Trish shakes her head. ‘To keep him quiet? Maybe he wanted to tell the police. Or he was trying to force her to confess. Blackmail, even?’
‘Seems unlikely.’
‘Aye.’
Trish looks deflated. But there, on the death certificate for Mr Helmsteading. His full name. Mr Jack Ernest Helmsteading. That’s who he was, the man in Walt’s bee book. Georgie knew she’d recognised him.
‘He was a friend of your uncle?’
‘Don’t know about friend, but he kept bees too. A few of the old folks did. You know what it’s like round here, everyone knows everyone. Why?’
Georgie shakes her head. That nagging feeling is back.
‘Look here, it says nothing unusual,’ Trish says. ‘It says he died of natural causes, but…’
Georgie’s thinking about Mrs Helmsteading, and about the photos on her mantelpiece. Her husband. Their wedding day. Then that old picture of Dawn she’d looked at with such tenderness right before asking Georgie to leave. The way she shut down, Georgie knew she was keeping something hidden.
‘There was no autopsy,’ she says. ‘They just assumed.’
Trish nods. ‘With the cancer and everything, there would have been no reason to suspect anything else.’
‘Well we’ve got reason to suspect now.’
‘But with the body cremated, no way of proving it either way—’
‘Unless we can find Dawn,’ Georgie says. ‘We need to find Dawn.’
When the Dead Come Calling Page 16