In the Moors

by Nina Milton

  “Fuck.” She stabbed again.

  My eyes were feverish hot. Pain shot though my head with every pulse beat, but I couldn’t stop staring. She’d brought a chopping board down on my head and now she was playing with a knife. A croak came unbidden from the back of my throat, and the shoes turned on the spot so that the neat navy toes were pointing at me.

  “You took your time,” she said, as if passing out was an Olympic sport.

  “Help me.” My voice was under the earth, but Linnet seemed to understand.

  “Fuck you, Sabbie Dare. You’ve as good as fucked me.” She prised the knife from the block and stabbed again like a darts player hoping for the bull’s eye. Thud. “I was going to help you. But you couldn’t stop yourself from sniffing around. Now I’ve got to sort you.” The shoes turned away, the voice dropped. “Got to sort you … got to.”

  Sort me? I looked at the knife. It quivered in the block. Sort me? With that knife? With the anger that fizzed across the kitchen floor, the posh quarry tiles so cold and so hard that when you were forced to lie on them you trembled? I was trembling up to my teeth. My entire body was a gigantic tic.

  I tried to shift. A wriggle, a turn, a chance to escape. Several degrees of pressure tugged at my body. I was shaking on a bone-cold floor inside coils of rope. My knees were bent and my arms were pinioned behind my back, forcing me onto my side. She had tied me up. She meant to sort me all right.

  “It was going good,” muttered Linnet. She thrust a finger at me, as if practicing for the point of the knife. “Perfect plan. Fail-safe. Indestructible.”

  “Nothing is,” I said and coughed.

  “No.” She turned back to her block and took her anger out on it. “Fuck!”

  I couldn’t work out what was happening. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get her. This was Miss Smith, partner at Hughes and Heaven, who’d given me her card and told me to come to her house. She was helping Cliff, she had fought to get him out on bail. She loved children, said how it turned her stomach, this hideous crime.

  Something had come roaring from deep inside, roaring to her surface, transforming her into a woman who swore like a drunken teenager and played darts with twenty centimetres of chromium steel and had to sort me because she was fucked.

  She was fucked? I was fucked. I’d seen the tunnel … I’d seen the drawer full of Calpol. No one kept that much Calpol. This woman, this defender of the accused, had brought Josh Sutton, seven years old and sobbing—crying, trembling like I was, tied, perhaps, like I was—into the room with the tunnel fireplace. She’d fed him Calpol. She’d said so. Only when they cried. She’d wrecked his young insides, poisoned his liver so eventually he died from a sticky mixture. She’d killed him sweetly.

  After Josh, Aidan.

  “Linnet.” My throat contracted, my teeth chattered. “Linnet … ” It was hard to talk. When I moved my tongue, it rasped against the roof of my mouth. I needed to ask: Where is Aidan? Is he here? Is he dead, or only just alive, or is there time? Is he already gone, dug into the peat like Josh?

  “You’ve got him,” I managed. “Haven’t you?”

  “Ah, so clever. All those powers. Weren’t a lot of help to you were they? Not in the end.”

  “Josh told me.” My voice floated out, as grey as a ghost. “He came here. He stood in your office, in front of that horrid fireplace …”

  “Okay,” said Linnet. “Look, I don’t care if you had some sort of visit from little Josh or not. Although you promised to come to me with anything new.” The navy shoes clipped until they were side by side in front of my face. It was almost as if they were doing the talking. “You did seem to know things.” A single laugh burst out of her. “It doesn’t harm me, what you know or don’t know. Look at you.”

  Look at me, indeed. Fucked.

  I longed to cry out, But I don’t know anything! I thought back to the record cards Gloria had found on my working top. Something’s missing, I’d told her. Now I knew the truth of that. I tried to shuffle those cards again, in my befuddled head, add in the things I’d learnt since yesterday, but I couldn’t hold onto the data. My mind could only concentrate on the rope and the throb in my head. How would she sort me? With that knife? You can slice a person, or jab, and it hurts, it’s all pain, but it doesn’t kill, does it? Not a kitchen knife—unless, like Rey had said, you get the blade right between the ribs, the intercostal-somethings—a lucky stab.

  You were abducted yet survived. I’d call that lucky, Linnet had told Cliff, but he’d said, cruel luck, and here I was, cruel luck on me, this time.

  Linnet loomed over me like a nightmare. I was desperate for water, desperate to run from this place. But I was even more desperate to know if Aidan was alive, where he was being kept, and how she’d got caught up in this. “Who is it?” I asked. “Some man?” In my mind I whispered, Please don’t let it be Cliff. “Who has made you do this? Because I don’t believe you would do this evil thing for yourself … ” I trailed off.

  She was still standing so close her court shoes were nudging the wound that Ivan had given me. I could feel it puffing up and she was pushing the point of one shoe into the swollen flesh above my eye. My voice broke with despair. “You’re not evil, you love kids, you told me about your nephews.”

  I had to survive this, if only in case Aidan was still alive.

  “Shut up,” she said and fairly drove her shoe into my swollen temple. I cried out, a sharp sound in my own ears, but a thought had already lodged in my mind and the pain seared it there, made me yell at her. “You don’t have a nephew, do you? You were talking about Josh. And Aidan!”

  “They’re closer to me than nephews,” she said, as if correcting me.

  I stared at her, gob-struck. “How dare you! You’ve ruined all these lives and you talk like that? Like you love these children?” I was shaking with the horror of it. I breathed deep through my nose to keep my stomach contents down.

  “You don’t know how much they mean to me.” For the first time, she sounded less than sure, and I came back at her quickly, while my brain cells were still up to it.

  “I know what you said in the pub. I remember you said it was not easy to make them happy! Well, no, Linnet, not when you tie someone up and feed them poison!”

  “I did want them to be happy.”

  “You killed Josh. You murdered him, innocent and seven years old. And little Aidan? Have you done the same to him, you bitch? You bitch!”

  In a flash, her mood turned. “Shut up about them!”

  She brought back her blue shoe and used me like a football. Pain shot through my head and I was back with Ivan and his rifle butt—I screamed across my dry throat and tried to turn, roll away from her, as if she couldn’t’ve walked around me. But I couldn’t turn, because when I tried to move my legs, I felt the pull again on my throat. My ankles were bound directly to my neck. If I moved at all, I’d strangle myself.

  I felt my eyes shoot open as comprehension grew.

  Linnet did know what she was doing. She would sort me. I was fucked.

  Clip, clip. Her loose heels faded as they reached carpet. She had left me. I felt my body sag. My mind was going to sag to, if I didn’t struggle hard to keep it in thinking mode. The relief of not having her shoes near my head was quickly replaced with the dread of not knowing what she was doing now. She’d been out of control when she kicked me, but out of control and close felt better than out of sight. My breath left me as I thought about what she might be planning. Maybe she had gone to wherever Aidan was, was with him now. I tried to breathe again—slow, come on, slow—but it was hard because my head pounded where she’d beaten me flat and throbbed where she’d kicked Ivan’s wound, and my throat was tight with the rope around it. I felt something warm run down my face. I must be bleeding, I thought, then realized it was tears.

  “Stop it,” I hissed. “Stop it. Come on, you’re a survivor.” It
was what the guardian I’d seen by the tidal river had told me, the Lady of the River. I had not trusted her for she’d sent me back to Brokeltuft, the last place I’d wanted to go, and the creature with the hairbrush was there, becoming more and more repulsive as the journey progressed.

  It was stupid to think of this now, when I had so much to try to work out, but I couldn’t help it. In the river journey, I’d gone in search of healing—I’d asked the Lady for wisdom—Trendle hadn’t stopped me, he knew of the evil that had happened inside Brokeltuft. I’d been taken there to see … the hair slide falling, the wig slipping, the face changing … this was a spirit gift that I was only just beginning to understand.

  Down the side of that sofa. Not Kissie’s style of slide, not at all. Not a child’s slide, either. A teenager’s sparkly adornment with the platinum blonde hairs still caught in the fastener.

  Witch, I’d called her, the wigged woman, and regretted it because I know many modern witches and they’re all benign. It was only in ancient times that witches were thought to be evildoers. Bitch, I’d called Linnet. Evildoer was too much of a mouthful when you’re tied up.

  Where did she learn to tie people up like this? The child murderer’s manual?

  People can have two sides to them. On one hand you had Linnet, defender of the innocent, and on the other you had Linnet who buried a little boy in an infamous grave as if she wanted him to be found. I’d drunk wine with a woman filled with sadness at the cruelty metered out to a victim; I’d seen the same woman viciously stabbing a knife. Between the ribs, that’s what Rey had said. Vicious, heartless, lying, desperate, dangerous. Obsessed. I choked as the rope pulled a little tighter across my neck. My legs were really hurting, holding them in one position. Cramping pains shot through my calves and thighs and I was sobbing uncontrollably, even though I knew I should not let Linnet hear me cry or do anything that might tighten the noose.

  The image of Linnet taking little Josh’s body to the burial site flooded into my mind. Why there of all places? And how could she know where it was? You could do the research, of course, or interview someone like Arnie Napper. Or you could have been there to watch the first bodies lowered and be only too grateful you were still alive.

  Two people. Poles apart. Like, here’s the good advocate, and there’s the witch who lives in the gingerbread house—who I saw in the cottage, where I was sent by the grace of the river goddess—where I saw hair fall away from a good woman’s face to reveal, scalped and livid … a monster.

  Like, on one hand, you had Linnet, and on the other … you had Patsy.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The tears had dried on my face and I was still and silent, watching her through half-closed lids as she clip-clopped around her Dom Perignon kitchen. She was a million miles—a million pounds—from the little flat where her father lived. It was as if I’d turned to the back page of a puzzle book and read the answer. Everything fell into place.

  I’d arrived at her office and announced that I’d found Arnie Napper. No wonder she’d downed bottles of Shiraz. She’d never gone to see him herself, but she’d picked my brains about him. Arnie would have been so proud of his Patsy, if he’d met her a few years ago.

  I’d asked her if she’d come back to Bridgwater because of a man, and she’d taunted me … him, or maybe her. But now I knew. It was him and her: Kissie and Pinchie.

  We’d spoken about death and she’d asked, Isn’t that a haunting? When you can still hear their words inside your head? I’d told her Cliff had forgotten everything and she’d said, How could you forget something like that? She hadn’t suddenly recalled Brokeltuft. No, she’d held the evil she’d witnessed inside her for quarter of a century. I already knew how those people had affected Cliff. I couldn’t start to imagine what they had done with a girl who had been with them for longer, who had watched Cliff come and go from the cottage of horrors.

  I’m supposed to be good with body language, but nothing in the way Linnet held herself hinted at a different past. She’d become the person she now was, completely.

  If only I’d touched her ring. If only I’d reached out, in the Admiral’s Landing, as I had already drawn her attention to it, and brushed a finger across the silver band. What might have flashed across my mind at that moment?

  I risked a glance at her. She was at the fridge door, ice was clumping into a glass. I heard a glug of fluid, imagined water sliding over the ice. I swallowed grit down my birdcage throat.

  “Linnet? Could I have a drink, please?”

  One step at a time. Get her to remember I was a person, not a threat. That’s how it was done. I’d read it in a Sunday supplement, I was sure of it. Kidnappers did sometimes release their victims. She’d been my friend once. Hadn’t she?

  “A drink?” said Linnet. “Good idea.” She sounded as chirpy as a hospital visitor. No more fucks. While she’d been out of the room, something had changed in her. She bent down beside me, kneeling like a concerned professional beside a wounded victim. She took my head between both hands and turned it so that I was staring at the ceiling.

  “Drink this,” she said, a satisfied sound. I saw what she was doing seconds before she upended a bottle and rammed the neck into my mouth. A burning sensation filled my throat as whisky poured down. I clamped my teeth and turned my head away, struggling to get air into my lungs. She grabbed my ponytail and jerked so hard that I screamed out loud, my mouth ripped open by the sheer traction. Fiery liquid filled every cavity. Colours and white light flashed across my vision and the detached, warm feeling that they say comes when you’re about to drown overwhelmed me. I did not want to end my life drowning on whisky. I don’t even like the stuff.

  Without a thought, I began to struggle. It was a primitive urge to get free. The rope around my neck tightened. I gagged, forced myself to lie still. A drip of sweat ran into my eyes. I focused on slow breaths.

  “Clever knot, isn’t it?” she said from above. “You lie still now. Stay still, stay alive.”

  I spluttered, heaved, and coughed. She looked ready to talk, now she’d rendered me unable to breath. Maybe that’s what she wanted. A silently received confession. It was my way in.“You were tied up.” I wracked out another raw cough. “Like this. Long time ago. Weren’t you. Patsy.”

  Silence. I had no idea how she would react. I braced myself, like I do at the dentist, ready for pain—the final plunge of a knife into the ribs.

  Still silence, not even a fuck, just the clinking of ice. She was on the whiskey, enjoying it a damned sight more than I had. What did that mean? Shiraz for the pub, whisky for the house? Or whisky for planning? Or whisky for executing a plan? But the ice was rattling. I’d rattled her.

  “I am not Patsy,” she said, but the voice was rough, a Patsy voice. “I got rid of that name because the sound of it made me sick. I mean sick, as in aversion therapy. I couldn’t be that person anymore.”

  I was struggling to get air into my lungs, my eyes streaming. I wanted her to start at the beginning. “Your father told me. You walked out of your home. Walked out of your family.”

  “I’d decided I hated them all. I wanted a different life. The big metropolis, all that excitement. I reckoned I was worth more than a rundown flat in a rundown area.”

  “But then you met Kissie and Pinchie.”

  I heard a half-sob break from her and another gulp from the glass. “I hitched a lift, that’s all. They promised to take me to London.”

  “They were bastards,” I said.

  Her knees gave way and she crumpled down the edge of the butcher’s block until she was sitting with her fawn legs stretched out beside me. I thought her lips seemed tinged with blue, but perhaps it was the reflection of her shoes. “What they did. I can’t describe it.”

  A long shiver travelled through me, like ice sliding and melting. She had described it, I was sure of that. That night in the pub, she’d done a lot of talking. A
s if she wanted to lay clues for me to follow. As if, underneath everything, she wanted at least one person to know. The person she thought might know anyway. I’d been slow about it, but I was getting there. “They left you unable to have children.”

  She nodded, her head bowed. “Each day. Hours of it. I’m screaming … they’re laughing.”

  “You struck a deal, did you? With those two killers? ‘Spare me and I’ll help you’?”

  “You think I was part of it?”

  I didn’t answer. I was too busy trying to breathe.

  “It wasn’t a choice!” she yelled, as if I was an obtuse student. “They forced me! Each time, a little child, screaming, dying. Then they’d force me into the car again. Made me go out and help them get another.” She downed the rest of the glass. “Let me explain. It was fucking awful. Fucking hell on earth. There were four bodies in the outhouse. Pinchie had stolen a van—he always nicked a fresh one, then dumped it. It had to end. Had to. Someone had to stop them.”

  The silence grew long between us. She was willing me to say the words.

  “You killed Kissie and Pinchie.”

  Linnet’s face drained until it was as white as bones. She bent close. Her mouth smelled of whisky. “Do not call them that. Do not do it. Do not give them the appellations they would choose. Call them by their names.”

  “I don’t know their names,” I croaked.

  “They were Terrance and Veronica Campion.”

  She turned away. It was almost too much for her. She had gone back into a world I could not even begin to imagine.

  “You used the bread knife. You hit a rib. It was in the report.”

  “I’ve never seen so much blood,” said Linnet, without turning round.