In the Moors

by Nina Milton

“And put them under their own floorboards. They must have been heavy. Why do it anyway? No one knew you were there.” She only shook her head in reply, so I gave the first answer that came to me. “You wanted to bury them with the hair. Their trophy.”

  She turned back to me, her eyes flashing. “The first ritual. You’d be tied to a chair. Kissie used the knife. Chunks of flesh sometimes. Them laughing, you screaming.” She looked away from me and swallowed hard, as if bile had climbed into her throat at the memory. “Then they were gone. From the world. From my life, I thought. And in the outhouse, four little bodies, full of maggots.”

  “You put the children in the moors?”

  “They deserved to be at rest. I did it at night. I drove down to the bottom of the track. I used to hot-wire cars, you know, in my mad moments of rebellion, so driving Terry’s stolen van was no sweat. Dragged them to the peat bog. Dropped them in. They sank away from me. There was this tree with a loose branch. I used it to stop their bodies floating up again. I even said a little prayer. Just, Be at peace, rest now.”

  Lost in her own story, she had calmed. We could’ve been sitting across a table in the Admiral’s Landing, the way she was talking. I knew this was the time to ask—please untie me, Linnet. Bring water, set me on my feet, set me free. But I saw how she rubbed and twisted at the ring she wore on her right hand, and the wrong words slipped out.

  “You took that ring from Kissie’s hand.”

  Her lip curled. She rammed a fist—the ringed right hand—down into my bruised face. It stung like a swarm of bees. “It won’t come off!” I heard her yell. “They are on my hand day and night! For ever and bloody ever!” She punched again like she was plumping some unloved cushion. I lay gasping like a reeled salmon. My eyes welled with tears; it seemed she was underwater, floating somehow. Her voice came from far away.

  “For a long time, it was whispers. Or in my sleep, nightmares. Them, coming to me. Like wraiths. Real but not real. Yearning, they were. More. They wanted more and more. In my head their voices were shouting over the voices in my office—even in court. I couldn’t do my job properly—couldn’t hear—couldn’t do anything. Even sleep. Didn’t eat, drank too much.”

  I heard Cliff’s sobbing voice. They got inside my head and I didn’t even know they were there, but they’re there all right, they’ve ruined my life.

  “It got bad. Their voices. Unbearable.” Her words burst in on me. “They wanted me to do it on my own so they could watch and enjoy. Watch from their grave.” She paused for a moment. Her head was in her hands.

  “They wanted you …” I prompted, not understanding.

  “They wanted me to have a child.” I heard one curdling laugh. “They wanted me to have a child? I wanted to have a child. I wanted a family. A husband, a litter of beautiful sons and daughters. Like a normal woman. They had no idea how much I wanted a child. But not like that. Not like they did it.”

  I’d met the spirits of Kissie and Pinchie. I didn’t doubt that, somehow or another, they had been haunting Linnet since she killed them. I saw her lips mutter something. She was talking to them, even now. I saw her fists tense as they invaded her head. She began to scream, her mouth so wide I saw the fillings in her back teeth. The cries came, as if she had not recognised the full horror of what she’d done until this moment. “They—never—stop. I am sick of it! I came back to tell them. Tell them to SHUT UP!” Her eyes were blazing. Her breath as ragged as mine. “SHUT UP! Leave me alone. LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  “You came to Bridgwater to tell them to go away? But everything was all right in Aberdeen, wasn’t it? Why risk it? Why come back?”

  She put a hand over her mouth. “They’ve always been too strong for me. They forced me to go to the grave. They made me remember. MADE ME DO IT.”

  “Don’t you care?” I couldn’t help ask this pointless question. “Don’t you ever think of the parents, grieving for their children?” When I looked at her, Linnet was hazy, grey in colour. My mind was distracted with pain—my head throbbed and stung, my bent legs sang agony through my body. I gasped with every breath as the rope tightened round my windpipe. I was sliding away from things. My mind was closing down.

  “Please. This flex is choking me … killing me … please?”

  “Why should I be merciful? They never were.” She bent over and slid a finger through the loop around my neck. It didn’t help. I started to gag. My eyes were wide, sweat stung as it poured into them. I was going to pass out. If I didn’t, I was going to vomit, inhale it, and die right here on her kitchen floor. I was staring at her, pleading with my eyes.

  I felt, rather than saw, the bottle in her hand. I read her mind. Whisky fumes rose in my throat. She yanked at my ponytail again, but I was ready, my mouth clamped shut with the last of my strength. She pinched my nose, squeezing with her fingers. Like you do for medicine. When a child refuses their medicine. Hold their nose. Open your mouth for your Calpol, darling, it will help the pain.

  She brought her mouth close to mine. Her voice was a whisper of menace. “You thought I was ‘part of it’, did you? You have no idea what being ‘part of it’ was like.”

  Without further signal, she went over to the block and forced out the solidly rammed knife. Her shoes clipped back. The kitchen lighting glinted yellow on the broad blade. She knelt at my feet. “I asked you, didn’t I?” She flashed a rue little smile. It made my spine crawl. “I challenged you to guess about me—find out what I was thinking. And you did. Clever little Sabbie Dare.” I felt her slice the knots at ankles. She lifted the line that was around my neck and I felt the pressure give.

  I stretched out my legs. The absence of pain was almost a sensation in itself. I could breathe again. “Thanks. Thank you.”

  “Get up.”

  “I … I can’t.”

  “Get up. You can do it.” She was looking at me with a new expression on her face. I’d been stupid enough to think she’d freed my legs as a sort of reward for guessing right. But she had her own reasons, nothing to do with my discomfort. I was frozen with fear. She had a plan, something new. What had her twisted mind come up with? Was it time to sort me? I tried to get my thoughts on track. Keeping ahead of her was my only hope … okay, not a great hope. Not a hope at all, really.

  “Get up!” She rammed the toe of her dreadful shoe into the wound on my head. Pain detonated inside my head. “Now!”

  It took several attempts. She’d tied my hands behind my back with the same rope that was now falling around my ankles. I had to flounder upright like an ungainly bird with clipped wings. My legs throbbed as blood flowed through them. I swayed in front of her.

  “Come here,” she said, gesturing to the butcher’s block as if it were a sacrificial altar.

  I felt stronger on my feet. Almost instinctively, I shuffled away, glancing round the kitchen. The doors were shut. They didn’t even need to be locked; I couldn’t get through a shut door without hands. Anyway, where could I go with my hands tied? The answer my heart gave was anywhere away from her. I took another penguin step, and found myself on my face on the floor. I’d tripped over the lengths of rope that were coiling round my feet.

  “Get up and come here.” Her voice was on the edge of patience, but I ignored it. I was concentrating on what I’d figured out. My bonds were loosening. I wriggled as if struggling to get to my feet, but I was secretly examining the rope. She’d wound it round and round my legs, and now she’d cut the bindings at my ankles, it was falling free, trailing across the tiles behind me.

  I tried to work out how I’d been tied. Had she started with the noose at my neck, taken the rope to my ankles, tied it tightly there, then tied up my hands? When she’d bound me, I’d been out cold, harmless, and she had been in Patsy fuck mode—desperate, panicked—concentrating on the noose thing, to scare and control me. But now she had a new agenda. She wanted me on my feet, she’d cut the rope deliberately. She’d cut the r
ope, not thinking about the original knots.

  She came towards me. I scrabbled to my feet and shuffled uselessly away. She grabbed my wrists behind me and yanked. Pain overwhelmed me. It was the shooting agony I’d experienced in Horfield Prison, when I’d put my hands on Cliff’s. She’d learnt all the tricks from Kissie and Pinchie. A sound wailed round the kitchen and back into my own ears. My scream.

  “They started up again,” she was saying. “I heard them plain. Patsy take another … try again, Patsy … get it right this time. They wanted the full bells and whistles. Patsy take a child … abuse … rape … torture it to death.”

  No marks on Josh’s body. That was what Rey had told me. He didn’t mention if that included the marks of rope around his wrists or neck. How did she keep them from running away if she didn’t tie them?

  “But I couldn’t hurt him.” Her voice was steady. “I didn’t even cut his hair.”

  “You’ve never been able to tell anyone, have you?” I kept my voice low, kept my pain to myself. “But now you have, you’ll feel better. You won’t want more babies to die. It’s only Kissie and Pinchie who want that. You’re a good person, a lawyer, trapped by these terrible people, their ghosts—ah!”

  She pushed my Weeble-Wobble body and I skidded across the floor in my socks, squealing like a piglet. We were heading for the butcher’s block, where the knife lay. She let go and I crumpled to the floor, gasping. The pain in my shoulders had gone as she’d released me, but my hands were tingling with slow life. When she’d grabbed me, the bindings had slipped a little more.

  I had very little time left, and one final throw of the dice. “Linnet.” I gave her a crooked smile. “I know a way to be free of them.”

  “Be free?”

  “Yes. They will never stop haunting you. They’ll always want another child, another death. But if you give yourself up …”

  “Give myself up?”

  “Yes.”

  “To the police?”

  “Think of the relief, Linnet.”

  “What, walk into the station and say, ‘it’s a fair cop, guv’?”

  I could not reply.

  “You really do know sod all, don’t you, Sabbie?” Her eyes had steeled—they were somewhere—someone else entirely. She put a tight fist around my ponytail and heaved. I followed the line of the pain, up onto my knees. I was staring across the surface of the butcher’s block. She yanked my head onto it. My neck felt ready to break; it was stretched and exposed as my cheek was pressed down onto the sawdusty surface. I tried shifting my legs, but they slid from under me and I was held on the block by the length of my hair, my knees floating handbreadths from the ground. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see the blood if she cut at my neck.

  “Stop it, Linnet,” I choked out, into the wood. “Just stop it all. Do yourself a favour. You’re up shit creek.”

  I heard her chuckle. “Shit creek? That’s where you are right this minute.”

  “Let it be over.” I was whispering, words fast and foolish, like a prayer. “Let it be over for you … for me … for Cliff. Let it be over for him too.”

  “Be over for Cliff?” She sounded incredulous. “Why should I ever let it be over for Cliff?”

  I stopped muttering. Her words cut through my fear. Why had Linnet taken on this case, when she knew all along that Cliff was as innocent as she was guilty? Not altogether innocent, she’d argued. I felt my eyes shoot wide open. I had betrayed Cliff, thinking for even one second that he might be involved with Linnet. But he had been involved with Patsy. I could see his pale face, in the prison visiting room, the story of his escape. I got in her way.

  “You freed him.” It came out as a groan. In my mind I heard Cliff, as the memories came to him. I wriggle towards the trunk. The girl hisses ‘fucking hurry up’. “You let him go and stayed behind.”

  Chilled steel lay on my neck. My bones liquidised inside my flesh.

  “I stayed behind,” she hissed. “And all that night, they kept me tied—feet to neck. I was a stupid young girl, so I struggled a lot. By morning I was half dead, slowly strangled. Thanks to your precious client.”

  “The tree—couldn’t take his weight.” I felt the blade in Linnet’s hand move. My breath was coming in tiny gasps, like my lungs were bellows. “How—how could you blame him?”

  “He never even looked back.”

  “Linnet. You both survived. Why not just be—glad.”

  “He went free, innocent, forgetting everything. I was left, murderess and accomplice. That what you wanted to hear? I was their accomplice. After Cliff escaped, they nearly killed me in all the ingenious ways they had, then, hey, guess what we did? We all went on holiday. Terry nicked a car and we all went off for a nice little summer holiday. Weymouth, I think. Ain’t that cute?”

  “They thought he’d tell the police.”

  “I wish to God that he had! I would be free now—they would be doing thirty years.” The blade trembled, pressed closer, dug into my flesh. “It’s his turn. He’s had a lifetime without them breathing down his neck. It’s his turn.”

  My thoughts spun. I saw her plan. So simple. Tomorrow morning, thanks to the efforts of his lawyer, Cliff would walk free. No, not free. Surveillance. The police, watching the wrong suspect, watching Cliff when they should be watching Linnet. Suddenly, I wanted to shout out, as if I could warn him, or warn Rey Buckley. Don’t watch Cliff! Don’t watch Cliff! I could see it, as clear as if it had already happened. Aidan’s body, left for Cliff to find, easily discovered. Or worse. Another child snatched, when surveillance went wrong, for just an hour. No one was watching Linnet. It had been going great. But I’d fucked it up—fucked the plan by finding the tunnel.

  There was a violent sharpness, a long scratch at the crease of my neck. The knife’s flat, cold blade slid upwards. A moan oozed from my lips. I tried to stop myself from peeing. The roots of my hair tightened, resisted, then sprang free. She was scalping me. She wanted me to know all the agonies, all the cruelties she’d suffered, starting with this one. I gritted my teeth against the pain as the knife sawed along my skin.

  “Don’t do this. Don’t do it!”

  “I have longed to do this. Forever. Longed to.”

  “Don’t do it, don’t do it! Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, you can’t kill, you can’t, you can’t kill me, Linnet!”

  I didn’t realize that I was crying until the tears began to drip from my cheeks and chin.

  “I have killed,” Linnet spat back at me, as if I’d insulted her. “I can fucking kill. As you will find, when the time is right.”

  Panic swilled over me like a scald of water. It had taken me all this time to realize how dangerous Linnet was.

  I was as much her victim as Josh, Aidan, and Cliff.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  What do you think is in there, Ina?

  Only one person had ever called me that particular nickname. I was seven or eight, and I can’t recall the face, can’t remember the gender. I must’ve known the name at the time, but it’s gone. When that memory slips in, through some unguarded back door in my mind, I think of that person as Ina … not me. Ina the Vile. Ina—pitiless, callous, vicious. Ina, who technically never laid a finger on me or any other child at the home or foster house or wherever it was. No bruises, no split lips to tell the tale. Ina used terror warfare that only worked on those still young enough to believe that horrors unseen, demons and monsters from dark places, could overcome the miracle of love.

  I do recall, in the recesses of my mind, that Ina had many diabolical tricks. They were played in the name of discipline, but that was not Ina’s immediate design. Ina loved to see a child’s face melt with fear. And if their bladder or bowels melted too, all the better, for that was two punishments all rolled up in one small transgression.

  Ina’s gift was to know what would terrorize a child the most
, and for me it was the cupboard. A swirling rise of emotions choked my throat if I knew the cupboard was threatened. I can still taste each one: Bewilderment and wretchedness growing fast and hot to anger, and the hammering at the inside of the door that left my hands aching for days. Hate and disgust for the tiny space, the harmless piles of towels and sheets. The first blasts of fear; darkness, the feeling that I couldn’t breathe. Then after a long time—for it was impossible to gauge the time spent, except by the growing hunger in my belly—the start of the terrors that shocked the heart rate, spasmed the brain, annihilated control of any part of my body. Eventually there was a swollen unconsciousness where my nightmares brought forth the beasts with curved teeth and the men with curved blades.

  What do you think is in there, Ina?

  Nothing compares. No other life experience has left me with such a sickening memory …

  Until Linnet’s knife sliced though my hair tight to my scalp. I’d been left out on a field of ice—I couldn’t feel anything, not even my heart beating. Black patches were splattered over my vision. Pain built as Linnet removed more and more hair from my head. I could feel her working over me, as if I was the steak for her dinner.

  I wanted to mourn for my hair. I’d taken almost ten years to grow it—and in a few more moments, Linnet would be holding all of it in her hand. But I didn’t have time to mourn hair. It was my life that was in real danger.

  Linnet had dragged me to the block with rope trailing behind me, but she was too absorbed with her new obsession to worry about the ropes that had bound me. I tried my hands, focusing my thoughts on them. When I forced them apart, I felt the coils around my wrists give. I moved my hands in a circular motion, felt rawness as flesh rubbed over rope.

  I gritted my teeth against the pain as the knife sawed through the final hank of hair and I fell, free from her hold, onto the floor.

  Linnet’s breathing was loud and ragged in her throat. She laid the heavy lengths of tangled, curling hair over the block and stroked it. I watched, mesmerized. Some sort of reaction had been set up in her with the cutting. Her shoulders shook. She leaned onto the butcher block as if unable to support her own weight. There was violent madness in her face. She raised the knife above the hair and roared. It was the roar of a wild beast—a monster—the evil witch who cooked children. She roared the knife above her head and roared it down. An inch of its point disappeared into the wood. I was hoping she’d never get it out again.