* * *
“Don’t!” said Debbie, pulling the window down.
Corrine saw the movement out of the corner of her eye. Someone shutting a window across the street. Her heart hammered in her chest and her fingers slipped on the bark, grazing her knuckles as she pulled herself round for a better look.
Someone had been watching them!
“What?” said Darren, his face flushed. “I was only having a laugh.”
* * *
His eyes glued to the hands of the watch, Noj smoothed the last of the soil over the top of the bundle. He felt like a thousand fireworks were detonating inside of him, the biggest surge of power he had ever experienced, as he entwined with Hecate at the exact second of the hour of the rising full moon.
Above his head, Corrine felt a stab of pure fear, as sharp as a dagger to the guts.
Someone had been watching them!
She didn’t know what she was more afraid of. That the working had been disturbed, or that Noj would realise she had not kept a good enough watch, that she had let them both down right at the final, crucial moment.
Maybe, she thought wildly, maybe he din’t hear it. He in’t said nothing. And if he don’t know, then maybe it don’t matter.
She looked back towards the house. Whoever had closed the window had just whisked the curtains shut too.
“Corrine!” Noj’s voice was an urgent whisper. She looked down, saw him standing there with his face turned upwards, a radiant smile across his countenance, reflecting back the luminescent glow of the moon. He didn’t look like a boy any more, she realised. No one who didn’t know him would believe he wasn’t really a girl.
For a second, seeing him like that, she felt giddy with relief.
He din’t notice. Thank God … No, thank the Goddess for that!
Noj raised both arms up in exultation. “It begins!” he cried.
* * *
“Debs, look, I’m sorry!” Darren was stung by the expression of anger on his girlfriend’s face. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Debs, what’s up?”
Just as quickly as her rage had flared her face crumpled and she fell forwards into his arms, tears spilling out of her eyes. “I’m sorry, Darren. It’s not you, it’s Alex …”
* * *
Corrine scrambled out of the tree, jumped the last few feet down and landed with a soft thud on the ground next to Noj.
“You did brilliantly, Corrine,” he said, taking her hand and squeezing it. “Now, let’s get out of here.” He started to run down the path. Corrine went to follow him, but as she did, she felt herself hesitate, felt herself doing the one thing her friend had impressed on her she should never do, lest the spell be turned back on itself.
She looked round, over her shoulder, at the old yew tree.
* * *
Corrine was jolted awake by the sound of the door slamming. Her eyes opened on her narrow bedroom, still cast in darkness, but for the barley-sugar glow from the streetlamp that seeped under the gap beneath the curtains.
Two luminous spots on the hands of her Mickey Mouse alarm clock told her it was 3:45 a.m. She’d only been back here a couple of hours herself, sneaking back unseen after a week and a half of bunking round Noj’s. It wasn’t that it was an odd hour for her mother to come home.
But, as she lay her head back down on her pillow, pulling her bedclothes closer around her, Corrine detected a sound she could not recall having ever heard before.
A low, snuffling noise, accompanying Gina’s heavy footfalls up the stairs. Corrine sat back up, listening hard. It sounded like crying.
Could it have something to do with all those other things that weren’t quite the same? There had been no lights on when she’d arrived, no motorbikes parked up in the front yard. Corrine didn’t think she had ever returned to an empty house before, whether her mother was in or not – there were normally at least three of them to be found through the haze of pot smoke, lying around on the sofas, dismantling machinery on the front room carpet, listening to their loud, groaning metal at the maximum volume.
Psycho, Whiz and Scum … How she’d hated their stupid names, their acne-scarred faces, their straggling, bumfluff beards. Not that it was anything she could have put into words, but Corrine had instinctively known that they were the weak cards in this raggedy outlaw pack. They were here because they didn’t stand a chance, any normal woman would shun them for being so crude, so they were forced instead to do the bidding of their elders. Ones like Rat, with his black, oily hair that ran like a snake down his back. His narrow, cruel eyes that always played over Corrine like a cat sizing up a rodent. His oil-stained fingers that were crueller still.
Rat was the one at the top. Rat was the one that was always here …
Except that he wasn’t here tonight.
Something’s happened, Corrine realised. A tiny spark of hope flared inside her, and she pulled back her blankets, put one foot tentatively down on the carpet. On tiptoe, she stole across its nylon surface, opened her door a crack.
Gina had stopped on the top of the stairs, had her head down, a hand across her face. Her body was convulsing with the effort of trying to keep the tears in.
Frozen in the doorframe, Corrine watched her, conflicting emotions twisting her stomach into a knot. She should have been happy to see her mother like this, at last. All the times she had stood over Corrine while she was in a similar state of distress, dropping scornful words onto her that burned worse than salt on an open wound, burned deeper into Corrine’s soul, convincing her that she was worthless, stupid, a sorry mistake that should have been flushed away in a condom and didn’t deserve the right to happiness, the trouble her existence had caused.
All those times she had let Psycho, Wiz and Scum do what they wanted with her, sneering at her tears and saying she needed toughening up. And the times that Gina didn’t know about, when Rat had put his hands around Corrine’s neck and told her what would happen if she ever let on, pushing her head down towards the bulge in his jeans that concealed the blade of his hunting knife.
All the dirty men under the pier and the money she had stolen.
But Corrine had never seen her mother cry. Never seen her look vulnerable in any way. Never seen her look happy, either. And from her earliest memories, all she had ever wanted to do was make Gina smile. Make that face, that beautiful face that Corrine could find no trace of in her own plain features, light up with something like love.
Now that older, deeper motive, that emotion that had held her captive so long, rolled back over her. Without thinking, Corrine opened her mouth. “Mum,” she said, opening the door fully and taking a step towards her. “What’s wrong?”
Gina lifted her head. Her cheeks were black with mascara. She opened her mouth and shut it again, no sound came out. Opened her arms instead.
Corrine went haltingly towards her, wondering if she dared put her arms around that perfect figure, encased in black leather and fishnet tights, previously such an impenetrable fortress. Did so awkwardly at first, then, feeling Gina respond, squeezed tightly into her. Corrine smelt the miasmas of men clinging to her mother’s flesh.
“It’s all right, Mum,” she said, feeling as if she were dreaming. “It’s all right.”
Gina began stroking Corrine’s hair, softly, absently at first. But as their embrace grew tighter, more suffocating, her hands started to pull, started to clamp down on these new raven tresses her daughter was sporting, this pathetic imitation of her own, naturally thick black mane. She, Gina, who had never allowed herself to cry in twenty years, not since she was thirteen years old herself and her stepdad had come into her room, thinking he could help himself. Help himself to what, from that moment on, all others would have to pay for dearly, in money or in kind. A concept her thick, useless, ugly little daughter had never once got her head around, for all she’d tried to beat it into her. What had she been thinking of …
“Ow!” Tears sprang into Corrine’s eyes as her head was yanked back, one tiny moment
of tenderness lost in the flash of Gina’s opaque black eyes.
“What are you doing here anyway?” Gina demanded. “I thought you had better things to do with yourself these days.”
“I … I just …” Corrine started, but found she hadn’t any words to offer her mother.
“Things have changed,” Gina hissed, her dirty, tear-streaked face transforming into a vixen’s mask. “It’s gonna cost if you want to come back here. As for that poncy social worker and all them teachers – they’ll be doing me a favour if they take you off my hands. You can rot in an orphanage for all I care!” She gave a hysterical cackle.
“Oh shit,” said Corrine, trying to wriggle free from her mother’s grasp.
Gina slapped her hard across the face. “Oh shit is right!” she snarled. And then, another sea change rolled across her features, a crooked smile tugged up the corners of her mouth, the gleam in her eyes became more maniacal as she extended a finger nail to trace down the side of Corrine’s face where the blood vessels were starting to engorge.
“But, hey,” she said, staring at her daughter as if seeing something in her face for the first time, “you know, you’ve been making so much effort recently to look nicer. I don’t think that should go unrewarded. Yes,” Gina smiled. “I think I’ll have just the job for you.”
Corrine no longer knew what to say or do. The weight had come down on her mind again, she could feel her emotions shutting down, blanking everything out, so that her mother stood before her mouthing words Corrine could no longer hear.
Gina let her go, pushed her back towards her bedroom. “Get some beauty sleep,” she said, “you’re going to fucking need it.”
25
No Doves Fly Here
March 2003
Dale Smollet stood on the threshold of the pillbox, nibbling one of his manicured thumbnails. It was the only sign of emotion he was giving off as he stared at the SOCO, Ben Armitage, working away inside.
Sean watched him, thinking of Paul Gray and what it would have been like for him when he made his discovery, on 18 June 1984. The crime scene photographs imprinted on his memory in black and white were starting to come into colour. The beach on a hot summer’s day, the smell of the sea and suntan lotion, the cries of the gulls overhead – the scene of a thousand family holidays. Gray crossing from that world and into the concrete bunker for the first time, the tableau of ritual murder laid out in front of him – black hair, white skin and open red flesh. The initial disbelief of confronting something so unnatural and unexpected that would have rendered him unable to process what he was actually seeing for the first few seconds until the full horror of it truly sank in …
And something else.
Corrine Woodrow hunched in a corner, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms folded around them, staring up at him with glassy, unfocused eyes. Sean had worked on this picture in his mind over and over, but the contents of it had started to alter now. The Corrine in his mental reconstruction, was she in shock over what she had committed, or convulsed with a psychological condition that rendered her incapable of defending either herself or her slaughtered school friend?
Gray had been thirty-three when he made the discovery, just a couple of years older than Sean was now. What had it done to him, walking in on this scene?
He looked across at Rivett, standing in the near distance, hunched against the wind on the top of a dune, keeping watch over the horizon to ward away any potential gawkers.
A thousand questions he wanted to ask the two of them, but none that he could voice right now. He turned his gaze back to the Detective Chief Inspector.
“You’ve never had anything like this happen before?” Sean asked.
Smollet frowned, turned his head slowly, as if it was an effort to disengage from what he had been observing. Maybe he, too, had been forming a picture in his mind.
Or was he reaching back into his own memory?
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“Death trippers,” said Sean. “You know. Sick individuals who like to come on pilgrimages to places like this, leave their own personal tributes. The more shocking the crime, the more likely it is to happen. I would have thought this place could be something of a magnet for them.”
“Ah,” said Smollet, nodding. “I get you. Well, it’s not something I’ve ever heard about before. Len can tell you for sure, but I think I’m right in saying that the exact location of this was kept from the press at the time, to stop that sort of thing from happening. There’s dozens of these pillboxes up the coast here, you know. Course, you can’t stop kids from getting into them …”
“That’s what I mean,” said Sean. “The local kids. Surely there’ve got to have their legends? They get intrigued by nefarious activity, don’t they? Don’t you think this could just be some bored little scrote, messing about, doing a dare with his mates?”
“I don’t think that’s very likely.” The SOCO emerged from the pillbox, pulling his mask away from his face. Armitage looked to be in his early thirties, but had the serious demeanour of someone older, a furrowed brow beneath his brown, curly hair and eyes that had the kind of squint acquired from staring down microscopes all day.
“From what I can see,” he said, “it look a bit more purposeful than that.”
Sean and Smollet exchanged glances. “How so?” said Smollet, folding his arms.
“First off,” said Armitage, “you’ve got the candle wax. Someone sat in here for five or six hours, probably overnight, burning a load of them – and I don’t think they’re going to turn out to be ordinary candles.”
“The smell,” suggested Sean, remembering the fragrance that had hit his nostrils when he’d first leant over the congealed pool of wax. “Has that got something to do with it?”
“Well, that in’t one of the posh scented variety like the wife gets in for the bathroom. These have had oils rubbed into them, that’s where the smell of cloves and that come from. Then there’s the different colours – silver, purple, blue, black and red. All of which suggest to me that they were prepared beforehand for some kind of ritual.”
“What about the pentagram?” Sean asked. “Is it salt?”
“Saxa, most probably,” said the SOCO. “Sort of table salt you’d find in any supermarket, any kitchen. The symbolism is probably the more important thing to consider. From what I know about these things, salt is used to protect against the devil – he in’t supposed to be able to cross over the lines. The candles were burned in the exact centre of the pentagram, where whoever was performing the ritual would have been, to their mind, the most adequately protected. Which in’t really the behaviour you associate with a load of drunken kids out for a lark. This is the work of an adept.”
“So,” said Smollet, his jaw tightening, “you mean we’re looking for a witch?”
“A white witch,” said Armitage, nodding. “Or a Wiccan, as they like to call themselves.” He looked at Smollet with a smile that was not immediately returned. “I think you can safely forget the idea that whoever done this was trying to recreate the murder. It look to me like they were trying to cleanse the place instead.”
“It’s not black magic, then?” said Sean.
“The opposite,” said the SOCO. “Like I say, I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but we do get a fair bit of this jiggery-pokery around here.” He raised his eyebrows. “And if this was another bunch of would-be satanists there’d be blood, bones, feathers, most probably a load of threatening slogans painted all over the place. Not to mention a ton of empties and other recreational stimulants. No,” he said, “whoever done this was very clean, very neat.”
“I see,” nodded Sean, understanding something more of what Noj had been trying to say to him last night, beginning to puzzle out what it was about the people of Ernemouth and their enigmatic ways. How the things they didn’t say were often more important than the things that they did.
“Len!” Smollet called. “You can come down now.”
&n
bsp; Rivett turned his head, putting his mobile phone back into his coat pocket as he made his lumbering way back down towards them. Smollet watched him approach with narrowed eyes. Sean wondered what was riling him – whether the story the SOCO had relayed was not the one he had wanted to hear, or if he was just pissed off at being dragged out here in the first place.
“What gives then, guv?” asked Rivett.
“Ben was just saying,” a tiny muscle twitched under Smollet’s left eye, “that this looks like the work of a white witch.”
“Ha!” Rivett exclaimed. “You’re joking, in’t you? Some sick little scrote, more like.”
“Well,” Armitage hefted his bag back over his shoulder, “the two things could be one and the same. But if you want the analysis back this evening, I’d best be off.” He nodded at Sean. “I don’t think there’s much else I can really tell you at this stage.”
“Course,” Smollet made a show of looking at his wristwatch. “I’d better get going myself. If there’s anything else …”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Can I make an appointment to speak with you later?” he said. “When the results of the tests come back.”
“Sure,” said the DCI. “Six o’clock, you reckon, Ben?”
The SOCO nodded. “Should be OK,” he said.
“Six o’clock, my office, then,” the corners of Smollet’s mouth drew upwards, more of a grimace than a smile. “In the meantime, maybe you can fill Len in on the rest of Ben’s …” he paused before delivering the last word in a withering tone, “thesis.”
* * *
Paul Gray was still standing in the hallway, staring at the phone, when his wife Sandra came back through the front door.
“Paul?” she said, taking in the expression on his face, adding it to last night’s late-night phone call from Len Rivett and feeling her heart jump in her chest.
“Sandra, love,” he said, looking at her with hollow eyes. “I’m sorry … I wanted to keep you out of this.”
He shook his head, bringing his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Sandra put her shopping bags down and stepped forwards. “What is it?” she said, putting her hand over his right bicep. “What’s he now said to you?”
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