by Matt Brolly
Traffic was still snail-like as she headed along the front towards Marine Lake. She tried her best to ignore the lump of rock in the distance, her hand rubbing the healed wound on her arm from her last visit there. She’d set off on that night from this very spot by the Lake. She could still taste the saltwater; feel the coldness on her skin as the dinghy had cut through the darkness. It felt like yesterday and she realised she would always link this section of the town with that night.
She was not the only one taking the scenic route out of town. The toll road, past Birnbeck Pier – the old pier, as it was known to locals – was slow moving as the tourists returned to their caravan parks and rented beach homes for the night. Louise thought about Victoria’s suicide note, the lack of people at her funeral. In the summer Weston was a place of transition, the populace changing on a weekly basis. In the winter, Weston could be a desolate place. It reminded Louise of a nightclub once the lights were switched off at the end of the night, the illusion of the glittery lights destroyed by grim reality. With summer departed, Weston became that empty nightclub: cold and drab without the revelry of the departed tourists. It was too easy to see how Victoria and Claire would suffer in such an environment. They were on the fringes of the town, not part of the summer crowds and invisible to the town folk in the winter months.
A car horn blared at her as Louise took a side road towards Sand Bay. The driver gesticulated wildly at her as he edged along the toll road, his car brimming with children. Louise ignored him and continued towards Claire Smedley’s old residence.
Applebee was outside working on a car, the uniformed team having departed. He was wearing a vest now. Louise imagined it had once been white but it was so covered in grease and oil that she couldn’t be sure.
‘Back so soon?’ said Applebee, wiping his hands on a cloth dirtier than his vest. He grinned, Louise seeing nothing pleasant in the gesture. She imagined what Claire had thought of him, at the thought of having to walk through his garage every time she wanted to go home.
Louise moved towards the man. His heavy breathing was audible, his brow moist with perspiration. She’d felt he’d been lying this morning and was now convinced. She decided to try a half-truth herself. ‘Something was missing from Claire’s room this morning,’ she said.
‘Oh really?’ said Applebee, wiping his hands again with the dirty rag. ‘Your colleagues didn’t seem to think so. They’ve gone through every inch of her place.’
Louise came close to arresting him at that point. She knew what he’d done but decided there was an easier way. ‘We believe Claire’s death might be part of an on-going investigation. Any cooperation you could give us at this moment would be greatly appreciated.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Applebee, wiping his hands vigorously as if trying to destroy evidence.
‘Let’s say for instance that Claire left something in your care, something for safekeeping as she went out. No one would think any less of you for forgetting about that, Mr Applebee. A laptop maybe?’
Applebee wiped his brow with the dirty rag, his eyes squinting against the sun. Louise saw his brain ticking over, finally concluding that he’d been offered a chance. ‘Now that you mention it, she did leave something with me. I was going to call you when I’d finished the car. In all the chaos today I completely forgot about it.’
‘I understand,’ said Louise, crossing her arms.
She followed him inside where he withdrew the laptop from a cubbyhole. ‘Place it down on the counter,’ said Louise, all pretence of goodwill vanishing as she used gloves to put the laptop in a protective container. ‘Was there anything else? A note perhaps.’
Applebee shook his head and from the look of fear in his eyes she knew that this time he was telling the truth.
The CID office was deserted, except for the figure of DS Greg Farrell busy working on his laptop, the fluorescent lights reflecting off the gleam of his slick-backed hair. Farrell was a rising star in the department. He was young and hungry for success, and although Louise admired his energy they sometimes clashed when his determination was superseded by his arrogance. In a way they were kindred spirits. Neither of them really wanted to be in Weston. Farrell wanted bigger and better and was working his way towards it, whereas Louise wanted a return to the type of role that had been taken from her.
‘Hey, boss, didn’t you see there,’ said Farrell, looking up from his screen as Louise sat behind her desk.
‘You’re working late,’ said Louise.
Farrell grinned. The gesture used to annoy her. More smirk than smile, she’d always thought he was trying to undermine her, but now she’d grown to accept it as being part of him. ‘That set of break-ins over in Worlebury. Need to collate all these witness reports. Not exactly the high end of investigative work but what are you going to do. What are you working on?’
‘The suicide in Uphill.’
Farrell frowned but the lightness in his eyes didn’t fully dissipate. ‘Tania Elliot asked about that today. Says she was going to call you.’
Tania Elliot was the town’s celebrity journalist. Following the Pensioner Killer case, she’d made a name for herself selling the story nationwide. She currently worked for the Bristol Post but was ever present in the affairs of the town. ‘I’ve a missed call from her. It can stay missed for now,’ said Louise, pulling on a set of protective gloves from inside the desk drawer.
As Applebee had suggested, Claire Smedley’s laptop was a brick of a machine. Louise wanted a quick look before she sent it to the IT department in Portishead tomorrow. The machine groaned into life as she pressed the on switch, the fan immediately on overdrive. Farrell glanced up at the noise, smiling before returning to his work.
The home screen was scattered with tens of icons. Louise was surprised to see a link to MySpace, having believed the social-media site no longer functioned. She clicked on the icon, Claire’s email and password stored automatically on the site. Nothing except a lone picture of Weston’s Grand Pier from ten years ago came up on her profile. Louise searched on the more popular social-media sites but couldn’t find any more profiles for the woman. The tech team would be able to do a more thorough search and if there was something on the machine they would find it.
The laptop was struggling, the fan whining as if something was broken within. Not wanting to risk breaking it, Louise was about to close the machine when she noticed an icon for an open-source word-processing application. She didn’t have to scroll down far on the recent files to find what she was looking for. There was only one file, and it was simply titled: Goodbye.
Chapter Seven
Amy spent the next three hours switching back and forth from the group chat to YouTube and the free-to-air television channels on her laptop. She took some comfort in having the group chat open. It wasn’t quite like being alone. Each new message played at the bottom of the screen as she watched a comedy show on iPlayer. You were supposed to have a TV licence to watch the shows but no one had ever checked on her. If they did she would plead ignorance, hoping her lack of television would prove good mitigation.
The messages were pretty random. Some of the group were prone to speaking in platitudes. There was much shallow thought and comment about the pointlessness of life and mumblings about what lay beyond. Most of it was the sort of nonsense you got from people who were high, as Amy imagined most of the group were. Yet, like her, they had all experienced something that set their drug talk apart – Jay had recruited them.
It had taken weeks for Jay to reveal himself to her. She’d known by the second or third time they met that their relationship was something out of the ordinary. Yes, of course, she fancied him. It was almost impossible not to. He was the archetypal tall, dark stranger, the embodiment of her fantasies. She’d wanted to be with him from the first time she’d set eyes on him but somehow he transcended the physical. She would have given herself to him then, as she would now, but although they’d held hands and held each other close, Jay had never made
a play for her. She understood his elusiveness was part of his charm, why in part she craved him, but there was so much more to it than that. She’d never met anyone like him. He knew things no one else knew. He’d travelled the world, seen things she could only dream of seeing.
He’d told her early on about his visit to the Peruvian Amazonian rainforest and how it had changed his life. At first she hadn’t understood as he’d recounted his visit, the days and nights with the indigenous people, and when he’d told her about first trying the drug it sounded like the worst thing in the world.
‘I have to tell you the full story so you understand,’ he’d said, before proceeding to tell her about the next night when he’d had his vision.
From anyone else she would have been incredulous. She’d done enough drugs in her time, had experienced enough outlandish trips to spot a fellow user, but the raw emotion in his voice made her listen. She’d heard about DMT before but had never tried it. She’d put anything beyond the occasional spliff behind her. She’d heard similar tales about self-revelation before but it had never attracted her. Yet the way Jay spoke about it made it sound like something else, something life-changing. He told her about the other worlds he’d experienced, his now iron-clad belief that something else waited for them beyond the confines of this world. ‘And I can prove it to you,’ he’d said, and she’d believed him.
She was about to switch off the laptop when a note from Megan popped up on the screen. A conversation had been rumbling on for the last thirty minutes about the changing seasons that she’d all but ignored beyond saying her favourite season was the spring. She’d waited to see if Megan would respond to that but she hadn’t commented until now:
I’m a summer girl myself. I like nothing more than long walks in the park on a summer morning. The light in Ashcombe Park has to be seen to be believed.
Amy felt her heart beat in her chest. Ashcombe Park was less than half a mile from her house. Had Megan meant this message for her? Jay continually warned them not to meet offline. He’d stressed it even more after Claire’s passing on. He was rarely present in the chats but they knew he was watching. It was a risk on Megan’s part but already four of the group had said how much they loved summer mornings, oblivious to the possibility of a hidden message. Amy didn’t respond, didn’t want to risk anyone knowing she’d taken the message in. Instead, she wished everyone a good night before logging off. She didn’t need to be in work the following day until the afternoon. What better way to spend the morning than a visit to Ashcombe Park?
Amy woke with a headache at 6 a.m. She’d struggled to get to sleep, her mind consumed with thoughts of seeing Megan. She wasn’t sure why the thought so excited her. In truth, she hardly knew the woman. Maybe it was simply the thought of speaking to someone other than Keith and the same customers she saw every day at the café.
After a breakfast of stale toast and tea, she left her building to the welcome glow of morning sunshine. It had been a long time since she’d approached a day with such anticipation. Not since her time with Jay had a day been so full of possibility. On the nights where they were summoned there was no time for anticipation. They were usually given a day’s notice at most, her body so full of adrenaline that she was rarely able to appreciate the time for what it was. She savoured that feeling now as she walked along the Milton Road to the park. She hadn’t been there since she was a child when a group of them would bunk off school, changing venue each time as if anyone really cared they were absent.
Amy walked along the stretch of grass that used to hold a pitch and putt course, smiling as she reached the playground area, remembering the sulky teenager she’d once been. Dressed in the hideous brown school uniform, she’d sat on the swings with the other truants smoking cigarette after cigarette, rarely inhaling, thinking she’d looked so cool. Now there she was alone on the swings, no cigarettes to her name, wearing tatty jogging bottoms and an oversized T-shirt, waiting for someone who probably had no intention of visiting the park that morning.
The overhanging branches of the trees blocked the sun. Amy folded her arms together for warmth. She wished she’d engaged Megan more on the group chat last night. The park was a huge area and if her note had been a coded message, chances were high they would still miss each other. At the rear of the park, a teenage boy rode up on a bicycle, stopping short as he noticed Amy on the swings. He stared at her as if she was a phantom. He looked too young to be threatening but she didn’t like the way he looked through her.
With his eyes still on her Amy stepped off the swing, a familiar tension in her stomach. She tried not to rush but the panic had started to overcome her and, eyes focused on the ground, she ran straight into a second person who must have been standing behind her all the time.
Chapter Eight
It hadn’t taken long for Louise to decipher the similarities between the two notes. Each told distressing stories about tragic lives, but it wasn’t that which caught her attention. What made her stop and take note was the repetition of two lines in both notes:
There are other worlds than this
Death is not the end
She’d remembered the lines from Victoria’s note. They’d struck her as odd then, out of sync with the rest of the note, and they jarred now. With little to be achieved last night, Louise had printed Claire’s note and placed the laptop in the safe ready to be transferred to MIT. She recognised the second line – death is not the end – as the title of a Bob Dylan song. She’d downloaded the lyrics last night, and it was the first thing she’d looked at this morning on waking, her dreams troubled with images of Victoria’s and Claire’s broken bodies.
By the time she’d showered and breakfasted it was only 6.30 a.m. Mr Thornton, her monosyllabic neighbour, was waiting for her outside. The elderly man had an innate ability to always be taking out his rubbish at exactly the same time Louise left the house. She’d presumed the man was lonely but every time she tried to strike up a conversation with him he’d only offer a one-word answer. Undeterred, she tried again. ‘Are you enjoying this lovely weather?’ she asked, cringing at her mundanity.
‘Too hot for me,’ said Thornton, retreating indoors.
‘I see,’ said Louise, getting into the car. It was the opposite for her. She loved this weather, the way it not only changed the environment of the town but its inhabitants. It was an illusion, but a charmed one she was happy to fall for.
She took the back road out of Worle along the toll road, passing the turn for Sand Bay and Claire Smedley’s old bedsit. The woman’s note was on the seat beside her. It was incongruous to think of the hope in the final words. Again, her overworked imagination surprised her by a vision of the note, this time signed by Emily.
With her meeting with Robertson still ninety minutes away, she parked up on the seafront and walked across the road to the Kalimera. She hadn’t visited the Greek restaurant since the move of the station and the reception from the owner, Georgina, was not warm. The statuesque woman lowered her head in greeting, her dark eyebrows pointing inwards as her eyes narrowed.
‘Good to see you again, Georgina.’
‘Coffee?’
Louise smiled. For the first year of visiting the restaurant, she hadn’t even known the woman’s name. Over time, they’d developed something of an understanding. Louise accepted her enigmatic behaviour for what it was and decided to apologise for her extended absence.
‘You think I only open this place early on the off chance you will show up?’ said Georgina, the hint of smile lines flourishing on her heavily made-up face.
Louise looked about her at the empty seats. ‘I promise I’ll try and visit more often,’ she said, as Georgina turned her back to make the coffee.
Georgina brought the piping hot drink over to Louise’s seat by the window five minutes later, surprising Louise by sitting next to her.
‘Why do you open this place so early, I never asked before?’
‘I can’t sleep for more than three or four hours. I get
here early and begin preparations. Why not open? You’re not our only customer.’
The comment wasn’t meant to be hostile and Louise welcomed the woman’s company. When she’d first moved to Weston, the Kalimera had been her refuge. Sometimes she thought she’d only survived her time in the town due to the thirty minutes of quiet contemplation she spent there every morning before work.
‘How is that handsome work colleague of yours?’ asked Georgina.
Quiet though she was, the woman had great insight when it came to people. She’d noticed Louise’s attraction to Thomas before Louise had really understood it. ‘He’s going through a divorce.’
A sly look crossed Georgina’s face but she didn’t comment. She was an old schoolfriend of Thomas’s and knew he had a young child. Not that Louise had any plans to discuss the matter with her. Thomas was on the no-go list and would remain so for a long time. Things were complicated enough already.
Thinking of Thomas’s little boy reminded her that she’d promised to see Emily that night. She hadn’t had time yesterday to check in with her mum and was worried about how Emily was faring without her dad. ‘I better be going,’ she said, draining the remains of the coffee.
‘I hope to see you before the end of the year,’ said Georgina, deadpan, as Louise left.
The first wave of tourists was heading towards the seafront as Louise left the restaurant. The forecast was another day of heat and already a few cars were trailing on to the beach in readiness for the day to come. Louise felt nostalgic for her own childhood and days of promise by the seaside. She missed her brother from that time, his enthusiasm and relentless energy. She hated what had happened to him, and worse still his reaction to those events. Her mood was clouded further by thoughts of Claire Smedley. The sun highlighted the girl’s wasted promise and Louise was motivated more than ever to find out what had driven her to her death.