‘It won’t take long,’ said Carrie roughly. ‘You hold the torch.’
She started to unbutton his trousers: Bridget looked off into the dark but the torch beam wavered, and she had to look back. Carrie made a sound. ‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘What?’ She couldn’t seem to make her eyes focus.
‘The old bastard liked to go commando,’ said Carrie, disgusted and for a moment although she knew the phrase – who didn’t? – Bridget didn’t understand what she was saying. She made herself focus and saw an inch of greying pubic hair against pale, flabby skin. A misshapen mole. She stood up, swaying, and for a moment she thought she was going to vomit.
No. No. If she vomited here—
‘He didn’t – he wasn’t—’ And then suddenly it was rage Bridget was feeling. ‘Button him back up,’ she said, her voice shaking with it. ‘Go on.’ An order, and Carrie obeyed, fumbling. ‘They could identify him by his teeth, anyway, couldn’t they?’ Bridget said.
‘Do you mean—’ Carrie sounded afraid now. ‘You want me to—’
‘No,’ said Bridget, stiffly, and it was as if her whole body had turned cold as iron, she could taste it in her mouth. ‘What I mean is, we can’t cover all the options.’ And now trying to locate the trembling: where was it? At her knees, her thighs, turning her spine to jelly.
She swallowed. ‘The most we can do is make sure they don’t find him at all until we’re all dead and gone. Or even just gone.’ Then she stood up, because if she didn’t move she would start to shake, she would fall on the ground beside him and shake like an animal.
Taking a hasty stumbling step backward, she nearly tripped over something. A tree root. Think. Think. She turned away.
‘What are you doing?’ Carrie’s voice was high. Bridget stopped, holding on to the nearest trunk: she couldn’t bear the sound of Carrie frightened.
Think of something.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, although it wasn’t, then it came to her.
‘I’m going to find something heavy,’ she said. ‘To put in his pockets. To hold him down.’ And then Carrie was on her feet beside her. Behind them he lay, exposed in the moonlight.
The earth was dusty, powdery: every time they found something that looked like a rock it crumbled. Carrie broke away from her, wandering. Bridget was about to stop her when she called, low.
‘Here.’ Excited.
A little sweep of stones, beyond the van, dusty, all different sizes. Bits of concrete were in among them: Bridget calculated, not wanting to remove something that would be missed and decided the stones were hardcore, an attempt at shoring up the verge. There were plenty of them. Carrie ran back for some of the polythene and they scooped handfuls of the stuff into it, dragging the bundle back to where he lay.
They filled his pockets and sat back. ‘That’s not going to be enough,’ said Carrie, on the edge of frightened again.
‘Hold on,’ said Bridget. She went back to the van and got the roll of packing tape she kept in the side pocket, for when boxes split. Could you trace packing tape? She doubted it. Think – but don’t think too hard. You can’t control everything. When she came back she saw Carrie, looking down at him from where she sat with her back against the tree, motionless, on guard. It had got darker: there was no more than a sliver of moon, high behind them.
‘We’ve got to be quick, now,’ Bridget said. ‘I don’t want anyone seeing the torch.’ And they had to be quick for Matt, cycling peacefully home from work. She blinked to get rid of the image.
Kneeling, she began to tape around the trousers at the ankle, and Carrie, understanding immediately, began to scoop up more of the hardcore and shovel it down his trousers, still unbuttoned. Carrie had angled herself so she blocked Bridget’s view and by the time she moved back out of the way it was done.
His head was furthest from them, hanging back a little over the cliff-edge. Bridget could see his chin, tilted upwards. She could see stubble: it went on growing, didn’t it? She’d read that somewhere. Hair, skin, nails, they go on growing after you’re dead. How long for?
‘Now,’ said Bridget and they positioned themselves on either side of him without any further communication passing between them, and heaved.
He went over without a sound. What sound had she expected? A cry, an accusation, a plea? And then the splash, loud. A gurgling sound that pinned them to the spot for a second then they both looked over. The sliver of moon illuminated something, the monstrous mounded shape of his coat ballooned with air and bobbed. One minute passed. Another.
‘Oh, my God,’ Carrie almost groaned, and scrambled for the edge, reaching for a root to hang on to, ready to lash out and kick him down. Just in time Bridget grabbed her back.
‘No,’ she hissed. ‘Just wait. Wait.’
And as they watched, holding on to each other, at last there was a swirl in the black water below them, and he went down.
The silence that followed seemed vast. Bridget felt a great, peaceful emptiness, like space, as if she closed her eyes she might float, weightless, away from the earth.
Along the bank something rustled.
‘We’ve got to go,’ said Carrie urgently. And the world rushed in again.
There was always a wine bar, and Gill was sitting in it, nursing a large glass of red.
Pubs were noisier, you couldn’t sit quiet and think, you couldn’t shape your sentences, for what that was worth. Not even these days when every other pub had been made over with scrubbed tables and wifi – well, not here they hadn’t. The gastropub and the hipster coffee shop had yet to flourish in the shadow of Rose Hill.
Identify the older part of town: Gill had spotted it from the bus, heading back downhill from the towers. Her hotel was off to the north, a modern tower with purple lettering, and on the opposite side she’d seen the cluster of red-tiled roofs, nicely tumbling over each other. No more than a couple of old streets, but there’d have to be something. And there was: seventies French-café style with a long bar, tealights on the tables, a big window looking out on to dark cobbles.
And it had been a reasonable day. Not outstanding, but time with the university admin office had been well spent: they’d been short-staffed, not the usual row of eagle-eyed middle-aged women who would have busted her straight off. There was one woman but she was on the phone, walking up and down between her desk and a corridor. The work experience kid had turned to Gill, hopeful, as she edged through the door. A boy, flustered. She introduced herself as Dr Somebody, randomly. Had she even said, Dr Finlay? The kid would have been too young to know who Dr Finlay was, anyway. She had smiled at him, kindly. Could he remind her of the number of Dr Carmichael’s house, she needed to get a book to him for review and he wasn’t in his office. Use the right tone of voice and an inexperienced kid will just obey.
He had looked, panicked, across to the boss, but she was still on the mobile, one hand clutching at her forehead and a glare hovering, just ready to be activated.
Use the right tone of voice, like you’re his mum. Gill had had a mum, after all, even if she wasn’t one, and Chloe was enough mum for both of them. Supermum. The girls liked their auntie, though. You needed a respite from Supermum once in a while.
Gill took a leisurely sip of her red, and found it to be not too bad. House red: she wasn’t the little-South-African-vineyard-I-know type, after all, and this wouldn’t have been the place for it if she had been. Maybe it was her kind of town, in some ways, even if she still didn’t believe it was Anthony Carmichael’s. He had travelled, done stints in Dijon and Chicago, conducting. And Bangkok, and São Paulo, too.
Whatever: Gill must have got her tone of voice right because the work experience boy had scrabbled through a pile on the desk he was at and found a laminated list. He had held it out to her and there he was, top of the Cs, Dr A. Carmichael. An honorary doctorate, from the university of arseholes.
‘Why do you hate him so much?’ Charlie had asked her that. Charlie with the sad eyes, her last editor: she
’d left that job because of Charlie, who had been married. Why she hated Carmichael was a long story, beginning with that girl, hanging herself. A promising violin student, and Gill had gone back to see the man who had taken her under his wing, encouraged her musical talent: Dr Anthony Carmichael, Mr, back then, before the university of arseholes singled him out for their special honour. She’d gone back to ask him for a quote, but mostly to confirm the feeling she’d had when first she met him, standing while he was photographed with the dead girl on one side of him, her friend Bess on the other.
He’d been offhand about the girl, platitudes expressing sorrow and sympathy insultingly thin. Really I hardly knew her, a handful of lessons. Eyeing Gill, trying to place her.
When Gill tracked her down, Bess had said different. Piercings all up one ear now with a death-metal boyfriend and a ripped Metallica T-shirt, she had said, glancing quickly at the boyfriend sitting frowning in the corner of their bedsit, he played us off against each other and she was his favourite. Took her on days out in his car. But she had shaken her head when Gill had asked if she’d go on the record, looking uneasy, and the boyfriend had got threateningly to his feet.
In the office at the base of the tower as the light outside faded and the work experience kid shuffled from foot to foot at her shoulder, she’d taken down the address and phone number – a landline – and the computer guy’s number while she was at it. Matthew Webster.
It had been late by then, and a twenty-five-minute wait for the bus on the windswept slope pondering, for the twentieth time, what would have brought Anthony Carmichael to this place. By the time Gill had got back to her hotel it was after seven and she was knackered. Exposure to Carmichael, even at this distance, drained her. She showered, poured some peanuts from the mini-bar down her throat and was off out.
‘Twenty-four-hour reception,’ chirruped the girl behind the desk in an Eastern European accent Gill couldn’t identify more precisely. Dyed blonde hair, pretty, tired: her skin beginning to go. Was she happy, out here, far from home? The resilience of young people never ceased to amaze Gill: she remembered, belatedly, as she pushed through the door and out into the darkness that she’d been young once, and ready to travel. She was about ready to go home, these days.
Enough Carmichael for one day: save that home visit for tomorrow. Would he remember her this time? She walked, down the hill towards where she calculated the old town should be. There was a distant gleam from the estuary, and at her shoulder, blinking, the red lights on top of the towers.
The lights were still visible from the window seat of the wine bar: Gill moved so she couldn’t see them. A man was eyeing her up from the corner of the room but Gill paid no attention.
Taking another sip of the wine, Gill shifted back to look out at the cobbles and something eased, just enough. The bits of evidence she had accumulated over ten years – the rooms, the faces, the sounds, images that spent all day cramped in a corner of her head – began to spread themselves out, for her perusal. She’d been through this before. Her routine.
She was thinking of faces, the other faces she’d known. The faces on the wall of a front room, a girl in school uniform, reception, first year at big school, hair in bunches, hair hiding her face, braces on, braces off. A girl and her mother from a school Carmichael taught at in his spare time, the mother desperate to believe there had been nothing in the accusation, the girl hiding her face. The police deciding there wasn’t enough evidence and the school closing ranks.
Persecution of a great talent and public-spirited man who couldn’t do enough for his community, the lawyers’ letter had read. The girl and her mother hiding behind net curtains after that while journalists – Gill still in there – camped out on the doorstep on a night like this one, bitter cold, and tried to get them to talk.
She’d interviewed him again, only months before, about an ex-pupil who’d made it big. He hadn’t remembered her when she went back: when he did the same trick of holding her hand softly and looking into her face she thought he had, but there’d been no recognition in his eyes, it was just what he did. She’d felt his finger in her palm. Gill had listened to him saying that was what it was all about, bringing on young talent, not about ego. She had loathed him.
The way he looked her up and down, like he’d remember her next time. A hard-faced wife patrolling the room while they talked. And Gill had believed the accusations, every word. She’d convinced the mother and girl she believed them too, only when the police dropped the case they wouldn’t talk to her any more. As if it had been she who’d betrayed them.
Unstable, vulnerable, those were the words used of the girl who’d killed herself, the first one. Until he came on the scene she hadn’t been, only unprotected. No father and a mother run ragged: predators from top to bottom of the scale target those. No doubt Carmichael thought himself a cut above but he was the same as an uneducated taxi driver from Oldham who gets together with his mates to groom girls in care for sex. They identify an opportunity. They pick off the weak.
She had started to dig, then.
First Charlie, then Steve: both of them interested to start with, in the story. Just another story, the gleam of excitement at the chase. Then – stupidly, stupidly – she had slept with Charlie, just the once, stupid, wrong, and he felt that had given him the right to make it personal, to question her motives. Were you, you weren’t ever …? And started to tell her, it wasn’t safe, she was too close to the story. She’d walked out, so angry she hadn’t been able to trust herself to speak. More angry than was reasonable, because there was a germ of outrage in it – she wasn’t damaged, thank you very much – that made her understand the bind they were in, those girls hiding in their bedrooms, their fierce mothers. Don’t call me damaged. But most of all because: did you have to have been abused yourself to know this was wrong? Maybe that was how men saw it.
Then Steve. Gill wasn’t going to make the same mistake again, this time their relationship was strictly professional, or close enough. And gradually the focus was on those issues, it wasn’t called a witch hunt any more, it was mainstream, it was big news. And Steve had said, Go with it, that gleam in his eye. But Gill didn’t bring him what he wanted. She didn’t bring him the victims, she just got the newspaper threatened with legal action. She was close to the edge, and she knew it.
Gill took another swig of the wine and got out her laptop: at the bar the man who’d eyed her up adjusted his position on his stool and she sighed: couldn’t help herself. She brought up the search page. She was supposed to be in Sandringham at the weekend some time, interviewing the Queen’s butcher about what she was going to have for her Christmas dinner.
Anthony Carmichael. She varied the search terms every time. Dr Anthony Carmichael. Violin prodigy gifted student suicide. And she looked, for the thousandth time at where he’d been, who he’d taught. These were the faces she saw, from school yearbooks and class outings and local newspaper cuttings: a handful, no more. They populated her dreams, sat on buses with her, kept their heads lowered in a crowded street. She noted patterns of drug abuse, repeat offending, self-harm. And there would be others who simply disappeared, melting into the background. Passing for normal.
She saw them everywhere. She saw them yesterday, she’d seen them today.
A shy girl, accepting a prize in a long, loose dress that didn’t disguise how thin she was. Mother and sister in chairs beside her. The man giving the prize – for effort in music, year nine, effort, Jesus preserve her – was Anthony Carmichael, in a sports jacket, hair just beginning to go. Thought himself God’s gift. A middle-aged sleaze but they’re all gazing at him like it’s the second coming.
A school hall full of cross-legged kids, knickers showing. Wouldn’t be allowed these days. What’s wrong with me? Gill thought.
The girl accepting the prize was one of the ones Gill looked for, pursued, and came up with nothing: she had disappeared into thin air. Except. Except. She’d know that face anywhere. She’d seen that face. S
he leaned closer to look at the younger sister, front row next to her mother. Primary school age, little white chin set and angry. And that face, too. She frowned, as it bothered her. Was it that she saw them everywhere, like ghosts?
The man at the bar was coming over: her glass on the table seemed to be empty, suddenly.
‘Get you another?’ His voice diffident, polite. He’s her type, close up: dark hair, stocky, not too polished. Gill bookmarked the page and closed her computer.
‘Go on then,’ she said, weary.
Chapter Sixteen
Friday
Some of the things that woke her, at half hour intervals through the night, were real.
His bloated body had risen to the surface and was bobbing there as the sun rose, turning slowly to face the sky.
Not true.
It had all been an accident, a mistake, a misunderstanding and the police were letting her go home. A kind face looked at her, nodding, as she explained.
Not true.
Someone had seen them.
That one was true; that one started her fully awake.
Staring in the bedroom dark until her eyes hurt Bridget had to lie very still otherwise she thought her heart might accelerate out of her chest. Every chemical in her body felt toxic. She’d die, and the carpet and cardboard and polythene with his DNA on it still in the back of the van would be found and – and. And nothing: then it would all go away.
But she didn’t want to die. Not any more. The thought came to Bridget as a revelation.
So think: there had been a man.
He hadn’t seen them doing anything, but he had seen them. He had been standing at the verge as they came back along the lane, close to the turning to the sailing club where a single streetlight stood guard. A youngish bloke with hair sticking up, in overalls. He must have recognised Bridget, her and her little white van because he raised a cheery hand, peering in as they slowed. The lane had been narrow.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 15