Our office was perched on the corner of the market place, a minute’s walk from the Castle. The production and advertising staff were on the ground floor. Cheryl and I had a first-floor office and Doug sat in isolationist splendour in an attic office opposite the junk room we call the Library. On market day in summer, it was possible to throw open the sash windows and pick up local gossip and potential stories as they drifted up from the stallholders and customers, floating skywards amongst the hoarse, disinterested cries of ‘Peaches ten for a pound’ and ‘Twenty half o’mush’.
After an hour and a half, I left the court session. The rest of it was going to be a series of non-appearances and adjournments. Doug would stay in case anything unexpected came up – and he was thinking of buying a caravan from Gail’s brother and wanted to have a chat with her about it.
There wasn’t much for that week’s paper. We were all sick of Independence stories and so were the readers. We wanted something fresh to cover but were all too knackered to go out and find it. I needed to get on the phone.
Each Monday, I put a call through to my friend Bill at the fire station and he tells me if anything has happened over the weekend. It was Bill who fed me the bananas, my first story for the Record, one small paragraph which is now framed and hanging on my kitchen wall.
Missing Bananas
A Belmesthorpe farmer made a surprise discovery on Tuesday morning when he happened upon sixty-three boxes of bananas which had been dumped in one of his fields. An appeal has been made for the owner to come forward. ‘We’re baffled,’ a police spokesperson has admitted.
When my brother Andrew saw the story he said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘The title,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the bananas which were missing, it was the owner. Everybody knew exactly where the bananas were.’
Andrew has always been a pedant.
During the week, all I need to do is keep my ears open. The fire station is a hundred yards down the High Street. I can hear the siren as it starts up. I go to the window and watch to see which way the engine is going, then get on the phone to the Village Correspondents in that direction and get them to look out of their windows too. If I guess right, the engine can be tracked halfway across the county.
As I crossed the Castle grounds I thought that I should ring the Whissendine Correspondent and find out if there were any rumours about the latest fracas between the Thomsons and the Smarts. I wouldn’t be able to use any background until after the trial but it would be good to get a few notes done in advance.
The only flurry of excitement in court that morning had been over one of the assault cases, an Oakham man in a suede jacket, up for punching his girlfriend. Just before his case was called, the door opened and a thin young man about my age sidled into the court. Everybody paused as he was approached by Gail. (Sometimes we get tourists coming to have a look around who don’t realise that the Castle is closed on Mondays and Gail has to usher them out. We had three Japanese once. It took quite a while to explain.) After a short exchange, Gail gestured the newcomer towards the press bench. He walked swiftly across the court, head down, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible – which made him riveting to watch. He crossed the bench behind us, then slid in next to me. The bench crackled.
Doug is not the sort to waste time on social niceties. He leant forward across me.
‘Who are you?’ he hissed to the young man.
‘David Poe,’ he whispered back. ‘Press Agency.’
The nationals had descended en masse for Independence, chortling into their notepads and churning out stories that made us sound like characters from an Ealing comedy. The following day, they all disappeared, vultures who had got wind of a fresher carcase.
‘What are you doing here?’ Doug hissed, ignoring the swift glances from the magistrates’ bench. I pressed myself back to facilitate the exchange.
‘This Browning,’ David Poe replied, indicating the man in suede, who was talking to his solicitor. ‘Rumour has it he’s a friend of a cousin of Jeremy Beadle. The Star are interested.’
Doug let out a short but resonant laugh, his head snapping back and his mouth opening in an exhalation of derision which echoed round the hall. Heads in the courtroom turned. Gail stepped towards us, frowning, and Doug lifted the flat of his hand, nodding an apology.
The friend of the cousin of Jeremy Beadle had finished talking to his brief, a black-suited woman who, while she talked, had been tidying up a scattering of pens and pencils on the table in front of her and pushing them into a plastic pencil case in the shape and design of a packet of Walkers Crisps. She rose to address the Bench, asking for an adjournment for probation reports to be obtained. The adjournment was granted and a date set. Bail remained unconditional.
As Browning turned to leave the court, David Poe eased himself from the bench and sidled out, following.
Doug leant sideways towards me, arms still folded. ‘He’ll have a fine time if he tries to doorstep that Browning,’ he muttered from the side of his mouth. ‘He’s liable to get a punch up the bracket.’
As I crossed the empty market square half an hour later, I saw David Poe standing in the doorway of the Nearly New shop, looking as though a punch up the bracket might have been exactly what he’d got. He was frowning and muttering and slapping a mobile phone. I stopped and watched him for a moment, unable to resist the temptation to be helpful.
‘Excuse me,’ I called across the square. He looked up, still frowning. He was sitting next to me a minute ago, I thought. Now he can’t even remember who I am, the pillock. His fringe was too long and his hair fell forward over his face, obliging him to make small, sideways tossing motions with his head which added to his air of irritation.
‘There’s a pay phone right there.’ I pointed back towards the butter cross, where the red telephone box stood out like a beacon among the stone buildings. He nodded, still frowning, then broke into an unexpected smile, as if he had just caught sight of himself in my eyes. He lifted the mobile phone in one hand and shrugged. ‘Thank you,’ he called.
As I opened the door to the office, I wondered whether I should have invited him in to use our phone – but I knew Doug would be back soon, and if David Poe thought Mr Browning was truculent he had yet to witness a full demonstration of Doug’s contempt for the national press.
Our biggest fear at the Record was that something newsworthy would happen on a Thursday afternoon when the paper was going to press. When a Tornado jet from the RAF base at South Luffenham crashed into Quakers Spinney last autumn, it timed its immolation to coincide with the end of the working day and the last copy of the Record rolling off the printer’s press in Grantham. Worst-case scenario.
Doug had to make an on-the-spot decision. If we were going to re-write the front page he would have to ring the printer, tell him to pulp every paper and stop his staff going home. All he had was a report of an explosion from the Correspondent in Ayston. Doug was cautious by nature but I think something must have got to him with that one, some tingling in the fingertips perhaps. Cheryl and I were making ready to get our coats on when he appeared in the doorway and announced, ‘Something’s broke at Ayston. I can smell it.’
He rang the printer from my phone. ‘Pulp the lot of them,’ he said. ‘We’ll have the new pages by midnight.’
It paid off. The two-man crew of the Tornado had been killed and a crater twenty foot deep left in the charred forestry. A Ridlington family out on a picnic was missing. It made the Nine O’Clock News that night, albeit in the summary.
The family turned up safe and sound the next day but it didn’t spoil Doug’s professional satisfaction. We had scooped every local paper for miles.
If something big happens on a Friday, there’s nothing we can do. By then, the Record has been delivered to hundreds of homes across the county and is stacked neatly in every newsagent. We sit glumly at our desks with the weary feeling that the weekend ought to have started.
Everybody feels like a day off after press day – but there’s next week’s paper to fill. We can’t afford to leave it all until Monday.
A big story breaking on a Friday is something of a relief. It wakes everybody up for a start, and gives us plenty of time to do the background before we have to go to press.
This story, my story, the murder of the Cowper family, began that Friday.
I was still at home but about to leave for the office. I hate rushing around in the mornings, so I always get up early. I have a bath and play with the water. My Friday morning treat is to do it without the radio on, so I don’t have to listen to the news. It is the only concession I make to having put the paper to bed the day before.
My first intimation that something was about to start happening came as I was standing at my kitchen window, finishing my third mug of tea. I often stand there in the mornings, leaning forward against the sink, looking out at the rose bushes in the narrow border between my front aspect and the lane. I like planning things that way. I like planning more roses.
I was clutching my mug in both hands and wondering if I had cut the bushes back a bit too far. My favourite moment of the gardening year is when the first tiny red shoots appear.
It was then that I heard the vehicle speeding down Brooke Road, some way distant but approaching rapidly. It didn’t sound like a car – it was something heavier, the engine shifting gear. I knew immediately that this meant something. Nothing ever speeds through Nether Bowston. It isn’t on the way to anywhere.
It was an ambulance, swaying smoothly down the narrow road, with no flashing light or siren. It was followed closely by a police car, also silent. I put down my cup and picked up my bag from the kitchen table. I slammed the front door behind me and was rooting in the bag as I went down the stone path to my gate. The notepad was in my hand as I rounded the corner by Ostlewaite’s Barn.
At the end of the road, there was a large detached cottage built of clean red brick. It was one of the few red-brick buildings in the village and always looked very new, perhaps because it was so immaculate. The front lawn was a neat, borderless rectangle, the driveway a short sweep of sandy-coloured shingle. The five-barred gate was creosoted, and, as far as I remember, always closed. I could recall nodding to the middle-aged couple who lived there. They had a daughter, I thought; I wasn’t sure. The house was on the edge of the village, the last house on a road that led out to open fields. They were not a family that mixed.
There was no sign of them. The ambulance and police car had parked on the verge. Three other patrol cars were parked in a line further down the road. The ambulance’s back doors were open but the paramedics seemed inactive, standing with their arms folded, talking to one of the officers surrounding the cottage.
The front door of the cottage was also open. I could see several bulky, dark figures in the hallway. One of them was bending down.
I was looking at the house as I approached and nearly walked into the line of tape that two officers were stretching across the road, reaching from a sapling on the right-hand side to a fence post on the left. I stopped, momentarily confused that my way should be barred. One of the policemen looked up from affixing his end of the tape. He was a thick-set, middle-aged man with a solid, hard expression. I knew most of the local force but I didn’t know him. He gazed at me briefly, then shook his head.
I peered past him to try and see an officer I recognised. Somebody would tell me what was going on.
It was a muggy day, that day. All week, the mornings had been gloomy, the afternoons sunny and the nights dense and close. The pattern had shown no signs of breaking and despite a slight breeze, the clouds seemed bunched up in the birdless sky, as if pressure from elsewhere was squeezing them together. The air felt thick, warm without being comfortable. It was a morning that held no trace of brightness.
An officer emerged from the house and paused on the doorstep, then rested a hand on the door-frame for balance while he lifted a foot and examined the sole of his shoe.
I glanced behind me. Nobody else from the village had come down. I was the first on the scene. I remember thinking, it’s not like me to hesitate.
2
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
It was summer. Gemma was sitting on the low red-brick wall at the back of her parents’ house, perched sideways with the soles of her bare feet lying flat against the wall’s rough surface. Her head was twisted so that she could look out over the fields.
The land behind their house was fallow, a lumpy expanse of ploughed, dark soil in which the occasional pale weed struggled. She had a vague memory of cows when she had been small – huge-tongued creatures with wet, yellow-rimmed eyes that stared back at her without expression. There were no cows now.
The position she sat in was uncomfortable – there was nothing to lean against. So after a while she turned her head away from the fields and rested her chin on her knees. She examined her toenails.
The previous day, her parents had gone out and left her alone for over an hour. She had sneaked into her mother’s room and stolen an old red nail varnish from the vanity unit, then painted her toenails in her bedroom with the door shut. It was only after they had dried, as she wiggled her feet in the air, that she thought to return the varnish and look for remover. There was none. In a panic, she had tried to scrape the varnish off with tissue. It was dry but not hard and came away in smears and lumps. She used one of her own emery boards to slough off the rest but rims of tell-tale red still lingered in the cuticles.
When her parents came home, her father had called up the stairs, ‘We’re back! What have you been doing?’
‘Working on my history project,’ she had called down. Then she had shut her bedroom door and changed into trousers and socks.
Now, she examined the toenails up close, the ridged and roughened surfaces, the guilty lividity of the remaining varnish. She picked off a few flakes with her fingernail.
Alongside her right foot, a tiny red ant was making its way across the top of the harsh, hot wall. She watched its progress as it tumbled into the minute black craters which peppered the surface of the brick, flipping itself out of each one without difficulty but still taking several seconds to scurry the length of her foot.
Her long hair felt heavy down her back. She could feel the sun on her head.
She squashed the red ant with one finger.
The History of Murder in England
by Gemma Cowper
Set II – Mr Donaldson
Introduction
Murder is undoubtedly the worst thing you can do to anyone, so it does seem funny that so many people like it so much in that they watch a lot of television programmes and read many books on the subject. A lot of things which are not so bad are taken a great deal more seriously, such as burgling houses and stealing a car and hitting your wife, which everybody agrees are bad things to do. It is only in the case of murder that you get so many films and books.
This is probably for several reasons.
1. Because it is so bad makes it hard to take seriously, i. e. the very thing that makes it bad also makes people want to talk about it a lot.
2. People who write books and make television programmes need to do things that people will want to watch and for that then things have to happen.
3. Some people do not perhaps realise how awful it is because the people who it has been done to are never around to tell their side of the story.
This project will look at some of the worst murders that have happened in the past in England and ask why they are often treated so lightly today. A good example is the Jack the Ripper case. Nobody knows who Jack the Ripper really was but people are always trying to work it out whereas very few people are interested in his unfortunate victims. Also, that is one ca
se where people make a lot of jokes a lot of the time.
Have people’s attitudes changed or has it always been like this?
What is the current situation?
Will things change in the future?
History and English were her favourite subjects. She was going to do both at A-level but the third subject was a bit of a problem. Her father wanted her to do a science because he said that it was important she should do something he could really help her with. He was keen to help. He had already put together a revision programme for her GCSEs. It was pinned to the kitchen wall, with each weekday evening marked out as a colour block; red for History, blue for English, green for Geography and so on (the colour codes were drawn in at the bottom). She was doing ten subjects, so if she revised for one each evening, Monday to Friday, it would take two weeks to get through them all before the rota came round again. Saturdays were for gaining what her father called ‘a general overview’. Sundays were a day of rest and clarinet practice.
She couldn’t wait for A-levels. She couldn’t wait to not have to think about photosynthesis or coastal shelving. She knew that when the details of the ordinary world had been left behind, she could be as brilliant as she deserved to be. Nobody had fully realised her potential as yet – not even her father.
English Language and Literature were well in hand already so she was permitting herself to read ahead. She had consulted Mrs Macpherson on what would be on the A-level syllabus next year and Mrs Macpherson had said, ‘The Romantic poets, Gemma. But I wouldn’t bother yourself with those right now. You’ve got quite enough on your plate.’ Gemma had nodded, glowing with the knowledge that she was going to do something above and beyond what she was supposed to do. By the time it came to Next Year, she would be way ahead.
Friday, 17th May 1996
Today was even hotter than it has been up till now and by lunch time I thought, God, I will never complain about being cold again. The only cool place on the whole planet was English because that block was built centuries ago and the stone walls are so thick that nothing can get through. I find it very boring that we are still stuck on Ted Hughes. Everybody else seems really into dead dogs in ditches and I just think, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Jane and Biz are very fond of calling me Gemma Cowpat right now which they seem to think is hilarious, as if we didn’t go through that one in the first year. I am a little clod surrounded by pebbles. They are all just completely stupid. I think I should tell them that my name is Klopstock and I will one day defy the whole of England. Not that it would mean anything to them.
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