Amazingly, later that afternoon, she saw someone else from school wearing one of the very same skirts, one of the cool sixth-formers called Judy. She had cut a slit up one side and was wearing it with black wool tights and Doc Martens. Gemma felt proud of herself. Maybe she was not quite so useless at clothes after all.
In her bedroom at home, the skirt did not look so cool. Perhaps it was her tan tights and brown loafers.
In the car driving to Oakham, her mother kept saying, ‘Well, this is a surprise all right. It certainly is a surprise.’
It was a freezing night and Oakham was deserted. The only person Gemma saw as they drove down the High Street was a man in the telephone box outside the bank. His dog was waiting for him outside, a West Highland terrier wearing a tartan coat, snuffling around with its lead trailing across the pavement.
Round the corner from the market place there was a new Italian restaurant called Mama Mia. It was the first Italian restaurant in town, as far as Gemma knew. It had green paintwork and a wrought-iron lamp hanging above the doorway. In the window, there was a framed menu. They stopped to look.
‘I didn’t book,’ her father muttered anxiously.
Gemma peered through the window. Only two of the tables were occupied, both by couples. The interior of the restaurant was lit by an orange glow so soft and textured that it almost felt warm through the glass. A young man wearing a white apron was standing on the bar and changing the bulb in the light that hung above it. He was talking over his shoulder to someone Gemma couldn’t see.
Her parents were silent, examining the menu. She waited beside them, feeling the hardness and coldness of the pavement through the thin soles of her shoes. She had forgotten her gloves and her hands were jammed into the pockets of her duffle jacket. When she exhaled, her breath condensed against the restaurant’s window.
Her father shook his head. ‘We can’t afford this . . .’ he murmured. ‘Look at this. This is a real rip-off.’
Gemma felt herself freeze over.
Her mother was quiet for a long time. Then she said, ‘It is rather pricey . . .’
Gemma turned away and bit the inside of her lip. She was so cold she had to bite hard in order to feel anything. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, willing herself to draw blood.
‘I tell you what,’ her father said eventually. ‘It’s your birthday, Mum. I tell you what, you and Gemma go in and have something. I’ll give you the money. I can get some fish and chips and wait in the car.’
Gemma tightened her fists inside her jacket and thought, please, Mum, please, but even as she thought it, knew what her mother’s response would be.
‘Oh no, dear, we couldn’t possibly do that. No . . .’ She tailed off, then suddenly brightened. ‘I know, let’s all get fish and chips and take them home.’
In the car going home, her mother said, twice, ‘We don’t often have fish and chips, do we?’
Her father had turned the heating off before they left. He put it on again as soon as they got in but it took a while for the house to warm up. Gemma kept her duffle jacket on while they ate the fish and chips at the dining table, putting the newspaper on the same oval place-mats they used for breakfast.
Ode to Kubla Khan
Oh Kubla Khan! How can you know what
It is like to be a girl trapped as I am
Buried above ground.
Vengeance will be mine!
Who will afford me a shelter when I have broken free
From the manacles forged by my youthfulness
I am encompassed round by many things but mostly
Mine own inability.
I am fill’d with sorrow
And the sadly followed furrow
Breaths not upon tomorrow
All I can do is burrow –
And I have been buried enough!
copyright Gemma Cowper
3rd February 1997
23rd March 1997
Today, I had to think quite hard to work out what day it was. There doesn’t seem much difference between the days and the weekends now. I was surprised however when I looked at the date and saw how long it was since I last wrote in my diary. It seems perculiar that the months are going by so quickly when the days are so slow.
We don’t do anything much now and I find it quite hard to stay interested in my poetry even though I know I am writing what is some of my best stuff these days. Coleridge wrote his best stuff when he was depressed as well, I’m sure. I think it’s important that I keep writing all my thoughts down because you never know when one might become a poem but it is difficult because often I just can’t remember what I have thought.
For he on mildew hath fed
And drunk the scum of paradise.
A thousand thousand slimy things live on, and so do I.
I am a girl who has penance done and penance more will do.
In my opinion, The Ancient Mariner goes off a bit when you get to the hermit.
Suddenly, the weather became hotter. It had been grey for so long that when the sun broke through, Gemma felt as strange and as dislocated as if they had moved house. The sun showed how dusty her bedroom was, bleaching the colour out of her blue duvet. She felt, all at once, that changes were coming. One day, she noticed that the huge elder tree in the lane had broken into eternal green, and she smiled to realise that there had been a tree in that spot at all. It seemed as surprising as if she had opened her curtains one morning and found that somebody had thrown up a block of flats overnight.
The day was punctuated by meals. These were her only points of reference. They still had dinner early, going to bed at the same time her father had arranged when they had all been revising for her GCSEs. During the winter, this had seemed like a good idea – the nights were so dark and miserable and the house was always so cold. But now that spring had arrived, she realised that, again, they would be going to bed when it was still light.
One afternoon, she said to her father, lightly, ‘I think I might go for a walk after dinner. Mum said we needed some bread for tomorrow.’
Her father stopped and put down his book. He had taken to reading about the Suez crisis. He had told Gemma that it was important for men like him to understand where everything had gone wrong.
He looked at her, then he sighed. ‘Gemma, do you really have no imagination?’
As usual, he paused for some time, as if this was a question she might want to answer.
Eventually, he closed his book and sat up in his chair. ‘Gemma, I realise that in some ways I have failed you as a father. I have not been strict enough. I have allowed you to go your own dreamy way about the house, as you do every day, as if it doesn’t matter what you do. I, however, do have some imagination. I read the papers every day. If you read the papers every day, you would realise that it is out of the question you going off wandering around the countryside whenever you feel like it.’
He returned to his book.
After the meal, Gemma rose from the table. She rose slowly. She had been doing everything carefully, that afternoon. The windows were all closed and locked now. The windows would always be closed.
As she rose, she had the feeling that her life had gone into slow motion. Her body seemed to straighten in one fluid movement. Her mother was reaching out a creaking hand for the glass of water that sat in front of her. Her father was leaning back in his seat, tipping slowly, easing himself.
As she moved away from the table, she realised that she had become deaf. Perhaps it was because she was moving so slowly. There was no sound from her bare feet on the carpet. The dishes that she held piled in her hands were solid as rock. The kitchen swung towards her as she left the dining room, the jangly whiteness of it widening her eyes.
At this rate, she thought, my life is going to take for ever.
Then, suddenly, there was a rush of noise in her ears, a multiple pile-up of sound. She was standing at the kitchen sink and her hands were immersed in hot, sudded water. The water hurt. Lying beside th
e sink were her mother’s pink, flaccid gloves, and she knew without remembering that she was doing the washing-up with bare hands because the gloves were damp inside. They had been clammy.
The sink was too full. The dishes clattered and tinkled; plates, glasses and cutlery all in together. Soapsuds were clambering up the stainless steel in a last-ditch attempt to escape. The water foamed and fell as she scrabbled in it. When she lifted a plate, she saw that her hands were red and swollen. Water splattered the front of her t-shirt and she felt the warmth of it, then instantly the cold.
Her father was standing beside her, very near, his mouth close to her ear. He was saying something, something about rinsing the plate, but the words were huge and distorted, like a badly tuned radio. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and in the corner of her vision she could see the empty flesh of his upper arms. It was marbled, with a scattering of sparse pale hairs.
Her fingers closed round the next item in the sink. The handle was smooth and weighty. She lifted it.
Her mother had gone into the village to catch the shop before it closed at six o’clock. It was five to six. It was going to be another early night.
Her father’s arm grazed against hers. She lifted the knife in her hand.
Even though he wasn’t leaning against her, she felt the weight of him, the purity of his love for her, the density of it – and she knew that to be loved that much was no longer bearable. She turned.
3
In 1995, 61% of homicide victims were acquainted with their killer or killers.
Homicide Index
Home Office Research Statistics Directorate
DID THEY KNOW THEIR KILLER? was one choice, which had pleasingly scary undertones. In a rural area like ours it seemed to imply you might be next. HUNT FOR MURDER ORPHAN was another, which I thought had too much pathos. In the end we settled for WHERE IS GEMMA. The use of the first name would appeal to our readers’ familiarity with Nether Bowston and the Cowper family, despite the fact that most people in Rutland had probably never been there or met them. The Cowpers had only lived in the county for twelve years, I discovered, so they were outsiders, but their murder was the first to occur in Rutland this century, which made them very local indeed.
Suddenly, everybody remembered an association with the family. Jennifer in reception? Her mother had been to Keep Fit with Mrs Cowper, years ago. Ken, the man who delivered our stationery supplies from a wholesaler on Ashwell Road? He had been behind the counter once when Mr Cowper came in to get some 100gsm bond and three rolls of fax paper. He knew exactly what it was because Mr Cowper had telephoned in advance to check that they sold goods to the general public and had been very specific about what weight of paper he wanted.
Doug had been for his usual weekend drink in the Westgate Tavern and got talking to a schoolteacher at the posh school the daughter went to until last year. The teacher had had some sort of run-in with Cowper who, he said, was a right rum sod. ‘I don’t think I’d ever met him myself,’ Doug ruminated as he told us this, ‘although he might have been that git who turned up at the council meeting a couple of years ago and said had we all thought clearly about what independence would mean for the rates and the educational system was bad enough round here as it was. I remember him because they had to throw him out. You were on holiday, Alison. But he came from Nether Bagwash, this bloke.’
We all wanted to be a part of it. It was our murder.
As it had happened practically on my doorstep, I now had a certain cachet. A special degree of sympathy was extended towards me, as if the physical closeness of my home to theirs made me a near-victim. People said things like, ‘You must be terrified’. As they said it, there was envy in their eyes.
Doug urged me to make the most of what he called ‘the personal angle’. He was writing the front page story, but I was to write a side column entitled THEY LIVED NEXT DOOR.
It was generally agreed that we should have an embargo on the phrase ‘house of horror’. So we ran a picture caption underneath a large photograph of the Cowpers’ place which said Shock in Rutland Record offices was intensified this week at the realisation that the tragic murder house was only minutes’ walk away from the home of Chief Reporter Alison Akenside. I tried to think of a way of beginning the report which did not say, I was first on the scene last Friday but realised I was fighting a losing battle. I was first on the scene last Friday when police officers made the gruesome discovery . . .
There are some occasions when only certain words will do, when people need the comfort of the inevitable. I could have written, I was annoyed when they wouldn’t let me through the police barriers to have a proper nose around or What struck me most was the officer wiping something off his shoe; but at a time like that, you can’t rub people’s noses in too much reality. The event was public property, and that demanded that we wrote a collective response. People would turn to us for information phrased in a way that sounded like a common voice, the language of the market place just outside our office door – the same market where you could buy coloured cotton reels and pet food and cheap wooden photo frames complete with picture of blond, smiling cherub (useful if your own kid is plug-ugly).
I had no reason to question what I wrote.
Miss Crabbe, my neighbour, had no such scruples. She caught me at my front gate as I was leaving for a press conference at the local police station on the Tuesday morning.
Nether Bowston had had the busiest three days in its history. Convoys of vehicles had been to-ing and fro-ing down Brooke Road all weekend. I cancelled my Friday night game of badminton with my friend Lizzie and my Saturday hair appointment in Leicester. I spent most of that weekend at one or other of my windows.
The nationals were on the scene by the end of the day. The police had drafted in a super I didn’t know – a fat geezer with shiny buttons who combed his hair before he spoke to reporters. He held an impromptu conference in front of the house that evening so he wouldn’t have the tabloid snappers crawling round the fields at the back and leaping over garden walls. Further details would be given at the regular Tuesday press conference at Oakham police station but the dailies got enough to run the story. Mr Thomas Cowper (52) and Mrs Edith Cowper (53) had died from multiple stab wounds. The murder weapon had not yet been found. Time of death was not yet established but it had probably happened at the beginning of the week. Police were extremely concerned for the safety of their daughter, Gemma (17), who was missing. There was no sign of any forced entry.
There are no upstairs windows at the front of my cottage. It is one of the model cottages built by a local benefactor at the turn of the last century. He wanted his tithe workers to have decent housing, but it was considered unseemly that they should be able to look down on any aristocrats who might pass through the village. There is a small upstairs window in the back bedroom. I discovered that if I leant out of it with a pair of binoculars I could just make out the moving shapes of the officers drafted in to search the field behind the Cowpers’ house. They were wearing t-shirts and trousers, some had caps and gloves, and they were raking their way slowly across the whole field. I wondered if they got bored after a couple of hours – or was a murder case still so unusual that they stayed alert and keen, eager to be the one to discover a vital clue? Occasionally they would stop and chat to each other. I envied them. I thought it was probably fun.
Onlookers turned up, of course; local people who just happened to be passing through. There was even a couple who had come all the way from Corby. They stopped me as I was walking down the lane on the Sunday morning. Was there a pub nearby where they could get lunch? I told them the only pub in Nether Bowston closed twenty years ago. That out of the way, they wanted to know if I knew where the murder had taken place. I pretended ignorance and walked away, shaking my head at the scope and unsubtlety of human curiosity. What shall we do this morning darling? Oh, I know, let’s go and have a look round that village where two people have been viciously slaughtered in their own home.
/> Miss Crabbe waylaid me as I was unlocking my car on Tuesday morning. I was not in the mood for a gossip. I wanted to write up some notes at the office before I went to the press conference.
‘Alison,’ she called out to me, raising a white, long-fingered hand and wagging it in my direction. ‘Alison, I’m so glad I caught you. I tapped at your door last night but you must have been out.’ We both knew I hadn’t been out. I had been in the bath. My bathroom is on the ground floor and I have my baths so hot that steam billows out of the window. It almost envelops both our gardens.
I had successfully dodged Miss C all weekend but now my time was up.
‘I thought I ought to have a quick word, in the light of recent events,’ she continued. ‘I suppose we will be covering this one together.’
Miss Crabbe is a flat-chested seventy-something who has lived in the village for ever. I recruited her as Nether Bowston’s Correspondent not long after I moved in. (The old one had just died of pneumonia and I was damned if I was going to do it.) Her usual remit included meetings of the women’s section of the Royal British Legion, car boot sales and the local annual pancake tossing competition. This year, a Mrs Edward Wright won the Mrs John Burnish Memorial Prize after tossing eight pancakes in one minute. Mrs John Burnish was an unfortunate casualty of the contest five years ago. After a valiant six pancakes, she collapsed and died.
I knew that Miss Crabbe would expect to be included in the coverage of the Cowper case and I had bad news for her. Doug had told me on Friday that he wanted to cover it himself, which meant I was effectively demoted to Village Correspondent, and Miss Crabbe was demoted to your average local busybody.
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