by M B Vincent
For Niamh Strachan,
the wonderchild who’s growing up
to be a wonderwoman
From the Kidbury Echo, page 3:
‘MARROW MAN’ TRIUMPHS AGAIN
Local resident Keith Dike yet again took the top prize in the marrow section at the Castle Kidbury Show. Keith (pictured right with his mammoth gourd) puts his three-year winning streak down to his special compost. ‘It’s a closely guarded secret,’ he said as he accepted the coveted Gold Rosette and a £10 gift voucher for Lynne’s Minimart. Keith vowed to return next year, with an even bigger marrow.
GOLD HILL
Danny was walking his dog.
‘Just walking my dog,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Just walking my dog.’ He reached down to pat Jumble and she leapt at his fingers before darting away. ‘Anybody asks, I’m just walking my dog.’
They trudged together up the slope. Gold Hill was the highest point above Castle Kidbury, but Danny didn’t look down at the houses. He didn’t notice the streetlamps flicker off as the new day broke. Something up ahead held his attention. Something familiar, that today looked different, and odd.
‘Come on, Jumble.’ Danny narrowed his slanted eyes at the scarecrow, troubled that its hat seemed to be missing. He didn’t notice the aqua-blue Morris Traveller below, on the road that approached the hill.
The car’s progress was slow on the empty stretch. To one side, caravans and tents gathered to disfigure the green and pleasant land. The car stopped at the traffic lights on the outskirts of the town proper, even though they shone green, inviting it in.
‘No hat!’ Danny’s breathing was laboured. The scarecrow was a landmark, even though its function was obscure, with no crops to guard at the top of the hill. It was an unchanging feature of these ‘walks’ with Jumble. ‘And no overcoat.’
Below, the old Morris avoided the town centre, beetling instead through the crescents and closes of a hinterland housing estate.
Now the dog was entranced by the scarecrow, when usually she barrelled past, nose to the ground. Jumble snuffled at the dark figure outlined against the brightening sky. She growled, her small stiff body trembling.
‘Jumble?’ Danny and his dog were best friends, apart, of course, from her, who wasn’t exactly a best friend, but was something more, something special. He was tuned into her the way he was tuned into Jumble, and he’d never seen his dog maddened like this. As if bursting to tell him something, but unable to tear its eyes away from the scarecrow.
There was a smell. Of wrong things. Of things that had gone off. Danny could almost taste it. He was scared, but nobody had told his feet; they carried him towards the scarecrow.
The dot that was a car left the maze of the estate and had a wide road all to itself.
On the hill, Danny fell to his knees and wailed.
The scarecrow should have been a collection of sticks, its twiggy arms stuck through ancient sleeves, a trilby jammed on its weathered football face. Instead, it was solid and meaty. It was naked, streaked all over with jammy blood. It was a man, arms out, gory head down, nailed in place like that Jesus his nan was so keen on. But a Jesus frozen in an agonising scream.
Danny couldn’t stop crying. He knew that somehow he’d be in terrible trouble over this.
The crucified man leant forward, pinioned by bony wrists and ankles. As if he was straining to be free, to walk down to Castle Kidbury and beg for help.
A breeze lifted his gummy hair. Blackish blood filled hollow eye sockets.
Danny turned and ran. He didn’t look back in case the Jesus man had ripped his nailed wrists from the wood and stepped down to follow him, bloody feet slithering on the wet grass. Danny stumbled and fell. He got up. He shouted; afterwards, he couldn’t remember which words.
Far below, out of earshot, the car had stopped at the top of a winding drive. Eventually the driver’s door opened and a figure got out, to be swallowed by a grand house.
Chapter 1
THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
Sunday 15 May
Jess let herself into Harebell House, relieved that her key still worked. Chintz. Flagstones. The tick of an inherited Grandfather clock.
Sundays in small market towns have their own special atmosphere, of bells and hush and a sense of waiting. In Harebell House it always felt like Sunday.
‘Dad?’ she called. He was an early riser, and Jess imagined him padding about somewhere in the rambling house’s innards. ‘Dad?’ Slightly louder. Her voice echoed in the flagstone hall.
A door opened and a creature roared in, a flash of wheat-coloured fur. Moose jumped up at Jess, deliriously happy as only a dog can be.
‘Moose!’ Jess matched his enthusiasm, glad of its uncomplicated simplicity. ‘Oh Moosey Moose!’ She put her arms around him and smiled as he barked.
A woman stepped through a glazed door, a hen sitting complacently in her arms. Her broad face was pinkish. She was blonde, but country blonde, not town blonde.
Jess took a step backwards, let Moose drop. ‘Who the hell are you?’ The woman wore slippers, she noticed. She was perfectly at home, whoever she was.
‘No, my darling,’ said the stranger, an Eastern European rhythm to her words. ‘Who hell are you?’
‘I’m Jess,’ said Jess. She glared, unable to dial it down.
‘Ah, the famous Jess . . .’ The woman looked her up and down. ‘I see what your father means.’
‘Where is my father?’
‘Jimmy’s out, darling.’ Perhaps she saw the tremor that ran through Jess at such familiarity with the forbidding Judge James Castle. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not your new step-mummy.’ She laughed, shoulders shaking, chicken juddering. ‘Come on. Cup of tea, isn’t it?’
The kitchen was its timeless self. Scuffed wooden table of enormous size. Scarred units painted cream. A self-important Aga. But it was shipshape, cleaner than it had ever been. Worktops scoured. Chrome gleaming.
‘Sit.’ The order was peremptory. The chicken was dropped out through an open window. ‘Kettle is just boiled.’
Jess sat, like an obedient pet, in her habitual dark, shapeless separates that disguised the ins and outs of her body. Baggy tee over baggy skirt over leggings. She noticed that her Doc Martens had trailed mud into the pristine kitchen and felt pleased.
The teapot was new; Jess thought of it as an interloper, then caught herself thinking that and despaired. The teapot was just a teapot.
She pulled off her all-seasons knit hat and freed her disordered dark-brown hair, the same colour as her eyes. She folded her arms brusquely, more like a toddler than a woman in her early thirties. ‘So . . . do I get to know who you are?’
‘My name, my darling, is Bogna. Not spelt like the seaside place.’ She laughed again, that hearty laugh. ‘I am housekeeper. I look after beautiful house.’
‘Dad never said.’
‘His head is full of serious stuff.’ Stoof. Bogna’s accent was soothing, despite her workmanlike way of moving and dressing. Battered jeans. A man’s aged shirt. Somewhere in her fifties, she was a little battered herself, but radiant with it. ‘Some days I barely see him. He is not like retired man. Always out. Or in his study.’ Stoody.
‘Is he, you know, okay?’
‘You’ll find out, my darling.’
Looking about her, Jess registered an absence. ‘Where’s Miffy?’
‘Dead,’ said Bogna.
‘What?’ The cat had warmed Harebell House laps for a decade. ‘Nobody said . . .’
‘You weren’t here, isn’t it?’
They drank tea in silence. The garden beyond the windows gradually brightened, its topiary taking shape.
Jess stood and o
pened a kitchen cupboard. Cleaning products stared back at her. ‘Oh. Biscuits?’
Bogna tutted. ‘Not allowed.’
‘Not . . .?’
‘The Judge must not get fat.’
Jess narrowed her eyes. ‘Where’s the biscuit tin gone?’
Bogna shrugged; she knew nothing of the tin’s long history, of the part it played in comforting a younger Jess when she sloped in from school. ‘Recycled, I suppose.’
Jess remembered the form of the tin, its ridges, the metallic sound of it. She mourned it keenly for a moment before noises outside made both women lift their heads.
Stamping of feet. A bicycle being parked in the glassed utility room to the side of the kitchen. A clearing of a throat. The door opened, and His Honour Judge Castle QC entered, head down to remove a sperm-shaped helmet, saying, ‘Twenty K, Bogna! Mostly uphill, to boot. Not bad at all.’
The Judge was all in black Lycra, his long, sexagenarian body sleek and, to Jess’s eyes, inappropriately lithe. She mentally pixelated certain regions.
Bending to pull at the Velcro straps on his cycling shoes, the Judge said, ‘Something’s going on up by Gold Hill. Three police cars sped past me. Almost—’ He straightened and saw Jess, who had half stood to greet him. ‘Ah. I see.’
He left the room.
Bogna pulled in her chin. ‘What’s bitten him on bum?’
‘I’ll go to my room.’ Jess picked up her rucksack. ‘Unless that’s been recycled?’
Harebell House was a labyrinth of genteel good taste. Tucked away down a short wallpapered hall off a landing, the room was exactly as it had been through Jess’s teenage years. Striped walls. Louvred built-in wardrobe. Avocado sink. Ruffled blind.
The record player she’d refused to retire sat boxily on the floor. Propped against it, an LP. Elvis’s chubby cheeks and killer smile. GI Blues was an album she’d almost worn out, despite its lack of cool. ‘Wooden Heart’ was the most worn of all the tracks.
She sat on the bed, then let herself lie back, giving into the feelings that crowded her. It was comforting to be in a room so familiar. It was also pathetic.
More pathetic than comforting, she thought. Jess was back in the place she least wanted to be.
The tape recorder in Interview Room One whirred, registering nothing but the slither of fabric as DS John Eden crossed his legs. He gazed at Danny, who kept his eyes on the floor.
Danny was clearly frightened at finding himself in Castle Kidbury police station. Slumped, plump thighs apart, his mouth hanging open, he hadn’t said a word when DS Eden explained that he wasn’t under caution. The Appropriate Adult – a permed woman whose face still bore the marks of her pillow – seemed satisfied that Danny understood what was going on, but Eden wasn’t so sure.
‘You know me, Danny,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I gave a talk on personal safety at the Trust.’ Danny worked part-time at a charitable trust over in Richleigh. ‘You can talk to me.’ DS Eden pushed a packet towards him. ‘Come on. Say something before I eat all the Maltesers.’
Danny was locked into a private place, and DS Eden didn’t blame him. The crimson mess hammered to the makeshift cross on the top of Gold Hill would give anybody nightmares, never mind a Vulnerable Adult like Danny.
‘Nobody thinks you’ve done anything wrong.’
The weather on Danny’s face changed slightly. His almond-shaped eyes, with their archetypal folded eyelids, flicked around the room.
Eden glanced again at the scant notes taken by the officer on the scene: Witness heard wheezing in mist. Witness very distraught.
‘Your mum’s very worried,’ he said. ‘As soon as she’s got your brother and sister to school, she’s coming here. We know you rang her when you found the . . .’ Eden faltered; he didn’t want to say ‘body’, even though that’s what the poor, slaughtered thing was. ‘When you found the man on top of the hill. Your mum was fast asleep, like the rest of Castle Kidbury.’
Danny blinked. He sank lower in the chair. His Appropriate Adult yawned.
‘Good thing you ran into Mr Else.’ The farmer had been poking in bushes at the foot of the hill, cursing, searching for a strayed sheep; Castle Kidbury sheep had been meeting sticky ends of late. The boy had run, screeching like a banshee, out of the haze. ‘You were very upset, weren’t you?’
Silence.
‘Danny, something puzzles me. It was early to be out and about. Why were you and Jumble up on the hill as the sun came up? Were you meeting somebody?’ Eden rubbed the back of his neat head. His brownish hair, short as a schoolboy’s, was so clean it squeaked. ‘You know about the sheep, don’t you? We all do.’
Appropriate Adult tutted and sighed. ‘Poor creatures,’ she murmured.
Noting that she hadn’t voiced any sympathy for the man currently being zipped into a body bag, Eden went on. ‘Everybody was very upset when the sheep were killed and left out for people to see. That was horrible. But this is different, don’t you think? This is more serious, Danny. Do you get that? That it’s serious?’
Danny looked directly at Eden for the first time. His teardrop eyes swam.
Eden felt the interview shift. He spoke more softly. ‘If you saw anything, Danny, you can tell me. Nothing bad will happen to you.’ He hesitated. ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘Did you see something? Somebody? Danny, do you know who did this?’
‘I don’t want her to get in trouble.’ Danny’s voice was tiny.
‘Who, Danny?’
‘She’s special. She’s a goddess. I swore I wouldn’t tell.’
‘Goddesses have names. What do you call her?’
Danny struggled. A tap at the door made him jump.
Softly, too softly for the tape to pick it up, DS Eden muttered, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ before saying, ‘Interview suspended at, let me see, zero six twenty-three.’
DC Karen Knott, a smudge of a woman with an Only me! air, put her head around the door. In a self-important whisper, she said, ‘Thought you’d want to know, Sarge, we got a positive ID from the family. It is Keith Dike.’
‘Poor sod.’
‘He was probably off his head, as per usual. Easy pickings for some psycho.’
‘Let’s not use words like psycho, Knott. Not yet.’
‘Sorry. Yeah.’ Knott leant further into the room. She wore forgettable separates. ‘All right, Danny? I’ve got your mum out here doing her nut.’
‘I don’t want to get her in trouble.’ Danny sat up, angry now, and hit the table.
Forgetting to turn on the tape, Eden snatched his moment. ‘We can’t help you both if you don’t tell us who she is, Danny.’
But Danny lapsed into silence, and was handed over to his distraught mother without another word passing his lips.
Creeping downstairs, Jess felt like a burglar. She didn’t want to attract Bogna’s attention. The housekeeper sang loudly in the kitchen, producing sound effects of general domestic clamour. Jess wondered where Bogna lived, then wondered if she lived in. Her brother had never thought to tell her about this development, but then, Stephen’s world ended at the tip of Stephen’s nose.
Stealing towards the study, Jess gathered herself on the parquet flooring. She was used to bearding her father in his den: it had always been Jess who sought out the Judge, never the other way around.
A hoarse bark from outside was all it took to sway her. Her father could wait. Harebell House was a place of many doors; she could escape into the garden without passing Bogna in the kitchen.
Hollyhocks. Catmint. All echoing the lavender and green of the wisteria that hung around the house like a frothy wig. Grasses whispered as she passed. The barking grew nearer. Moose must have cornered a squirrel. Jess didn’t panic; the squirrels never came off worse. Moose’s bark was, as the proverb promised, worse than his non-existent bite.
A gate she’d not walked through for years. Arched wrought-iron in a high wall. Jess pushed at it, and it spoke, like a sore throat.
The dog was in a sky-blue tiled
rectangle carved into the ground. Jess joined him, taking the slope from what had been the shallow end. Sitting beside the dog – who was still insanely pleased to see her – she asked him rhetorically if he could remember the pool when it was full.
‘It was such a laugh, Moose. I was in and out of it all day. But then Mum drained it and locked the gate, so that was that.’ Her soft-hearted mother, crying as she turned the big key, just couldn’t bear to see her children in the water after what had happened at a long-ago birthday party.
‘Yes, Moose, Mum was lovely, wasn’t she?’ The golden retriever’s coat was sun-warm against Jess’s face.
Moose pawed her, a little whine escaping.
‘What’s that?’ Jess cocked her head. ‘You think I’m hiding, do you? You think I should just get on with it and face Dad?’ Jess got up, wiped moss from her skirt. ‘As usual, Moose, you’re right.’
With Moose at her heels, Jess retraced her steps to the Judge’s study door and barged in. ‘Well, it goes without saying I’d find you in your man cave. Like you’d be anywhere else. I’m not impressed with this cycling nonsense by the way.’
Jess landed on a leather Chesterfield armchair. Its vast size made her feel small. Moose threw himself on the rug, one eye open. ‘Sooo, thought I may as well pop in, see what’s what in Sad Valley.’
‘It’s been a year, Jess.’ The Judge was grave as he turned his chair to take her in across his broad, leather-topped desk. The deliberate way he moved and spoke told Jess she hadn’t won; he wouldn’t allow her to orchestrate this. ‘A whole year.’
‘The new job, you know . . .’ Jess shrugged, feeling her hair drop out of the half-hearted bun she’d wrangled at her dressing table mirror. ‘It’s been intense.’
‘We haven’t seen you since the funeral.’
‘No, well . . .’ Jess had airbrushed that day from her memory banks. She galloped on to a burr that had been bothering her. ‘I know you expected me for Christmas, but . . .’ Her shoulders dropped. ‘I couldn’t, Dad. I just couldn’t.’
‘I see.’ The Judge nodded and pushed at the white hair that, according to the portrait over the mantelpiece, had once been a chocolate-brown quiff. ‘We all managed to do it. Stephen and Susannah and the children. Iris. Josh. But, no, not you. Not Jessica Castle.’