Black Wood

by SJI Holliday

  But he wasn’t guilty then, and Gray’s gut said he wasn’t guilty now.

  Gray’s gut was usually pretty accurate.

  It told him to not even bother to drink strong coffee, because it would reject it instantly with sharp muscle spasms. It told him there was no point thinking about the past, because there was nothing he could do to change it, and it was telling him now that Pete knew something, but he wasn’t behind it.

  If Pete had frightened those girls – even for some warped kind of fun – he’d never be able to keep quiet about it. His speech was strictly one speed. He wondered what his dad had said or done to him in the station to shut him up.

  He passed through the stile that separated the alley from the Track: something that he had never quite understood, assuming that stiles were only supposed to stop animals from straying out of their safety zones – and he was pretty sure there were no animals on the Track. Well, not of the four-legged variety anyway.

  When he reached the other side, he turned round and faced Brotherstone’s house, just in time to see a figure retreat from the top window. Martin? Or Pete? Either way, what Martin had said earlier was right – the room had a clear view of the Track and, it seemed, the alleyway.

  He walked along to the bridge that Lydia had mentioned. It was a five-minute brisk stroll, and he was slippery with sweat by the time he got there. He could’ve parked on the bridge, walked down the embankment – but he wanted to see it from this angle first.

  At the section where Lydia said she was waiting for her boyfriend, there was no sign of any disturbance. It was hard to tell with the bark-mulch path covering. If anyone had walked over it since, it’d be disturbed anyway.

  Nothing looked out of place.

  He turned back on himself, walked back out into the sunshine. It was oddly quiet, for the time of day – nearly seven on a warm summer’s evening. There should’ve been plenty of people around. Dog walkers, joggers. Old men. Teens heading to their hangout places.

  Even the birds seemed subdued. Upset at someone tainting their habitat.

  A rustling behind him made Gray almost leap out of his skin. He whirled round to see a small grey and white rabbit sitting on the path behind him. The colour surprised him. He’d never seen a wild rabbit with white patches.

  ‘Hello, boy,’ he said, bending down towards it. The rabbit didn’t move. Odd, as they normally ran a mile when you tried to get close to them. He took a step closer, saw a dark-red stain on one of its feet.

  ‘Are you hurt, boy? Let me see … I can try to help you?’ He felt a bit mad talking to the rabbit, but he could see that it was injured. He wondered what he was supposed to do in these situations. Call the RSPCA? Try to catch it and take it to a vet?

  In the end it didn’t give him a choice.

  A sudden breeze whipped up the bushes that lined the Track and the rabbit’s ears cocked.

  Then it bolted up the embankment.

  Gray whipped round, followed the rabbit’s path. Watched as something seemed to fall off behind it as it ran. For a horrible fleeting moment, Gray thought it was its tail.

  The rabbit was gone, but clearly it was OK.

  The thing it had dropped, though – that was something else. Gray picked up a stick and poked at the white, bloodstained blob and realised he was looking at a tissue.

  Lydia said she’d kicked him hard, that he might have a bruised knee.

  Maybe not bruised. Definitely bleeding.

  Gray pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket – something he always carried, just in case – picked up the tissue on the end of the stick and dropped it in.

  Might be nothing.

  Might be everything.

  He was about to turn back in the direction of Brotherstone’s house when he saw the footprint.

  He had to stop himself from laughing. Two potential bits of evidence right at his feet, thanks to that daft wee rabbit.

  Pity he didn’t have a suspect to check them against.

  If he sent the tissue to the lab for analysis, he’d have to inform the CID boys about what was going on, and in they’d come, stamping their size 9s over the whole thing. This was his town. He wanted to find this prick himself.

  He took his phone out of his pocket and bent down to take photographs of the footprint. It was clean. An exact shape of a foot, with distinctive ridges across the ball. He made sure to take one with his own foot next to it, so that it could be sized against his own size 11s. It looked like a 10 to him. A size 10 trainer.

  Not exactly unique.

  It’d be something, though.

  Once he found the bastard.

  31

  I let him wait. Not for long. Long enough for him to consider whether he should knock again. I could sense him standing there on the other side of the door. Wondered if he felt that same frisson of excitement I did. It felt like my heart was doing somersaults inside my chest. I counted slowly to sixty before walking down the stairs and unlocking the door.

  He smiled at me. His eyes shone, and I wondered how much he’d had to drink already. Then he held out a plastic bag, bottles chinking together inside. I took it.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here,’ he said. He stepped in. I moved back and he pulled the door closed behind him.

  I didn’t answer straight away. We just looked at each other. Stared into each other’s eyes. Sometimes we never said a word to each other the whole night, but he’d gone and spoiled it now.

  Broken the spell.

  ‘Where else would I be?’ was all I said. I frowned. But before I could say or do anything else, he pushed me onto the table.

  I slid backwards across the surface, pushing packets of crisps and crackers and tubs of olives and hearing them drop on the floor. He took the bag with the wine in it back out of my hand and set it on the worktop next to the sink. I started to unbutton my jeans, but he’d already grabbed them by the ankles and then slid them off over the top of my boots in one easy move, like one of those sleight-of-hand magicians yanking out a tablecloth from under a table full of crockery. Then he was on top of me. The only sounds were the clanging of his belt buckle as he freed himself, the rasps of my breath mixing with his. Hard. Heavy.

  He crushed my mouth under his. His lips dry, chapped. He tasted of beer and fags and something else deeper inside. Coffee, maybe. Slightly stale. Underneath it all, that familiar scent of him that I craved.

  It was quick, anxious. My thighs burned from the friction of his jeans against my skin.

  He grabbed hold of my hair as he came. Tugging it slightly too hard. I had to bite his shoulder to stop myself from crying out. No, I wanted to shout. Not yet. He left me lying there as he zipped and buckled himself back up. Both of us still panting.

  He stared down at me.

  Then he pulled me forwards by my ankles and pushed my knees far apart and his face disappeared into the space between my legs. I thought I might dissolve into the wood of the table. Felt like there would be nothing left of me except a faint, unidentifiable stain.

  Afterwards, we sat in the lounge. The wine hadn’t lasted long. My picnic lay mostly untouched.

  He passed me a squashed packet of Marlboro Red, one cigarette poking out from the top. He did this with an effortless shake of the pack that I could never replicate. I only ever smoked with him.

  ‘Why tonight?’ I said eventually.

  He lit another cigarette from the butt of the last. Sucked hard, releasing perfect smoke rings towards the ceiling.

  ‘You know why,’ he said.

  I sighed. It was always like this. The passion was like nothing I’d ever felt before, but afterwards it was always the same. Cold. Empty. I was scared to ask him how he felt, because I was terrified of hearing the truth from him. About how he felt. About why he came to me, like this. Our secret thing that definitely wasn’t love.

  ‘He’s back, you know.’

  He nodded as if he already knew this.

  ‘He’s staying at Rose Cottage.’ I stared at him, wa
iting for a reaction. He took another long drag on his cigarette and pushed a slow stream of smoke out from the corner of his mouth. ‘I’ve got a key,’ I continued. ‘You could go round there?’

  He turned to face me, his mouth bent into a sneer. ‘What would I want to do that for?’

  I felt panic rising in my chest, my heart speeding up, fluttering. ‘To help … to help me. And to help—’

  ‘You should drop this shit, you know.’ He ground his cigarette into the ashtray with such force I almost expected it to burn through the glass. He leant back in the armchair and closed his eyes.

  End of discussion.

  I left him there, sitting on the sofa in the fading light.

  I slept in Gran’s old bedroom, the soft sheets still carrying a hint of his scent from the last time we’d been there together, when he’d wanted me more.

  *

  I woke up early, to birdsong and the morning sunlight streaming through dirty windows. I turned over towards him, flung my arm over his body, to the space where it should’ve been. I needed him close. But he wasn’t there. He’d never been there. I’d woken up briefly during the night at the sound of the front door closing.

  I sat up, pulling the duvet up over my naked body, hugging it around myself, trying to generate some warmth. Even in the height of summer, the cottage was cold. Stone floors, old-fashioned windows. There was no central heating or anything luxurious like that. The hot water came from a coal-fired boiler connected to the fire in the kitchen, so if I wanted a hot wash I was going to have to put the fire on. I wasn’t sure there was any coal and I wasn’t about to start chopping wood at the crack of dawn. I’d left my phone on the floor at the side of the bed, and as I leant over to check the time, all the blood rushed to my head. It wasn’t even six o’clock. I felt sick.

  Then I remembered the night before. The scene on the kitchen table coming back to me in little stabs of light, as if I was watching under a strobe light.

  His hands on me. The weight of his body.

  Maybe a cold bath was the answer, after all.

  I walked through to the bathroom, felt the cold air poking through the gaps in the floorboards beneath my feet. I turned on the bath taps, those old-style ones with the cross-handled tops. They squealed in protest and the water came out in a juddering grey spurt. The pipes whined like fighting tomcats. Finally the water flowed, the colour changing to a milky-white, then finally running clear. As it started to fill the bath, I wandered out into the hall to the big built-in cupboard where Gran kept the towels. I’d never bought new ones. I’d never bought new anything. The cottage was my secret. To most people it was uninhabited. Practically a ruin. If I’d had any business sense I’d have sold the land by now, but I couldn’t.

  Not until I’d worked up the courage to find out who was buried out there.

  As I leant into the cupboard to pull out a greying, threadbare towel, I felt a weight, like a hand. It pressed hard on my shoulder and I took a step back, dropping the towel at my feet.

  A gust of wind whipped at my ankles and I felt every hair on my body stand up.

  A door banged shut. I held my breath.

  Froze, waiting.

  Nothing.

  I crept to the top of the stairs and peered down, conscious of my nakedness. I wished I’d kept the duvet wrapped around me until I’d got in the bath.

  ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Who’s there?’

  Nothing. The breeze that had come from nowhere had stopped. There was silence.

  That’s when I realised I couldn’t even hear the sound of water running into the bath.

  Someone had turned off the taps.

  Turn off the taps, JoJo … you’re a wee water-waster …

  I had no memory of going back through to the bathroom and turning them off, but I must’ve. Or else they had turned themselves off because they were old and creaky and the thread on the handles was gone … or …

  When I finally worked up the nerve to walk back into Gran’s bedroom, I found the wardrobe doors flung open wide. Piles of clothes lay scattered across the bed.

  Had I done this?

  Lying at the bottom of the bed was an open shoebox.

  Inside were my sketchbooks.

  Each one containing the very things I’d tried to push out of my mind.

  THE WOODS

  He walks over to the swing and grabs hold of the rope, bringing it to a jerky stop.

  ‘Oi,’ says the girl in the red skirt. ‘We’re playing on the swing.’

  The smaller girl stays where she is. He doesn’t look at her, but he can hear the soft blubbering of her tears. He picks up the tyre, twists it, then smacks it like he’s trying to get the last out of a bottle of ketchup, and the girl plops out onto the dirty mulch floor. Her crying becomes louder and she curls into a ball, wailing.

  ‘I want to go home! Please!’

  ‘Oi,’ says the girl in the red skirt. She marches over and pokes a finger into his chest. ‘What the fuck did you do that for? You’re a big fat bully.’ She pokes him again and he grabs hold of her hand.

  ‘Brave, eh?’ He twists her wrist until he has her in a position that’s impossible for her to wriggle out of. ‘Let’s see how brave you really are, you wee slut.’

  He’s aware that the other boy has gone to tend to the little girl who lies curled up under the tyre, which is still swinging gently above her. It has not yet come to a complete stop, and there is a faint creak as the rope pivots on the loop that holds it secure on the branch. He hears him muttering something to her. He ignores them. He’s not interested in either of them. He’s got the one he wanted.

  Weirdly, she doesn’t scream. Doesn’t say a word. He drags her over by one arm towards the fallen oak. She doesn’t struggle. He wants to throw her down onto the floor, but as soon as he releases his grip, she slides away from him and sits down. She leans back and fans away dead leaves with her arms, sliding them back and forth to leave an imprint like an angel’s wings.

  ‘D’you want to kiss me then?’ She whispers it, gives him a little smile.

  He steps back.

  Fuck. This is not what he wanted. In his head, he was holding her down by the throat, pumping himself into her as she bucked and cried, tears mixing with snot smeared across her terrified face. He looks at her with disgust. Little tramp. He probably wouldn’t even have been her first.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he says. ‘Just fuck off.’

  He kicks a pile of leaves at her and she pulls her legs together and pushes herself up with her arms until she’s sit-ting. The smirk back on her face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she says. ‘Can’t get it up?’

  She jumps to her feet before he can react. She runs across to the swing and drags her friend up by the arm. ‘Come on,’ she says.

  Then they’re running. Out of the woods and into the field.

  He hears her laugh as it fades away in the breeze.

  He looks down at the other boy, who is still crouched down next to the swing, his face a mixture of bewilderment and fear.

  ‘Can we go home now?’ he says.

  ‘No. We’re going after them.’

  32

  Claire had been working for the local paper – the Banktoun Mail and Post – since she’d finished university. It was a decent enough job, especially in a place like Banktoun. But on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, it wasn’t exactly exciting.

  She’d studied a joint MA in English and Journalism with thoughts of working for one of the glossy fashion mags. Marie Claire or something. But the four years at Glasgow University had taken their toll. There were plenty of facilities, plenty of help for people like her. She’d lived in the student halls for the whole four years. That was one of the things that made her realise she was never going to cut it out in the real world. While all her mates moved into trendy West End tenements after the first year, she was left with no option but to stay where she was. You don’t see too many tenements with lifts. Maybe some of the swanky ones that’ve been converted
by builders into luxury apartments.

  Not the ones off the Byres Road above the kebab shops where the students lived.

  Even going round to visit her friends was a chore. She had to be practically dragged up the several storeys of worn stone steps, and even though no one ever said anything, she could tell what they were thinking.

  She’d overheard a couple of girls talking one day, discussing the end-of-term piss-up in someone’s flat. Someone who just happened to live on the top floor.

  ‘Don’t invite Claire. It’s just too much hassle.’

  The girl who said it had been someone that Claire had trusted. Someone she thought was a good friend.

  She withdrew after that.

  She seemed to have gone full circle: when she was young, she was a mouse. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. The gymnastics had gone some way to alleviating that, though, and for a while, she did well.

  ‘Come on, Claire, remember your landing. Feet together, arms raised …’ MissAlbert’s voice haunted her dreams. That clipped Morningside tone. ‘Chop chop, girls. Run along.’

  Claire had hung back after the class one day to talk to her. ‘Er, Miss?’

  The woman spun round, seemingly unaware that there was someone left in the gym. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was wondering if I could get some extra practice sometime. My mum said maybe she could pay, and—’

  ‘Why yes! Of course.’ The woman’s face softened. ‘I think you might do rather well with a wee bit of help, you know, Claire. You’ll maybe need to work on your fitness a bit, though. Working with the beams and the rings can take its toll. How about you talk to Mrs McCreedie to see about some sports coaching too? Jogging maybe? Hmm? What do you think?’

  Claire hesitated. What have I done? I hate jogging! Mrs McCreedie thinks I’m a fat waste of space … A sudden determination came over her. But she’s wrong. ‘OK, if you think it’ll help …’

  Miss Albert clapped her hands. ‘Excellent! I’ll talk to your mother. Is she waiting outside?’