by Rod Madocks
Then we heard a growing thrumming roar from somewhere to our right in the valley bottom. We couldn’t see it at first and we thought it was a combine like the others we had seen that day. A giant, yellow, road digger came thundering right through a hedge then carved its way through the wheat in front of us. This was followed by another great machine and yet another. We were stunned by this sudden eruption of noise and mayhem. When silence had settled again we walked cautiously over the tracks in the flattened crops to the splintered rents in the thick hedging. There was a smell of sap and of dust in the wrecked hedge line and birds were flitting frantically around their trashed nest sites. Rachel pointed out the notice pinned askew to a pole. It read — Don’t Drown Our Valley.
We realised then that this was Tuxford Water, although people were yet to call it that. Then it was simply known as “the reservoir”. We had heard of it as a cause célèbre of the time. The authorities had proposed filling a valley of rich, ancient farmland with water from a dam seven miles down stream. It would take ten years to fill properly. The slender streams, which grew fat in winter, would pour in to form a great lake that would eventually be drawn off on giant sluices, going to slake the thirst of the growing Midlands’ cities. We cruised along those doomed valleys that afternoon and watched the diggers ripping down the settlements, Barnhaven among them. Dust blew back onto our helmets, our mood was lowered by seeing something so relentless happening. The old places were erased, the wells were capped and the sheltering copses ground down. The waters were to creep up over the next decade to drown the villages with their two thousand years of habitation. All their secrets were to be submerged: the rich lands full of flint arrow heads from the Stone Age people who had left their barrows on the ridge lines. It would cover the lynchets and the ridge and furrow pasturage and the prime fox hunting lands. The Elizabethan estates and the Victorian lodges were all to go under the water, along with the gate posts and the shale slab that I had leaned my bike against on that day.
We moved on in the afternoon. I cranked the starter, flicked down the helmet visor and the bike throbbed away. I went up the road out of the valley to the ridge then tilted the machine and glided onto the main road, heading east to the coast. Rachel clung to me as I opened the throttle and sped along the flickering hedgerows, out and beyond the rim of recall.
I thought more intensely about Rachel than I had done in years as I wandered there through the grasses by the lake. As the gulls skirled by the lake shore I was reminded of how much I had really missed her over those years. She had given out such a warm, generous and companionable presence and had shown a loving acceptance of my uncertainties. Only after she had bowed out from everything had I really begun to wonder what sort of being had I been with all that time. She remained with me though, like a slow current that twines around a lake swimmer.
*
I had one visitor during the time of my suspension from the hospital after Hobman’s escape. It was Bartram. He had come bustling up my driveway with his odd mincing step one cold afternoon in March. He looked quite different out of his usual consultant’s bow tie and pinstripes. He came wrapped in a long tweed coat with a heavy, home-knitted scarf and a battered fedora. After unfolding himself from his wrappings he sat drinking tea. He refused my offer of biscuits.
“My weight, you know, Mika is trying to get me to cut down,” he said patting his stomach and glancing around at my bookshelves.
Once he was seated, and after a jocular exchange of courtesies, he fixed me with a serious look and said, “Well Jack, you came among us disguised to kill the suitors eh?”
I had forgotten how direct he could be in his strange way and I began to stutter out some sort of explanation but it sounded like an apology.
“No, no, dear fellow, you may tell me what you like in due course. I am not here to question you. It’s not to say there haven’t been consequences of course.”
He took a sip of his tea.
“Well, there have been consequences. An inquiry, internal of course. Poor Poynton has not exactly got the sack but his powers are diminished and there is a sleek young man from the London prison service directing security matters now.”
“Poor Poynton,” I murmured.
“Yes, he had your interests at heart. We really have him to thank for allowing us to track you and Irina to the river in the first place that afternoon. He got the forensic electrostatic results from Hobman’s writing pad that allowed us to read his letter to his sister. And then he got through to Nikki, his younger sister. She told us that at his sister’s funeral Hobman had asked her to drop her ashes in the river from the bridge near to the power station. And so we guessed where he was heading. And, as for Hobman, well, we have never found him. I imagine he is in the North Sea now undergoing further transformations.”
I felt momentarily guilty about Poynton, thinking of his vigilance and his probing visits to my office after the death of Kress.
“And other than that, things go on,” continued Bartram, “The hospital has survived worse scandals. New patients have arrived and some old customers return. Pinsent got recalled from his conditional discharge. Yes, our fish-eyed one, suspicion of involvement in Hobman’s escape. Got a recall on his license, much to our delight. He is cooling his heels on a block ward and Lynch, your old friend, has been returned to prison with an additional weight of time after the hostage incident. The wheel turns. The fences are thicker and they have torn down the medium secure area and some of the trees. The poor old rooks are short on nesting sites. The enquiry is still going but little will come of it I expect. Vulgus vult decipi and all that. No one will really be concerned at your, let’s say, minor deviations from the truth. You followed your own track but we have never felt that you have really let us down.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
Bartram tinkled his spoon in his cup and looked at me with a gentle smile.
“And you, how are you Jack? Are you looking after yourself?”
I rubbed the scar from Hobman’s knife handle where it had creased an eyebrow. “I suppose I will always carry that mark,” I said, noticing how kind his gaze was, almost paternal, although he was barely ten years older than me. “It’s hard to explain, it’s been infinitely, unspeakably, difficult,” I stammered, then felt a welling-up of tears.
“Come on, dear chap.”
He put his cup down carefully and advanced towards me and hugged me as I sat, his tweed jacket prickled my wet face. He took me by the shoulders and fixed his eyes on me, “Look, you need to understand. We are all wounded physicians there. We all have our reasons for being there. We miss you. We grew to rely upon you. Come back when you are ready.”
I felt grateful, connected as never before with Bartram and the hospital. I was astonished to feel like that, as I had thought I had irrevocably broken with the place or it had done so with me.
“Whatever happens with the Max revelations and the Hobman inquiry, we have a place for you, never mind what security might say, they do not hold all the cards in the hospital.”
He patted me on the shoulder then began to squeeze himself into his coat and wrapped the long scarf around his neck. “You will be alright I am sure. Think about it, won’t you? Coming back, I mean.”
He pottered out and turned in my drive way as I watched him from the door, “Oh, and the wife says hello,” he called out and waved his fedora in farewell.
*
Little Leanne, Max’s niece, had handed me a plastic carrier bag and I had cursorily examined its contents while sitting in my car after the funeral. Later that afternoon, I unpacked the MP3 player and the thick volumes and had a better look at them in my office. My initial impression was that they were merely a collection of cuttings about crime, taken from tabloid newspapers over time, interspersed with a few family photos and Max’s scratchy jottings. They formed a dense, compacted mass and exuded a smell of old gum, stale newsprint and an indefinable hospital odour after all those months under his bed at Haven Lodge. There w
as something repellent about the bulky heap of them, as if they carried some sort of contagion which put me off exploring the contents further. I took them home with me that night, overcame my distaste, and placed them on my desk to take a more careful look at them. There were three children’s scrapbooks from a series, made of heavy, soft paper in shades of pink and grey. They were bound with string to which Max had added sections of looped and knotted twine that dangled from the volumes like prayer beads. The stiff pages felt heavy and sometimes they made little cracking sounds when they were turned.
At first glance the subjects seemed to be a jumble. However, I began to see after a while that he had interests and themes. There were many press stories about children and about missing young women and about certain types of offenders. I saw that the Midlands Triangle cases were there, I also recognised the Susan Barber and Kim Newell cases.
He must have gone back in time to old issues of True Detective for there was Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray; the infernal Gloucester pair were featured, as well as more recent images of Aileen Wournos. In and around the yellowing clippings wound Maxie’s crabbed notations. He had made notes next to the occasional faded photo that seemed to come from his own life. Sometimes there were arrows pointing to images and looping or underlining marks. His scribblings were hard to read and looked almost like shorthand. Sometimes I could make out just a few words like “this was a good one” or “she knew what she wanted”. Sometimes there were groups of numerals or ragged drawings, in other places just a series of scratchy marks. I closed the thick volumes and hefted the cheap blue and silver MP3 player. It was connected to small headphones, which he had wreathed with knotted string. I donned the headphones thinking that it was a strangely intimate act and flicked the machine on. Max’s sister must have downloaded hits from the 1960s and 70s on to it and I quickly put it away again after imagining Max lying there listening to the old tunes on his bed of pain.
Days and weeks passed. I lay up in my place, recovering from my struggle with Hobman. The pile of scrap books and the player remained untouched as I could not bear to look at them. One winter afternoon I finally looked at the scrapbooks once more and picked up the MP3 player. I unplugged the headphones and fiddled with the controls then I noticed a record button and remembered Max wheezing to me, “the things they do now.” I snapped the play button on to hear a hissing sound followed by a scuffling clatter then an indistinct woman’s voice saying, “Do yer want proppin’ up, duck?”
And Max’s voice replying, “Nah — leave us a mo’ will yer?”
There was a hissing sound, which I think was a nebuliser, and Max again much clearer.
Well Boss, we have both come a long way, come a long way. We kept our promises in our own way. I was always a bad ’un, always. I don’t know why. That was just how I was though it all seems like a dream now. The things I did. The things that happened. I think of it now as not quite happening to me but to some bit of me. And sure, I hurt those first little girls when I was nobbut a kid meself as I was hurt when I was small. But the serious stuff later, that was different. A different time.
It was my LeeLee really, she got me doing it. LeeLee. I feel she is here, now, along with the others in the shadows by the black oxy tank whispering in the night. LeeLee, she liked to be called, or ordinary Pegs as I knew her when I first met her. I remember she loved that song. What were it? Yes, ‘When Doves Cry’. Played it all the time. Still hear it, especially at night. Her singing it. “Why do we scream at each other? That is what it sounds like when doves cry … Yea they cry … oh they cry.”
Pegs, she hated herself so much, she hated anyone perfect. My love was not enough, or mebbe I just could not fill her up enough. I was too like her after all I guess.
And somehow, anyhow, we started and we were a team.
And we would sit in pubs and that and see them going past, and we’d say to each other, “We can do it to you and to you.”
And we would go driving in the works van saying, “If we were choosing tonight it would be her or her.”
It was just the taking. It was not the hurting. Taking someone, having the power to do that. To make something happen like that. Doing it together. There wasn’t much pain Jack, I want you to know that. We would be sick and sorry later but then, after a while, it would build up again and LeeLee would start on at me and we would begin to play it in our heads again.
When the life is no good, when the loving is no good, there is only anger and shame. That’s how it was. Shame also drove it.
And after Pegs was gone, I lost that wanting. It was her game really. That is why I plugged that poor taxi man feller. I were lost.
No Pegs, tho’ I hated her in a way I needed her. There was nothing for me after that. Now these last few months have been a blessing really. I feel released from it.
T’resa has my picture books Boss. I’m leaving them for you. Take care of them.
There was then a hiss, a clatter and a clunk and that was it.
The wheezy grating of Maxie’s voice was a shock to hear once more and his message to me even more so. Who was this LeeLee? I played the recording again and again, smelling once more the sweet, sick odour of Max’s decaying flesh and remembered the dark blue, crudely inked capitals “LL” on his right arm and him saying “What a lass!” I went back to his scrapbooks on my desk and looked carefully among the stiff pages until I found a piece of white card lodged next to an illustration of a teddy bear. On the card, in a naïve woman’s hand in dark ink was written the following uneven rhyme:
Love digs deep to forgive so many things you
Say you can’t forget.
Love always takes its jacket off
Preventing you from becoming wet.
Love will always take its time to try and
Make it right for you.
Love will always keep you company doing absolutely
Anything you want to do.
It will also squeeze you tight with a kiss.
Saying, “I apologise, I don’t want to argue.”
Love will never leave you alone in the dark.
Love is the light to guide you.
L.L. x to M. Always.
This was the first evidence of her presence as I searched again through the heavy scrap books. I turned over the yellowing newsprint clippings and looked at the Polaroid pictures of fields and woodland scenes. That photo of Max on his reform school bed, a press picture of John Straffen being driven back through the gates of Broadmoor with a battered face. There was a newsprint clipping of Brady and Hindley, then a faded Kodachrome print of woman with short dark hair sitting on a sunlit lawn, thrusting her hand into the mouth of a Doberman puppy with a studded collar. The woman is grinning up at the camera and you can make out the dark shadow of the photographer falling across the grass.
Who was she? This photo, and one other, was as all that I kept back later from the scrap books after giving the rest to the police. Somehow, after Hobman, I felt I no longer had a personal quest to find Rachel. The police took their time looking over the documents. They realised what I had not worked out — that the marks were maps that corresponded to a crude outline of Tuxford Water, and that Max’s swirls and arrows and crabbed notations were forms of direction. They also found out about LeeLee — that vacuum at the heart of it all. Little about her came out in the press although Catherine, Rachel’s sister, told me some of the detail later. What is known is taken from her remaining family members and from a few public records.
She was born in August, a Leo, a stubborn, pudgy girl. She came from a market town not far from Tuxford Water. She was born Peggy Cumberpatch, one of four siblings, a cuckoo that elbowed her sibs aside. She was not like the others at all, a wilful unhappy child whose waxy skin was scored by her undergarments and who walked with an ungainly duck-like tread. Her father was chronically disabled, due to a head injury in a car accident, and had left the family in her early years. Her ineffective mother made her own clothes, equipping Peggy with shapeless wo
ollen items decorated with bows and hearts and clover motifs that brought derision at school. She talked to her toys a lot and she had a favourite black doll. She was ungainly and her nickname at school was “square arse”. She fell on the school swimming pool steps as a teenager and hit her head on the left side of the parietal area. She had no neurological tests after that although she had been knocked unconscious and her front teeth badly damaged, requiring her to wear a plate. She spoke with a slight lisp ever after as the end of her tongue had been bitten off.
Peggy struggled in the world. She groaned at the onset of the menses and was scoured monthly with pain all her life. She was hypochondriacal. She was teased by her peers and struggled for attention from adults. She ate hugely but was a starveling for love. She appears in a few class lists but otherwise scarcely appears in the school record. Her bewildered mother had few explanations for the later researchers. We know that she had a low, husky voice but otherwise there was something about her that did not exist or did not come into being in childhood. As a teenager and adult, she responded to rewards more readily than most people would. Words that were loaded with emotion meant the same to her as any other thus “kill”, “sunshine”, “love”, “dishes”, “chicken” “destroy”, all had the same resonance to her. At school she conceived a devotion to a sickly boy called Morris. She doted on him and seemed to grieve terribly when he died in a drowning accident. Her mother gave the police her surviving school books showing her experiments with names, at first doing away with her clumsy first name, shortening it to Pegs, then she experimented with Tania, then after leaving school she became Tania Lee then Liana Lee or LeeLee, as she later styled herself. She let Maxie call her Pegs in domestic privacy but we can speculate that she hated the name, associating it with her dumpy, shapeless self, the hairs that bristled on her stocky shins, the crippling monthly belly ache.