Derek threw the ball again, harder this time, like he used to on the cricket field back in his youth. The ball landed out of his view; just at the bottom of the cliffs and behind some bigger rocks. Humphrey hared off in pursuit again.
Derek watched as the dog darted behind the rocks, expecting him to come out quickly with the ball lodged triumphantly between his teeth. But Humphrey didn't reappear. Derek waited for a few seconds. There was still no sign of Humphrey emerging from the rocks: just an intermittent, insistent barking.
"Ruff. Ruff. Ruff."
Derek paced forwards towards the cliff face. He reached the rocks and clambered over them. He saw Humphrey's head, and as he stepped down over the last rock he noticed what the dog was barking at.
It was the body of a teenage girl.
Her arms and legs were splayed out oddly; her face was white and strangely serene; but above her eyes was a mess of bloody, matted hair and smashed bone. Then the smell hit him; the smell of drains, sewers and horror, penetrating this beautiful summer’s morning.
He put his hands over his mouth and moved backwards until he no longer felt so much like retching, before taking out his phone and dialling 999.
Six
(Anna)
The train journey from Selchester to Tarnsey took twenty minutes. Crows would have flown it a lot quicker, but the rail route involved a change-over to switch to the branch line that wound its way from the mainline to the coast.
It may have been a short journey, but it was one I hadn’t taken for months. I had spent the whole of my last year of college in Selchester. I’d even remained there over Christmas, making Mum and Dad come and visit me. I guess it was the behaviour of a stubborn youngster grasping for independence, but Selchester made me feel safe and positive. Tarnsey didn’t.
But this time I had no choice but to go back home. My exams were over, my new friends had gone back to their own parts of the country and my room was needed for summer school students from Asia. I couldn’t afford to be independent anymore. My old bedroom beckoned.
The train entered the huge tunnel that cut through Tardown Head, the vast chalk cliff that surrounded the west side of the town. The few minutes of blackness that followed seemed like the perfect gateway to Tarnsey. I sulked into my own reflection in the glass, trying to console myself that it was only for two months. Two months until medical school. Two months until my life could begin again.
I was vaguely aware of a shape passing behind the reflection of my face. I looked up from my sulk and saw a boy of about my age taking one of the four seats to the left of mine. He was tallish, and dressed in a shirt and tie underneath a green wax jacket. His face was lean and serious-looking, framed by swept-back brown hair and fashionable-looking glasses. He shot me a strange glance from the corner of his eye. I looked away towards the window. We had now left the tunnel and were trundling through the familiar sights of Tarnsey.
The scenes of my childhood.
To my left I saw the squat classrooms and small playing field of my old primary school. It looked like a little toy building now, and it was weird to think how big it had all seemed when I was a nervous five-year-old. Predictably, my reflections turned from here to Sarah Dee: still missing; presumed dead by all accounts. Suicide after the murder of Maggie seemed the most popular theory: her body yet to be yielded by the sea; or decomposing in some river somewhere. I wasn’t quite sure I believed it though; for I knew Sarah a little more than most. I wouldn’t say I knew her well – nobody did – but there, in that little toy-like primary school, we had once been friends.
I guess we started hanging out together because we were both quiet, studious types. Sarah liked to draw and often we would spend break-times together under the shade of the big tree on the field. Sarah would sketch something or other whilst I read about the workings of the human body. Sarah spoke back then too: you wouldn’t exactly say she was talkative, but she would tell me things; like how she hoped to be an artist one day, living in an attic apartment in a big city. It’s funny really, despite the years of silence that were her high-school years, I can still hear her delicate, precise way of speaking and her certainty about her future. I felt desperately sad when I though how wrong she had been.
Sad and guilty.
The train rolled on and my mind slid off into its own little journey, back into my schooldays...
*
“What the fuck is this?” Maggie Dickens demanded. Millie and Callie stood next to her like lieutenants, and the rest of the bus fell silent. I was sitting next to Sarah, and remember being frozen with dread. Who were these girls? Why were they doing this?
“Oooh, lovely drawings” Maggie said mockingly, pulling Sarah’s sketchbook from her hands and rifling through the pages.
“Give it back” Sarah had said in a tiny voice.
“What’s the magic word, ginger?” said Callie Cox.
“Pleeeeease!” mimicked Millie.
“You can have it back, ginger, when I’ve removed all the rubbish from it” said Maggie.
I watched, horrified, as Maggie slowly ripped every page from Sarah’s sketchbook, handing each one to Millie or Callie as she went.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she would say each time, before tearing out another sheet of paper, each piece adorned with one of Sarah’s lovingly crafted pencil sketches; some going back years; some which I could remember her working on under the shade of that big tree in primary school.
Primary school: a simpler time.
This was our first week of high school, and these girls were like nothing we had seen before.
I remember staring with a lump in my throat as Millie and Callie screwed up every torn-out sketch into a tiny ball and launched them one by one through the open window of the bus’s top deck. Sarah’s drawings snagged in trees or rolled pathetically under following cars. When Maggie had finished she threw Sarah’s gutted sketchbook back onto her lap and simply walked away, followed as ever by Millie and Callie. Sarah and I sat there in silence. I was eleven, petrified and had no idea how to deal with something like this.
*
In the event, I dealt with it in a cowardly way. In a nasty, selfish way that still makes me burn with shame. I abandoned Sarah.
It was an act of self preservation, and not even one I consciously made. I simply stopped sitting next to her in class or on the bus, stopped having lunch with her or hanging out at break-times. I cut all my ties with her without a word exchanged by either of us. I did it gradually at first, spending more and more of my time with Helen Craig, another studious girl, and gradually making links with her little friendship group. In a silent, unspoken way I let Sarah know that she wasn’t to be a part of it.
Kids can be cruel, and I certainly was. Not in Maggie’s overtly evil manner, but in an insidious, cold way. But I did it to survive.
If Sarah - someone pretty, slim and artistic - could attract such vicious bullying, then what would have happened to me if I had stuck with her?
I was slightly overweight: fleshy, my mum always said. I was bespectacled, nerdish and obsessed with science. Sticking with Sarah would have made me stand out even more, and standing out is the worst thing you can do at school.
I made myself invisible, and left Sarah in no-man’s land.
Seven
(Two years ago...)
CJ walked through the main doors of the boys’ school and his stomach began to lurch with excitement: the same tingly, fluttery feeling he got at this time every day, as if his heart was a gaping vacuum waiting to be filled with something he couldn’t describe, but which he knew was beautiful.
The girls’ school day started and finished twenty minutes later than the boys’, which gave CJ a head start. He followed the same route he did every day: past the playing fields and down a residential road to the local cricket field. Here he came to a street of terraced houses which culminated in the West Hails shopping precinct: a big, ugly quadrangle of concrete blocks with shops on the bottom floors and flats on the top.
In one of these poky little layers of flats, with washing lines on their balconies and satellite dishes glued to their sides, lived Sarah Dee.
The one light of his existence.
The reason he had been born onto this ugly, wasteful planet.
He couldn’t be certain, because he’d never been inside anyone else’s mind, but he was pretty sure that nobody could ever feel a love as deep as this.
It was the kind of love that made him physically hurt. It burnt and it scalded and ached, but it was worth the pain.
He sat in his usual spot on the bench opposite the bus stop and waited for Sarah’s bus to arrive.
CJ did this every day. Apart from the time he had hired the expensive camera from the shop. That day he had hidden in one of the stairwells that led up to the flats and taken some pictures of Sarah as she got off the bus. One had come out really well, and this was the one he kept in his bedroom drawer at home. It perfectly captured Sarah’s fragile face and amazing, deep eyes.
God she was beautiful.
Maybe today he would talk to her. Ask her how she was. Get to know her properly.
Or maybe he’d just stare again.
Eight
(Anna)
The train finally slowed into the run-down surroundings of Tarnsey station and I alighted with a sluggish insolence. It had been a year since I was last here, but the place looked as grim as ever.
The station was the perfect introduction to the town, from the peeling paint on the rusty ‘welcome to Tarnsey’ sign, to the bird-mess splattered metal benches and the graffiti-daubed timetables. It looked like nothing had been replaced since the 1980s: only subjected to minor running repairs. Including the people.
Welcome home.
“Hi there” said a voice from behind me. I turned. It was the boy from the train.
“Hello” I said warily.
“Don’t you recognise me Anna?” he asked. I looked at him a bit more closely, but was still none the wiser.
“It’s Adam, Adam Jacks. I was in the same year as you at the high. We were on the Paris trip together.”
Suddenly it clicked. I remembered the Paris trip, which was about four years ago now. It was one of the few occasions that the boys and girls from each high school got to mix with each other. I remembered a quiet boy called Adam Jacks traipsing around the Louvre with a backpack almost as big as him. He’d had floppy hair which almost covered his eyes; he’d worn thick prescription glasses and had braces on his teeth. I also recalled his skin being greasy and spotty. This guy in front of me was definitely the same boy, but he’d clearly had something of a combined makeover and growth spurt in recent years. He still looked quite serious, but was also really rather handsome now; with his short hair and designer glasses.
“Oh hi Adam, how’re you?”
“Great thanks. What are you up to now?”
“I’ve just finished my ‘A’ Levels in Selchester. Back for the summer then off to medical school.”
“Cool, where are you going?”
“Brighton”
“Awesome, Brighton’s great, so much more fun than here.”
“Yeah I guess. So what are you up to? Still at the high school?”
“No, I got out of there as soon as I could. Went to journalism college. I’m working for the Tarnsey Star now. Junior reporter.”
So that explained Adam’s new smartness and neat hair. He was a journalist now, not a spotty schoolboy. I looked at his eyes a bit longer and suddenly had a desire to extend the conversation somewhat. But Adam did it for me:
“You fancy grabbing a coffee perhaps?” he asked, “there’s a Roasters around the corner. There’re a few things I’d like to ask you if you don’t mind – all work based,” he flashed something at me, which on closer inspection appeared to be a press ID card.
“OK, sure” I replied.
We settled into our seats in the window of the Roasters and watched the Tarnsey high street go by. Adam took a notepad and pen from his wax jacket and began writing in a weird code that looked a bit like Arabic.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Shorthand. It was a bitch to learn.”
I felt a bit weird not knowing what he was writing, but he stopped scribbling after a while and looked at me, still serious.
“You went to school with Callie Cox right?”
“Yeah, she was in my year.”
“Were you friends?”
“No, not at all, she was in a different group from me. We rarely spoke.”
“Did you hear what happened to her?”
“No...” – suddenly the hairs on my neck started to stand up.
“So you didn’t see the news, or hear it on the radio?”
“No, why? What’s...?”
As I spoke Adam reached into his seemingly endless wax jacket and pulled out a rolled-up copy of the Tarnsey Star. He unfolded it and put it in front of me. I read the headline:
“Cliff fall death girl identified”
My hands shook a bit as I read the story:
The body of a teenage girl who fell to her death from Tardown Head was yesterday identified as local 18 year-old Caroline Cox. The girl, known to friends as Callie, was discovered yesterday morning by a man walking his dog.
Police are not confirming a cause of death until after a post-mortem has been performed, however it appears that suicide is the most likely scenario. Callie was a close friend of murder victim Margaret Dickens, who was bludgeoned to death in her bedroom two years ago. It is thought that the trauma of her friend’s murder may have led to Callie’s suicide. Friends have claimed that Callie was particularly withdrawn in the weeks before her death.
“My God” I said.
It didn’t seem real somehow; it was like reading about other people, strangers. First Maggie and now Callie; both dead in violent, horrible ways. Was this some kind of karma?
“So you didn’t see her in recent weeks?” asked Adam?
“Not at all, not seen her for over a year” I replied.
“So I guess it’s pretty pointless asking you about her state of mind lately.”
“Yeah completely useless, I’m afraid.”
“Never mind.”
Adam smiled for probably the first time and folded his notebook shut. He sipped his Americano coffee and spoke:
“Between you and me Anna (for some reason my eyes blinked involuntarily at the sound of my name on his lips...) the word from the police station is that this might not have been a clear-cut suicide. It’s yet to be confirmed by the pathologist, but the officers I’ve spoken to believe that some of Callie’s head injuries are consistent with an attack sustained before she fell off the cliff.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she may have been attacked before she fell off. Or was pushed off.”
“God, you mean she was murdered?”
“It seems possible. And do you know what the police reckon was used as a murder weapon?”
I could have taken a guess, but I didn’t need to:
“It looks like a hammer attack” he said.
We both knew what this would mean. Maggie Dickens had been hammered to death; the whole town knew it, and by now the whole town knew who had done it as well: the reclusive loner, as always. Sarah Dee had murdered her tormentor and vanished, wanted by police on suspicion of murder. And now another of her bullies was dead. Adam and I looked at each other. He kept eye contact a bit longer than normal, and the question hung between us; unspoken.
Was Sarah Dee back?
A brief period of silence followed, during which I was desperately trying to think of some possible way to turn the conversation away from murders, police and head injuries and towards something a bit sunnier. I glanced down at my coffee and saw that it was almost empty. I always drank fast when I was nervous, but why I was nervous I couldn’t quite say.
“Want another?” asked Adam.
“Sorry, I have to go” I replied, “my folks will be wondering why I’m
not back from the station. Plus I have a lot to unpack.”
“Maybe later then?” asked Adam, smiling again, “I mean, not just coffee, maybe we could get something to eat, have a proper catch-up?”
I wasn’t sure what we had to catch-up on exactly, seeing as to my knowledge we’d barely shared two words in all the time we’d spent together at school. But this new Adam seemed different; confident. Maybe it took the end of school’s harsh winter for some people’s true selves to flower.
“That would be nice” I said, “but I’ve got family catch-ups and stuff tonight.”
“Tomorrow night then?” Adam grinned.
I paused. I had been very keen to avoid anything that might hold me in some way to Tarnsey. I’d cut most ties with the town, and wasn’t keen to start patching any up. But Adam’s warm smile persuaded me.
“Yes” I replied. “Tomorrow sounds good.”
Nine
(Two years ago...)
Ricky James stared at his girlfriend in shock. What the fuck was she doing?
This wasn’t Ricky. He hated it. It made him sick. How had he got caught up in this?
He was a good looking boy. Not that he’d have said as much himself, but enough people had told him he was to convince him it must be true.
Ricky was also good at sport, that much he was certain of. He was athletic, naturally fit and fast, and was proud to have recently been made captain of the school football team.
It was probably a combination of these two things: sport and good looks; that made Maggie Dickens want to go out with him. He was flattered at first, because she was by far the most popular girl in the school. And at first he had thought she was pretty. But she wasn’t.
Sarah Dee Was Here Page 2