Sarah Dee Was Here

by Steve Galloway

  “You’re not here for food – are you crazy? Not even an ice cream?” said Reni.

  “I’m afraid not. I need to speak to one of your workers.”

  “Ah, which one?”

  “I hoped you’d be able to help me with that. You had an order last night for number twelve Bramble Gardens, probably placed sometime after 11pm. I need to speak to whoever delivered it.”

  “Was it that bad they called the police?” laughed Reni.

  Crane smiled back, but he wasn’t really in the mood for banter: his eyes were tired after a late night at the station yesterday and the events of this morning which followed the disappearance of Millie Blunden. Something in his stare seemed to convey this seriousness to Reni, who toned down his joviality.

  “Yes Mr Crane, that was young Trey. I go get him now: you wait here.”

  Minutes later Crane was sat facing Trey at a plastic table in the corner of the restaurant. Trey was in his late teens or early twenties with short spiky dark hair and a neat goatee beard. He had a shiny ear-ring in his left ear and a chunky-looking gold chain around his neck. He had the look of a small-town wide boy or wannabe gangsta-rapper; but despite his appearance, Crane’s first impressions didn’t scream murderer. Trey seemed nervous but also genuinely surprised that he was being questioned, and seemed to be answering Crane’s questions with honesty.

  “Who did you see when you dropped off the pizza?”

  “Just this guy, man, he crept up on the car, gave me a shock you know.”

  “So you didn’t actually approach the house?”

  “Nah man, he was at the end of the drive.”

  Crane looked around him: the restaurant was fairly empty, and the few diners who were present were well out of earshot.

  “Can you describe him to me?” asked Crane.

  “Well, he was a young guy, about the same age as me, innit?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “But you didn’t recognise him as somebody you knew?”

  “Nah. But it was dark, and he had a big hood up.”

  “Could you see his hair colour?”

  “Nah.”

  “His eye colour?”

  Trey shrugged: “I don’t know man, it was late and I wasn’t really paying attention, you know.”

  “OK” said Crane; was there anything that stood out about him?”

  “No. He was really normal looking you know, sort of boring, you get me?”

  Crane wasn’t sure if he did. He would ask Trey along to the station to complete a proper e-fit, but given Trey’s talent for observation it would probably resemble half the men in the town.

  Thirty-five

  Harry Wollers put his BMW into gear and pulled out of Ricky’s road, no nearer solving the puzzle than he had been when he arrived. There was no trace of Millie at Ricky’s house, and according to his father the lad had been in bed since arriving back from the police station the night before. But Harry was still suspicious. Ricky James just didn’t look bothered. His reactions were a million miles away from what you would expect of someone who had just been told that their girlfriend was missing: no sign of worry; no frantic questions; no rush to dial her phone and track her down.

  It was really bloody odd.

  Harry turned on the radio and pondered on the case as he drove. He turned the radio up as a song he recognised came on. It was a hit from the 80s which he had almost forgotten about, but it stirred that funny part of the brain that only a melody can reach. He was sure he’d heard this tune recently. He frowned and thought hard...

  Then it came to him: this was the tune that Ricky James had been humming last night as Harry had led him back to the cells.

  The song was by a band called Electronic, and it was called ‘Getting Away With It”.

  Thirty-six

  (Somewhere...)

  Somewhere far away, in the place she used to call her home-town, there were reminders: actual physical reminders of the years of ugliness. There was an alleyway that ran behind the garages of the West Hails shopping centre and flats, where once she had lived. On that wall: directly behind the window of what had once been her bedroom; were painted the initials GLF.

  Most people who would pass by the alleyway didn’t give the letters a second glance. Apart from those who knew what they stood for, and who they were aimed at.

  Ginger. Loner. Freak.

  At first Sarah had taken some of her paints out early in the morning and daubed a clean white cloud over the initials, but days later they had appeared again: bigger, bolder, defiant:

  GLF!

  After a while Sarah gave up trying to stop it happening. The slogan was probably still there now: faded by two years’ worth of exposure but still readable.

  Just like the wording on Maggie Dickens’ tombstone.

  Soon that wording would grow obscured by moss, and the flowers placed on the grave would twist and decay like the body beneath the soil. The painted initials would dissipate in time, and the other GLF initials around the town - carved into trees or scrawled on benches - would also succumb to nature’s endless renewal.

  And while the memories would be slower to fade, they would too: soon Maggie’s hatred and humiliation of Sarah would dissolve from the minds of those involved and float away in the long stream of time: and Sarah would continue to wake up to beautiful summer mornings like this one.

  As for Maggie, well Maggie would rot.

  The trees were changing now; becoming sparser and smaller. Then the houses started to appear: big farm-houses with agricultural machinery and children’s toys in the garden. After a while this vista gave way to the out-skirts of the city: blocks of flats, sports fields, shopping centres; and before long she was back in the comforting bustle of the city, racing along the elevated tracks as the beautifully shambolic mess of urban life swarmed beneath her once again. She was a million miles away from Tarnsey; not in distance, but in her mind at least.

  Soon she would be back on her street: walking up the steps towards the front door of the house she shared with Jin and Camille. Soon she would be back in the white-walled kitchen with the smell of coffee in the air, and one of the girls would ask her how her journey went.

  “Did it go OK, Janie? They would ask (For she was always Janie to them) and she would smile back:

  “Yes thank you, it went very well.”

  Thirty-seven

  (Anna)

  I often thought how odd it was that we’d so quickly become used to relying on the internet to keep friendships going. I remembered as a child – before Facebook and MSN existed – having to phone up my friends’ landlines or simply call round their houses unannounced to see if they fancied playing. Nowadays if someone isn’t on Facebook it’s almost as if they don’t exist.

  I hadn’t had any contact with Helen Craig since she abruptly deleted her Facebook page several months ago. I’d always meant to text her and see how she was, but never quite got round to it. I was away at college, and always found an excuse to put off contacting her. I’ll wait till I’m back at home, I always thought. Well now I was back at home, and I reckoned that made it time to get in touch.

  Helen was my closest friend at school, and in a way my replacement best friend after I’d dumped Sarah from that position. Helen and I had got on well: we were both studious, a little insecure and on the quieter side. But whereas I had ambitions to move away and forge a career, Helen seemed a bit more settled in Tarnsey. She had a large, supportive family - something an only child like myself couldn’t quite appreciate - and had stayed behind to take her ‘A’ Levels at the high school.

  Once I’d arrived at Selchester College I’d found that Helen was very much out of sight and out of mind. I moved on, finding new friends and throwing myself into my studies, with only paltry, token efforts on my part to keep the friendship going. We’d always met up when I returned home, and a couple of times she’d come to visit me in Selchester, but for the last six months at least there had been
nothing.

  When I pondered upon such things, I saw an unpleasant little link between my abandonment of Sarah and the fraying of my friendship with Helen. Was this the manifestation of some unpleasant trait in me? Did I only use friendships to make my own life a little more comfortable, before discarding them like litter when they were no longer needed?

  Thoughts such as these inspired me to send that text message to Helen, and as a result I found myself standing opposite the pier watching the waves crashing against the groynes and waiting to meet up with her.

  The sea was particularly choppy, and it was one of those summer days when the sun takes off his hat and goes for a little sleep, allowing drizzle and wind to come and play in his place.

  Tarnsey seafront looked as far from picture-postcard perfect as it’s possible to get on days like these. The rusty legs of the pier stood in the frothing green water like a reluctant paddler’s, while its faded signs promised ‘ice cream’ ‘amusements’ and ‘souvenirs’ in sarcastic, peeling lettering. The crazy golf course across the road was grimacing under flecks of rain and sea-spray as a solitary couple in raincoats hacked manfully towards the windmill. I stood under the blue and green awning of the empty Pizza-Mia restaurant and waited for Helen to arrive.

  It didn’t take long for a girl’s figure to appear some way down on the promenade wearing a big khaki anorak and sheltering under a huge umbrella. I soon realised it was Helen, and stepped out into the drizzle to greet her. We exchanged a damp hug and looked at each other in that funny way that friends who haven’t seen each other for some time do.

  There was something subtly different about Helen: she was taller than me, and still looked fairly slim under her massive coat, but her face was noticeably fuller and her dark hair a little greasier and less sleek. She smiled at me, and we exchanged some light small talk before deciding to head into Flamingo’s for a coffee.

  Once inside and out of the grim afternoon weather Helen took off her big anorak and we found a table. She was wearing a navy blue knitted jumper underneath her coat, and as she hung the coat on the back of her chair I noticed a distinct bulge beneath her ribs. It surprised me, as Helen had always been skinny; in fact only a few inches short of being lanky: all skin and bone and barely an ounce of fat on her. I’d always assumed that she’d been one of those lucky girls with an efficient metabolism who could eat whatever they wanted and never show any physical evidence.

  As Helen sat down I noticed that the bump looked even more pronounced. Either her metabolism had started to let her down, or there was another reason for her rounder belly...

  Don’t be silly, I remember thinking, Helen isn’t like that. She’s sensible, besides she’s only eighteen. I wasn’t even sure if she had a boyfriend. We started to catch-up, with me striving to act as normally as possible and not look down at her stomach.

  Our coffees arrived and I started to tell Helen about my life at college and my impending move to Brighton. As I spoke I felt a funny emotion entering my head and looking around for the first time. Normally I would have spoken about Brighton, medical school and my studies with an unbearable keenness: but today there was a slight hesitation in my words; a pinch of doubt, and it was something to do with Adam. I realised then that I could easily be talking just as enthusiastically about him.

  Part of me wanted to talk about him, to say his name, to tell Helen how it had felt to kiss and hold him tight in the moonlight. I sipped my coffee and tried to concentrate:

  “So” I said to Helen, “what about you? How did your ‘A’ Levels go?”

  “Oh fine, until five months ago, when I had to drop out.”

  “Oh” I said, unsure what to say. I glanced down again at her stomach and immediately looked back up again with eyes that probably gave away my thoughts.

  “Yeah, you probably guessed it” said Helen, rubbing the bump...“I’m going to be a Mum.”

  Later we were back in Helen’s bedroom in the little terraced house she shared with her Mum and Dad and younger twin sisters. The house had always seemed barely able to contain the five of them, let alone the new addition Helen was carrying. Hand-me-down baby toys and tiny, freshly washed baby clothes took up most of her bedroom, looking incongruous beneath the posters of punk bands I was more used to seeing.

  Back in Flamingo’s I had asked Helen who the father was.

  “I’ll tell you back at mine” Helen had said. Now she was about to show me. She was rooting around in her draw and pulled out some photos. She flicked through and pulled out a picture of a handsome, blond-haired young man in a leather jacket. She handed me the photos: the man looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t sure why.

  “Dylan Hansen. Fit isn’t he?” said Helen, “but he’s a complete bastard and a total waster. He’s having nothing to do with the baby.”

  “God” I said, “was that his idea or yours?”

  “His, but he sort of made up my mind for me when I told him I was pregnant and he hit me in the face.”

  “Shit” I said, looking at the picture.

  “It’s OK, my parents have been great about it” said Helen, smiling at me. “It’s nice to have someone my age to talk to though Anna. I miss the way we used to talk at school.”

  “Me too” I replied.

  Helen was silent for a while, then she spoke to me again in a quiet voice:

  “After he hit me, I thought he was going to try and kill the baby, I really did. I thought he was going to kick it to death through my stomach. He scared the shit out of me Anna, but luckily I haven’t seen him since. It made me realise that he’s mad, totally mad.”

  “Oh my god” I said, looking through the other photos and trying to think what I could say. It was at that point I saw the photo of all the young men in football kits: one group in yellow and the other in green; standing on either side of a referee. I noticed Dylan in the green team from the wavy blond hair, but then I idly studied the yellow team. I recognised the grinning face of Ricky James, the guy who had been going out with Maggie when she was killed, and who Adam had told me the police looking for Callie’s killer had arrested. I’d since heard in the news that they’d released him.

  I looked further along the yellow team and all of a sudden felt my heart flutter, for there was Adam: without his glasses on and with slightly longer hair, smiling confidently into the camera. I didn’t know he played football. I looked into his eyes and felt that strange feeling in my stomach once again. It was like a need: a need to see him, to be near him.

  I handed the photos back to Helen and smiled sympathetically.

  Thirty-eight

  Beep-beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep-beep!

  The alarm on his phone burst into life for the fifth time and Stu Harris desperately tried to hit the snooze button again. Instead, he knocked the phone off his bedside table and sent it flying across his wooden floor.

  “Shit a brick!” exclaimed Stu, reluctantly dragging himself out of bed to retrieve it. Once he’d found it, he glanced at the time display:

  07:55

  Stu swore again under his breath. It was later than he thought, and there was no point going back to bed. He had to leave for work in twenty minutes. No time for breakfast: he’d have to jump straight into the shower and then change into the suit that was hanging on his door before heading off to the office.

  Stu’s head was throbbing from last night’s late night and beers. Whose idea was it to go down the pub on a Sunday?

  It had been Dylan’s idea, he remembered. His flatmate was crazy lately, crazier than ever. He was out drinking almost every night, and had started missing more than a few days work these past few weeks.

  White-Moore’s, the estate agency they both worked for, had been more than fair to Dylan recently: they had agreed to keep him on despite his conviction for assault; but he was very much on his last warning. Dylan was actually a bloody good estate agent: but only when he was there and sober, which wasn’t that often recently.

  Last night at around midnight –
when closing time was approaching – Dylan had started ordering shots and getting more and more drunk and aggressive. Eventually Stu had left him to it, walking home alone whilst Dylan stayed in the bar chatting to some old regulars and playing the fruit machine.

  As Stu passed Dylan’s room he noticed that the bed was empty. He looked into the front room and saw no signs of Dylan’s presence: and the hall – where Dylan usually dumped his shoes and denim jacket – was clutter free.

  Later that morning: after Stu had had his shower, coffee and cigarette and walked into work he settled into his desk at White-Moore’s and looked opposite him to where Dylan usually sat. His desk was empty.

  At about 10am Stu tried to look busy as his boss Mr White bustled into the office, red-faced and muttering to himself. He saw his boss’s eyes settle on Dylan Hansen’s still-empty desk, and then felt his eyes focus on him:

  “Harris lad, where’s your mate today?” shouted Mr White.

  Stu wasn’t sure what to say; whether to lie for Dylan or not. If he said that his flatmate was at home ill, only for him to walk in through the door late, then it would be him that would look like the dishonest one.

  Sod it. I’m not getting in trouble for him, thought Dylan.

  “No idea boss, not seen him” said Stu.

  Thirty-nine

  “So, where are we then boss?” asked Inspector Harry Wollers as he settled opposite DS Nick Crane with a coffee in a little beige plastic cup.