by Nina Allan
‘From what I could tell, Julie’s parents were decent people who cared about her. Julie never tried to suggest otherwise, though it was clear she felt she was different from her parents, that they were conventional and rather dull. She had a younger sister she used to be close to, but they’d drifted apart. She was a typical teenager, in other words. She was still very young. People tend to forget that.’
We talk for some time about our own childhoods, and the way teenagers today seem so much more confident and streetwise than we felt ourselves. Gifford tells me a little about some of the women she has encountered through her prison writing projects, how mature they seem in some ways, how astonishingly naive in others. She is clearly angry about society’s attitude to women offenders, passionate in her engagement with their stories.
When I ask her what she believes happened to Julie, she is quick to answer.
‘I think she was murdered. She was probably dead before anyone realised she was missing. I remember the night she disappeared as if it were yesterday. I ate Chinese takeaway in front of the television. Blind Date was on, then Stars in their Eyes. I watched that through to the end then spent the rest of the evening doing some marking. I wanted to get the school work out of the way so I would have Sunday free. Those were the last properly peaceful hours I had for the whole of the next two years. Julie going missing was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Worse than Jo’s death even, because Jo’s death was private. What happened with Julie left me wishing I’d never met her, never spoken to her, that she’d never existed. Even the act of remembering her seemed tainted, as if I were guilty of something, which I knew I wasn’t. I thought I’d never get over it.’
She pauses, and for a moment I see her as she was in the newspaper photographs: the hurt in her eyes, a sense of isolation that can never be lifted.
‘You know the strangest thing about her?’ Gifford adds. ‘Julie was terrified of black holes. She told me they gave her nightmares. When I asked her why, she said that black holes proved there were a lot of things we didn’t know about the universe, and that most of them were terrifying.’
[From Snake in the Grass by Celeste Adewami, Macmillan, 2012]
The fear rose up in Angela like damp rising up through the lawn, the kind of dampness that comes on at night, beading the grass stems with dewdrops, with what Angela’s sister Agnes used to call fairy piss.
It disappears with the sunrise, Agnes said. Pfff, like ghost breath. That’s what the sour smell is, you know, when you open the back door first thing.
Evaporates, Angela had corrected her. And there’s no smell anyway. You can’t smell fairies.
You can, too. They’re all stinky when you get a lot of them together, I bet. Like a nest of white mice.
Did Rowena remind her of Agnes, is that what it was? Angela didn’t think so, not at all. Rowena was tall, like her name. Agnes was small and firm and upright as a Russian doll. One of the maths masters at their old school had once referred to Agnes’s intellect as terrifying. When their father found out what the master had said, he’d threatened to go up to the school and have it out with the man.
Oh God, Dad, no, Agnes had moaned. Mr James is just a bit of a—
Dipshit? said Angela.
I was going to say unreconstructed nineteen-fifties male, Agnes said.
So your father is a better feminist than I am, said their mother. Why else do you think I married him? She was leaning in towards the hallway mirror, applying lipstick in a shade called Aurora’s Dream, a sort of pinkish brown, like dawn light shining on the pointed facades of the ironstone almshouses just off the High Street. Aurora was the goddess of the dawn.
Rowena’s hair was strawberry-blonde, a similar colour. Dense and faintly wavy, like some kind of grass crop. Rowena moved around Angela’s sitting room on tiptoe, hugging her bag to her side as if she was afraid of breaking something.
You have a lot of books, she said. Angela couldn’t help noticing how Rowena’s eyes kept sliding off the books and wandering towards the shelf where she kept the things she’d brought back from China, tourist souvenirs mainly and yet they were precious to her, keepsakes from another life. She loved the soapstone box especially, with its entwined dragons. Pinkish, like alabaster.
She wondered if it would be all right to offer Rowena a glass of wine. She had a bottle already opened, a fragrant Chianti, so no one could accuse her of opening it especially. Perhaps coffee would be safer, or even hot chocolate, a child’s drink for a child’s late night, although the thought of cocoa, with its intimations of crisp bedsheets and plump duvets, made Angela’s head spin.
Would you like something to drink? she asked, and then immediately regretted not replying to Rowena’s comment about the books. She could have asked her if there were any she might like to borrow, or simply talk about. Talking about books might make sense of things. Of this, of whatever this was. Asking Rowena back to her flat when there was no reason for her to come here, no reason at all, except that her flat was close to the cinema and Rowena had seemed so upset by the film, there had been tears in her eyes. Angela hadn’t liked the idea of her going home straight away. That’s what she told herself, anyway, though why she’d invited Rowena to go to the cinema with her in the first place remained unclear.
A student, Angela thought. The kind of thing you read about in someone’s discarded copy of the Daily Mirror.
I’d love a cup of tea, Rowena said. Her fingers brushed the lid of the soapstone box.
You can pick it up, if you like, Angela said. I bought it while I was in China. She hurried into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The relief of being out of the room, whilst knowing that Rowena was still in the room, made her knees shake. She made tea in the straight-sided china beakers she’d brought back from Copenhagen, modern variants on a Chinese original in Danish porcelain. Rowena would think she was obsessed with China, which she had been once. Still, not to worry, who cared. Two mugs of tea, even though Angela herself would have preferred a glass of wine. Vastly preferred, she would have said. Maybe later. Macaroons on a sky-blue plate. Pretty things, sweet things, she thought to herself, then realised she was sounding like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, a difficult image to dispel once it had wandered in.
She returned to the sitting room with the tea things. Rowena was sitting on the edge of the couch, the way you’d sit at your aunt’s house, afraid of scrunching the cushions or getting dirt on the seat covers. The soapstone box was balanced on her knees. Angela smiled.
Here’s your tea, she said. She placed the tray – beakers, macaroons, the whole shebang – on the low table in front of the sofa. Carved legs in the shape of lions’ feet. China again.
Thanks.
Angela went to sit on the sofa beside her, then changed her mind. She sat in the armchair opposite, her eyes drawn – inevitably, unsparingly – to Rowena’s drawn-together knees and the dragon box upon them, the long droop of rose-coloured hair, the same colour, almost, as the hair of the girl in the film who had played the accomplice, the weaker one, the girl who’d been ill but who had agreed they should go through with the murder nonetheless.
She hadn’t swung the brick but she’d been there when it happened. She hadn’t stopped it.
Of all the murders she’d seen onscreen, that had been the worst, Angela thought, because it seemed so real. She reached for her tea.
Are you feeling better? she asked.
I’m sorry. You must think I’m pathetic.
It’s my fault. If I’d known the film would upset you so much—
I felt so angry, that’s all. They should have left them alone.
The girls? Angela couldn’t remember Rowena ever saying so much at once before. Not just in class – in class she was mainly silent – but that time they’d had coffee together in the refectory, she’d barely said a word then, either. Embarrassed to be seen with a teacher? And yet when Angela had asked if she’d like to see a movie with her, Rowena had agreed at once.
As if
she’d been waiting to be asked, or so Angela had told herself. She wondered now if that was wishful thinking, if Rowena had simply been too embarrassed to say no.
They weren’t hurting anyone, were they? Rowena said. All they wanted was to be together. But that’s what always happens when adults are scared of something. They try and destroy it.
There were tiny spots of colour in her cheeks. She looked as if she might start crying again.
Life is always difficult for people who are different, Angela said. The newspapers of the time had described the girls as possessed, monsters, daughters of Satan. She wondered if she should share this information with Rowena, then decided to tell her about the soapstone box instead.
I found this in a funny little antiques shop close to the centre of Beijing, she said. It was in the basement of a warehouse somewhere. I can’t remember now who told me about it. One of the other reporters, I expect. I wasn’t really there long enough to have Chinese friends.
Angela remembered Jing Li, who had been assigned to their office as their official translator: the dark line of her hair against her jawline, straight as a blade, the perfect curve of her throat, like the inside of a shell. It had been a joke between herself and Agnes, how much she’d fancied her. Of course she’d never dared do anything about it, she was far too shy.
I think it’s beautiful, Rowena said. I love the dragons.
Have it, Angela almost said, then didn’t, because the box was hers and she still wanted it, needed it to remind her of who she’d been when she’d come across it in that unexpected place, half market stall, half junk room. All that teal-blue silk, she remembered, piled up in the corner like old dustsheets.
If she gave the box to Rowena she’d never see it again, never hold it in her hand, small as a pack of cards but twice as heavy. That might not matter now, but it would hurt later, she knew it would. She plucked the box from Rowena’s knees and placed it gently on the tea tray, next to the sky-blue plate with the macaroons.
I should call you a taxi, she said.
I could stay here, if you want, Rowena said. She pushed her hair back from her face then let it fall forward again, her cheeks flushed red, as if she’d drunk the Chianti after all. It would be easier for getting to college in the morning.
A little joke for them to enjoy later, once this peculiar, awkward beginning was long in the past and they could laugh about it? God, you were so slow! I thought nothing was ever going to happen.
What about your parents? Angela said.
That’s OK. I can tell them I’m staying over with a friend.
Which is exactly what she did, five minutes later, padding into the hallway in her stocking feet, only she was wearing socks, not stockings, an Argyll pattern. Men’s socks, they looked like, her dad’s, probably. Her feet in those bulky socks. Angela felt she might faint from longing at the sight of them. She sat rigid in her armchair, trying not to eavesdrop. Yeah, Miranda’s, she heard Rowena say, but nothing else. She glanced at her watch: just gone eleven. Would they phone Miranda’s house, to check? Who phoned anyone after eleven, unless it was an emergency? Why would they, anyway? She was just being paranoid.
Rowena looked different when she returned to the room. Older, Angela thought, wished, told herself. There was a light in her eyes that hadn’t been there previously. Right, Rowena said. That’s them sorted. Shall we put on some music?
Angela fetched the Chianti from the kitchen and they danced. At the time, Angela thought she would remember forever the detailed step-by-step of how it happened – how one minute they were sitting in armchairs drinking tea and the next they were dancing to Hazel O’Connor, their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, wine glasses in hand.
Rowena crooned along to the lyrics, laughing when she came to the end of the line, just to play it safe, Angela supposed, just to prove to them both it could still be a joke if either of them wanted it to be. And then that sax riff, spiralling into the night like the bleeding outer edges of the Milky Way.
At least Angela still had a part of her mind left, enough to stop the thing from ending her completely.
There’s just the one bed, she said. I’ll sleep on the sofa.
It’s OK, said Rowena. They’d finished the wine by then, and it was well after midnight. Rowena was beginning to droop. She rested her head on Angela’s shoulder, the rucked-up mass of her rosy hair tickling against her nose.
I’ll find you something to wear, then, Angela said, and she did, a huge grey T-shirt with a hole under one arm, REYKJAVIK across the front in dirty-white capitals, not the place but an obscure post-punk band from the end of the eighties. Angela had seen their drummer play live once at Ronnie Scott’s. Cass had been her name, Cass Reinhardt? Angela loved the T-shirt too much to throw it away.
Rowena removed her jeans and then her jersey, their evacuated tubes dumped in messy worm-cast piles at the side of the bed. Rowena’s body was firm, squarish, the bushy mass of pubic hair surprisingly dark. The moment hovered and then passed. Rowena pulled the Reykjavik T-shirt over her head. It reached to her knees. Beneath the faded cloth, the bumps of her nipples were just visible.
Rowena—
It’s OK, Rowena said. We were just dancing. She pulled back her side of the duvet and scrambled in. Angela undressed, facing the wall. By the time she turned back to the bed Rowena was asleep, or at least she was pretending to be.
Angela climbed into bed and switched out the light. She could hear the girl’s breathing, slow and deep, see the dark bulk of her shape faintly outlined against the curtains. Angela shifted to lie on her side, then slid her hand beneath her nightshirt and between her legs. Her clitoris felt huge, like a grape. She teased it gently with the edge of her nail, relishing its soreness, remembering the blunt convexity of Rowena’s nipples, the dark pubic hair. She penetrated herself, squeezing the insides of her thighs against her hand. She came almost at once, a liquid silence. The rhythm of Rowena’s breathing did not change.
Angela dozed on and off for a couple of hours, her thoughts a feverish jumble of disjointed syllables and dream images. A child’s first alphabet: beach balls and elephants, a gyroscope, a pair of red velvet slippers with golden trim. At some weird hour she reached sideways to her bedside table and picked up her watch. Five o’clock. She tiptoed to the bathroom, quietly washed her face and then dressed herself in the clothes she’d dumped in the laundry basket two days before. Rowena surfaced at around eight o’clock. Angela made them both coffee and toast, then Rowena said she’d better be going, she had a class at nine.
Urban studies, she said. We’re learning about the history of Manchester.
They were the last words Rowena ever spoke to her, at least in private.
No act of intimacy took place. When they asked Angela about that night later – at the police station, on the witness stand – that was the story her lawyer said she should stick to, and so she did. She told them she slept on the sofa, and occasionally she convinced herself that she really had. No act of intimacy took place. Could dancing to Hazel O’Connor be classed as an act of intimacy? She doubted it. Not by lawyers, anyway. Angela kept the tape of Breaking Glass, but she never played it again. Some years later she bought a CD replacement, but she never played that, either.
Selena read Snake in the Grass from cover to cover in just a few hours. She was surprised by how deeply she became absorbed in it. There had been a time when she avoided crime stories of all kinds, but especially any that involved a missing person or a lost child. The bit that always got to her was when the police came. The moment when a normal day became something horrific, when the lives of ordinary people became a story for others to read about in the newspapers.
Celeste Adewami’s Wikipedia entry said she was a junior BBC researcher who had stumbled into writing fiction almost by accident. She still enjoyed doing research, and liked to base her crime novels on real-life cases. In Adewami’s fourth novel Snake in the Grass, Rowena Kingston gets abducted by someone she meets by chance in
the city art gallery, a man no one seems to know or to have even laid eyes on. The subplot about Angela Craig starts off seeming like a red herring, but turns out not to be. Once she is released from prison, Angela becomes more and more obsessed with Rowena, and with her disappearance. She ends up on the trail of the killer, whose identity Adewami keeps cleverly hidden until the very end.
Selena felt uncomfortable at first, knowing that Adewami had based the character of Angela Craig on Allison Gifford, but after a while she became so wrapped up in the story she stopped thinking about it. She liked Angela’s voice, the skewed clarity of her thoughts, the intensity of her inner reflections. It was as if Adewami had been transcribing the thoughts of a real person.
Rowena Kingston though, she was like the blank space in a jigsaw puzzle where the missing piece should go. People talked about her all the time, but everyone seemed to have a different opinion and you ended up not trusting any of them.
No one knew Rowena. Not really.
In Adewami’s novel, Rowena’s best friend was called Carina Ghosh. Either Allison Gifford never mentioned Lucinda Milner in her interview with Adewami, or Adewami had chosen not to include the material. Julie seemed to think that Allison hadn’t known about Lucy, but even if that was true, there had been photos of her in all the local newspapers, both soon after Julie went missing and a year later, when Lucy got into Oxford.
Until she read Adewami’s book, the idea of tracking down Lucinda Milner had never occurred to her. Lucy had come to the house a few times, though Selena had barely spoken to her. She had seemed mysterious and vaguely aloof, part of the new life Julie was leading at college, the life she guarded like the entrance to a separate existence. Where Lucy ended up after Oxford, Selena had no idea. The Milners would have moved by now, several times, probably. In the end it was only her certainty that the trail would have gone cold that allowed Selena to dare herself to dial the Milners’ old number, still preserved like an autumn leaf, between the pages of an old school exercise book in Dad’s old Filofax, one of the artefacts she’d rescued from his flat without knowing why.