by William Shaw
Cupidi shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t stop long. We found the girl who had been staying in one of the caravans – the one whose ID we picked up. I just wanted to ask if you knew anything about her.’
The woman took the skirt out of the bag and looked at it. ‘I’m afraid not. I make a point of staying out of other people’s business. Unless they’ve set a dangerous dog on someone, obviously.’ She sat on a wooden kitchen chair in front of the range and pointed to another with a crocheted cushion on it.
Cupidi sat down too. ‘She was Lithuanian. Her name was Rasa Petrauska.’
‘Not really surprising. There’re an awful lot of Lithuanians around here. They do nearly all the farm work, you know.’
‘But you don’t recognise the name?’
Connie Reed shook her head.
‘She had a birthmark on her face.’
‘Possibly I saw her, yes, but I didn’t know her. Is that bad?’
‘No. But she was twenty-one and pregnant. It appears that the father was Hamid Fakroun, the gentleman who did this to my face.’ Cupidi pointed to the scab below her eye.
Reed looked down at the floor. ‘I apologise,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t let them stay on my field, this would never have happened. I’m not having them anywhere around here ever again, I promise.’
‘I don’t need an apology from you,’ said Cupidi. ‘They did this. Not you. You stepped in and saved my colleague from much worse. All I wanted to know is if you’d seen the woman here much.’
‘If it’s the one I think you’re talking about, I did, yes. She was around. Never really spoke to her. She seemed shy. I understand that. Same way myself.’ There was a saddle sitting on the kitchen table, with a cloth and and old toothbrush lying next to it. ‘You have to understand, I’m not the kind of person who goes out of my way for company.’
‘Did you at any point feel she was frightened?’
‘No. I mean, maybe. Not really. All I noticed was she seemed out of place, certainly. But so many people do, don’t they?’ She picked up a buckle and examined it. ‘Was she being mistreated?’
‘I’m not sure. She is five months pregnant, but hadn’t been for any hospital visits until yesterday. I’m trying to work out if there was something coercive about the relationship.’
She looked up. ‘Was there? Is that what she’s saying?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cupidi. ‘It’s a possibility.’
‘How awful would that be,’ said the woman. ‘If that kind of thing was going on in the field next to my house. I don’t really take sufficient interest in people, I suppose. I just find it so hard.’
‘You like living on your own, don’t you?’ She thought of her own mother, wanting independence.
‘It’s more that I don’t like living with people,’ said Connie Reed. ‘Why are you so interested in this girl?’
‘Because I think she’s in trouble.’
‘With girls like that, I tend to assume it’s their own silly fault. But that’s probably why you’re a better person than me,’ she said plainly, with no hint of either irony or self-deprecation.
‘Do you have any idea where any of the men worked? Were they on farms? Or building sites?’
‘If it was farms it wasn’t round here. It’s mainly arable and sheep on the marsh. A few cows, but not many. It’s not the farms around here that need labourers.’
‘What about Horse Bones Farm?’
‘Dairy,’ she said. ‘Oh. That’s where the body was found, wasn’t it?’
‘You heard about that.’
‘Cows. None of them would have worked there, I doubt. Nasty man, that farmer.’
‘Why?’
‘Always trying to block off his bridleways. Not legal, you know. Doesn’t like me riding through there. Silly really. Know why it’s called that?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Horse Bones Farm. The army retired their horses there after the Napoleonic Wars. Used to be hundreds of horses on that farm once, now he can’t bear a single horse crossing his land, silly arse.’
‘You know him?’
‘Only by reputation.’
‘Which is?’
She looked away. ‘I’m sure he’s perfectly nice. He’s just trying to run a farm, which is tough enough in this day and age.’
Cupidi stood.
‘I’m sorry. I haven’t been much use, have I?’
‘Maybe,’ said Cupidi. ‘You don’t like hunting, I see. Is there a lot of it around here?’
‘Some. Don’t like them coming on my land. Don’t like the cruelty to animals.’ The woman who had killed a dog with her bare hands.
Reed walked her to the door again, as if she needed to know that her visitor had gone before she could relax.
She reached Dungeness as the last of the day’s light disappeared. Once she reached the place where the sea road crossed over the small railway, she pulled over by one of the big new millionaire’s beach chalets, watching the red sky darken, trying to fix the day’s events in her head before she arrived home. The discovery that Hilary Keen had once been young and idealistic, going to prison for her beliefs. But more importantly, visible even in the pixellated video link, the fear in Hamid Fakroun’s eyes. The father of Rasa Petrauska’s child was a man so callous that he had almost certainly coerced a vulnerable woman into having his baby, but even he had looked afraid.
She was finally getting a sense of the malevolence that lay beneath the surface, but it remained obscure, hard to grasp. In neither case, the dead man’s nor Hilary Keen’s, did the evidence form any pattern she understood.
In the millionaire’s black house, a light came on. Someone was in. It looked like someone had hired it for a house party. There was an expensive-looking German SUV parked on the pebbles next to it, a red sports car of some kind and a classic 1960s Citroën.
People who lived here all year round here resented these new arrivals with their high-tech, architect-designed houses. The older shacks were ramshackle, bent and weathered. These new buildings were all clean lines and flat planes. Their unyielding neatness seemed like an affront to the wildness of the place.
She shivered. The days were already getting shorter. Soon she and Zoë would be starting their second winter here; in this place she liked that season even more than the summer. The tourists left. People ordered in firewood and hunkered down, waiting for the cold to come and for the birds to begin arriving.
Above the black silhouette of the Old Lighthouse, the sky was streaked pink and magenta.
She was about to move off again when someone raised the blind in the black house. A big square window was suddenly illuminated by clear orange light.
A woman was in the bedroom, looking out of the glass towards Cupidi’s car.
Cupidi froze for a second, then sank slowly down in her seat until her eyes could only just see over the dashboard.
She knew her.
The woman was Cathy Colquhoun; David’s wife. She was standing in a sparse white room, looking out over the shingle, straight towards her car.
Fumbling with the switch, Cupidi switched the lights onto full beam, making it impossible for Cathy to see into the car. The woman stood in the window, lit up. She was wearing a pale grey sweater and squinting out into the evening. Then she turned on her heels and walked to the door, switching off the light as she left the room.
‘Shit,’ said Cupidi. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
She was angry. This was her own special place; the place she had run away to. How dare he?
THIRTY-ONE
‘Your boyfriend called round,’ said her mother. She was sitting on a deckchair outside Arum cottage, cigarette in one hand, glass of rosé in the other. She had put candles in jam jars in a circle around her.
‘Jesus. David?’
‘What’s he doing here?’ asked her mother.
‘He’s not my boyfriend. It’s over. It was finished ages ago in London.’
‘Doesn’t look like he thinks that.’ Hel
en took a pull on her cigarette and blew out smoke.
‘He came here?’
‘Knocked on the door up at the house looking for you. Zoë was in.’
‘Oh hell,’ said Cupidi.
‘Exactly.’
‘I bet she loved that.’
‘Not much. She thinks you’ve been lying to her about the relationship being over. I told her you’d never lie. Would you?’
Cupidi reached out and took the cigarette from her mother’s hand. ‘Unbelievable. He’s gone and rented one of the big beach houses. With his wife.’ She took a puff from the cigarette and regretted it right away. It tasted disgusting.
‘Oh,’ said her mother.
‘What did he say?’
‘He just wanted to know when you were back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Zoë that angry since she was small.’
Cupidi looked around. Moths circled the candles. ‘Where is she?’
‘She went off in a huff. Took your bike.’
‘It’s got no lights. What did you let her do that for?’
‘I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s not a question of letting her do anything,’ Helen said. ‘I can make you some cheese on toast if you like. There’s nothing much in the fridge.’
‘Not hungry. Is she all right?’
‘Of course she’s all right. She’s just angry. I suppose you’d like some wine then?’
Cupidi nodded. Her mother pushed herself out of the deckchair and went to the kitchen, returning with another glass. Cupidi unfolded a second deckchair and set it up within the circle of candles.
She looked up. The stars were disappearing from the western sky; cloud was coming over. The air was thick and muggy.
‘Tell me about Greenham Common,’ Cupidi said to her mother as she poured the wine.
Her mother looked surprised. ‘Why?’
‘The murder victim – the woman. I’m pretty sure she was arrested there.’
Her mother filled her own glass. ‘It was such a long time ago. What was her name?’ asked her mother.
‘Hilary Keen.’
Her mother wrinkled her nose. ‘There were thousands and thousands of us there. I wouldn’t remember one person. I probably never even met her. You have to understand, it was huge. Do you know what gate she was at?’
‘Gates?’
‘We formed camps around the gates of the base. I was at Turquoise Gate. There were nine of them. Green Gate was women-only. I think it was Violet Gate where all the Quakers were. I can’t remember the rest. Oh yes, Red Gate used to have great parties.’
‘It looks as if Hilary Keen, the woman whose body we found on Romney Marsh, was arrested for criminal damage during a mass trespass on New Year’s Eve in 1982. She refused to pay the fine and had to serve thirty days.’
‘I remember that night.’
‘You do?’
‘I was there, but I usually made sure I wasn’t arrested. I always knew your dad would hate it if I was. It wouldn’t have been fair.’
‘He didn’t like it much that you were there in the first place,’ said Cupidi.
‘That’s not true,’ her mother said, stung. ‘He always let me do what I wanted. He said he was proud of me, in fact.’
‘Really?’ said Cupidi, disbelieving.
‘Absolutely. He backed me going. He was very ahead of his time in some ways. I mean it was awkward for both of us. All the women knew I was an ex-copper. Some of them didn’t trust me. And it wasn’t easy for him, on the force. But he wanted me to go.’
‘I don’t remember it like that at all.’
‘You did, too,’ said her mother. ‘You wanted me to go.’
‘I never did. I didn’t understand why you’d just left us. I was upset.’
‘No you weren’t,’ her mother said. ‘You were happy as anything that I’d gone, I think.’
In the darkness, Cupidi looked her mother. The remark had not been spiteful. It had been delivered as simple report on what had happened back then. ‘Was I?’
‘You loved it, just you and Dad. You resented it when I came back, in fact. It was hard.’
‘But… you left us.’
‘And you liked it that way. You had Dad all to yourself.’
It was a shock to Cupidi to realise that this was true. She had always complained to friends that her mother had left her and her father when she was a child. But she hadn’t minded at all. In fact, when she thought back, she had loved it when it was just Dad and her. A thirteen-year-old girl trying to be so grown-up, looking after her father, setting the table for him for when he came back from work. The smile on his face as he pretended that whatever she had cooked was delicious.
She realised that the anger she had felt when her mother had come back from the camp on her infrequent visits hadn’t been about her going away; it had been about her coming back, interrupting the rare closeness Cupidi had enjoyed with her father.
‘Wow,’ she said.
‘It was something I had to do at the time, though,’ said her mother.
A gust of warm air blew across the promontory, rustling tufts of dry grass. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cupidi.
Her mother looked surprised. ‘What for?’
‘God. I must have been a bitch. I didn’t realise.’
Her mother laughed a rich, phlegmy smoker’s laugh. ‘Funny how we recall things so differently,’ she said. ‘We never really got along after that, did we?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me about this, then. The one you wanted to know about.’
‘I hadn’t expected you to know her, really. I just wanted to know what it was like. To know what she was like, I suppose. It’s frustrating.’ Cupidi took a sip of wine.
Her mother settled back into her deckchair, looked up and said, ‘It was… It felt like everything was changing, do you know what I mean? Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. The Americans were coming to put these terrible, pointless weapons in our country. We felt we had to do something. I only went for a day. My friend Elfie suggested we go. Do you remember Elfie?’
Of course she remembered Elfie. A loud, flamboyantly dressed woman who had almost been like part of the family in those days. A chaotic hippie, she had a son the same age as Alex.
‘We went and we stayed,’ her mother said.
Cupidi tried to see down the road, hoping to see the silhouette of a girl on a bicycle, but there was no one there.
‘Don’t worry,’ her mother said. ‘She’ll be back.’ But she knitted her hands together with an anxiety Cupidi recognised.
‘You said the protesters didn’t trust you because you’d been a copper.’
‘Some of them. But I was useful. Because I knew the law and how the police thought.’
‘Double agent.’
‘Sort of, I suppose. But it was great to be part of something like that. Something really important.’
‘But what did you really achieve? The missiles came anyway. There was nothing you could do about them.’
‘We became more confident. More sure of ourselves, as women… as a whole generation.’
‘Zoë calls you a hippie,’ said Cupidi.
‘I was never,’ said her mother. ‘Not a hippie. Not really.’
‘So why were all those women imprisoned after that night?’
‘Because they refused to be bound over. If you accepted the fine, you also had to be bound over to keep the peace. That meant you couldn’t go back to Greenham. It was one of their conditions. They were trying to break us that way. So the women all refused to pay the fine and went to prison instead. They were very brave.’
‘You were arrested?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘You went to prison?’ Her mother had never talked about this.
‘God, no. They only charged me properly once and it would never stick. The stupid police there didn’t know what they were doing.’
‘Dad was an inspector in the Met whose wife was being arrested with a bunch of crusties.’
�
�He understood. He was a good man. It was never that bad, between me and your dad. Honestly.’
Cupidi didn’t respond. For a second, Helen’s face was lit briefly by the lights of a car turning at the end of the lane; she was smiling. Alex changed the subject. ‘Do you reckon you know anyone who might have known her?’
‘I could ask around. Elfie is probably more in touch with that crowd. Would that be useful?’
‘Very. Yes, thanks.’ She smiled at her mother in the darkness. A gust of wind blew out one of the candles.
But though they waited until it got too cold and windy to sit outside, Zoë didn’t come home.
‘She didn’t say where she was going?’
‘No,’ Cupidi’s mother said. ‘She didn’t say anything. She was just upset. I’m sure she’ll be back any minute.’
Together they walked back to Cupidi’s house, where she could use the house phone to call Zoë’s mobile, but the moment she finished dialling she heard it ringing upstairs.
So they sat down next to each other in the living room, switched on the TV and watched Newsnight reports about a famine somewhere and elections somewhere else. Cupidi was tired, but on edge. ‘I should go and look for her.’
‘She knows her way around. She’ll be back soon, you’ll see.’
But she didn’t come back. Her mother stood and started to pace around the room. It unnerved Cupidi to know that her mother was thinking of her sister, Alexandra, the dead woman Cupidi had been named after; a teenager who had disappeared.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’
‘Of course I am,’ she muttered. But her mother’s dark mood was infectious.
Both of them were thinking the same thing: how Alexandra had been abducted, assaulted, and her body left in a ditch.
A little after eleven, Cupidi took the large torch from the cupboard under the stairs, put on her walking jacket and went out looking for her.
Low cloud blackened the stars.
Cupidi climbed to the top of the shingle bank and shouted ‘Zoë!’ into the darkness.
She turned to see her mother silhouetted at the back door. ‘You go and look for her,’ her mother said quietly. Her mother was normally thick-skinned. There was a brittleness to her voice now. ‘I’ll stay here in case she calls or comes back.’