by Laura Powell
I know that I should tell Inspector Napier what I saw, but the moment I do, he will ask why I was in the woods at all, with whom, and a hundred more questions that I could never answer without breaking my promise to you. Though I would never want to see you locked up or, God forbid, hanged (for what we did should never be a crime), neither can I watch poor Mr Forbes suffer. So please allow me to unmake my promise to you and tell the Inspector the truth, no matter what the consequence for us. If you don’t permit it, I’ll keep my promise and never tell a soul what we did. But if that’s what you choose, I can’t help thinking how cruel it will be to Mr Forbes and how bleak it will be to spend our lives saddled with this guilt.
I also understand that you must have had your reasons for leaving so abruptly and if, after this is all over, you still never want to hear from me again, I’ll leave you in peace. But if you changed your mind and found that you could perhaps love me too, I would be the happiest girl in all of Cornwall, and on God’s great Earth.
Your Betty
Gallagher drops the letter onto the passenger seat. Suddenly he knows exactly what he must do: he will hunt down that monster Paxon himself and find out from him where Betty is. He will force him to confess or drag him to the police station himself; Forbes will be released and Betty will be safe, never mind the consequences for him. He guns the engine and roars out of Newl Grove, onto the New Road towards Spoole.
The road is narrow and empty. The fields either side blur past and the rain chips down. He passes the correct turning and smacks on the brakes too late. The tyres scream. He slams the gearstick into reverse and backs down the street, turning sharply into a lane. At the end is a cluster of hedges and behind them, the two tall narrow chimneys of the biscuit factory.
The building itself is brick, blockish and unremarkable with a ribcage of scaffolding around it. Gallagher parks by the front door and leaps out of the car, forgetting his keys. The door is unlocked and he storms in. The forecourt is deserted, it is too silent. The hairs on his arms stand on end.
He strides between the rows of workbenches covered with silver machines, clamps and strips of wax paper. In the centre is an enormous open furnace. It spits and cackles.
‘Paxon,’ he cries. ‘I know what you did.’
His own voice bounces off the walls and pipes. At the far end of the factory floor is a door, leading to an airless corridor. It is dim but for the flickering shadow of the furnace. It smells of engine oil and sugar and ash. A row of offices juts off the corridor, sectioned behind a long pane of frosted glass.
‘George Paxon,’ he calls again. ‘Come out here and face me.’
Gallagher steams along the corridor, squinting through the windows. The offices are all dark, but for the last one with a dim yellow light inside. A figure is moving around a desk. He is stooped over. His body shudders as he half-carries and half drags a bulky object to the centre of the room. Gallagher takes a sharp breath inwards and flings open the door.
Part Three
Chapter 14
Fifty years later
‘Hello,’ says Mary quietly. ‘Hello Mr Gallagher.’
Then she dares to look at him.
He is a corpse of the man she once knew. His nose has bulbed out with age but kept its crooked bridge, his eyebrows are bushier and oaky age spots colour his face, matching the ones on her hands. His eyes are closed and, were it not for the rise and fall of his chest, he could be dead.
‘Can you hear me?’
His eyes flicker but he doesn’t move.
‘It’s me,’ murmurs Mary.
She is about to introduce herself but she stops, uncertain what to say. That moment his eyes open. He stares at her with glassy black pupils. She holds her breath and waits.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she says in a pale voice.
How can you not remember me? she wants to say. His face seared itself onto her memory, as if with a hot iron, on that terrible day they first met. Even after he left, she caught whiffs of his cigarettes and burnt woody aftershave.
‘It’s not you, it’s the medication,’ says the nurse, wobbling back into the bedroom with a full jug and two damp glasses.
Mary flushes; she had forgotten about the nurse.
‘The doctors have been adjusting his dosages since the heart attack,’ she continues. ‘Give him a few minutes and he’ll be himself again.’ She turns to John and speaks louder, elongating every syllable. ‘Why don’t you drink this and sit yourself up, then you can have a nice catch up with your friend?’
Mary wishes that the nurse wouldn’t speak to him so condescendingly, but she looks at him again and sees that he is still unmoving and expressionless, as though any feeling or thought or knowledge that he ever had, has long been scraped out of him.
What was she thinking, coming here and expecting an old man who hardly knew her fifty years ago to remember her now? He probably met hundreds of girls like her; all silly and naive and his for the picking. How was he supposed to know what happened to her after he left?
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ she says to the nurse, gripping her handbag. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about being early,’ says the nurse. ‘I’ll just finish up, then he’s all yours.’
‘No, I really shouldn’t have come.’
She glances fleetingly at him as she makes for the door. His eyes are still locked onto her face. They burn her, just as they burned her back then.
‘But you’ve come all this way. At least remind him of your name.’
‘It’s… it’s Mary Sugden,’ she mutters, hoping he won’t hear.
But his head twists and his eyebrows stitch together and his lips open.
‘I don’t know any Mary Sugdens.’
His voice is shaky but his tone is firm. It doesn’t match his body.
‘Come on now,’ soothes the nurse. ‘Don’t be like this.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ says Mary. ‘I’ll go.’
She is lightheaded. She leans against the wall to steady herself before she pushes on to the door.
‘I don’t know any Mary Sugdens,’ booms John again. ‘But I know you, don’t I?’
Mary freezes in the doorway, certain that she must look white.
‘They get agitated sometimes. It’s normal,’ explains the nurse.
‘You’re not called Mary!’
‘Don’t shout,’ says the nurse. ‘You’re scaring your friend. Look.’
Mary shakes with inward sobs but no tears come; tears never come. They haven’t since the day she was wrenched from St Steele, the day she ran the well dry. She cried for them all that day: for Forbes and for Gallagher, for her old best friend and for her dead mother, for her giblet baby and for herself. That first night in Middlebury, she had cried until her mouth parched, until her head throbbed and her brain shrank. She has never managed a tear in the fifty years since.
‘I understand,’ says the nurse. ‘It can be a shock to see them like this but—’
‘I don’t know any Mary Sugdens and I never forget a name.’
‘Calm down John. Your heart… I’ll have to call Doctor Lavery if you don’t.’
‘But I know your face. I never forget a face.’
The moment he says it, his eyes widen and his lips form an o-shape.
‘It’s Mary Sugden,’ says the nurse firmly. She turns back to Mary. ‘It’s quite common—’
‘Say your name,’ he interrupts, but his voice is gentler.
‘You remember me?’
‘Say your name,’ he says again.
Her throat has clogged up.
‘I was your Betty,’ she chokes.
She covers her face with her hands, horrified at how she worded it and horrified at how his burning eyes still make her feel. For a single awful moment, she remembers how it was to be Betty.
‘You must leave,’ says John Gallagher.
Chapter 15
October 1956
At first Betty doesn’t not
ice the blood. She wakes with her knees bent under her. Her muscles are knotted and warm fingers seem to creep up between her thighs, but when she rubs her eyes and looks around, she is alone.
The windows are beaded with condensation and, outside, a film reel of green blurs past; Paddington far behind now. Her teeth chatter with nerves and cold, and she has to bite down to stop them. Everything is calm for a moment, but then the creeping fingers return and something tugs downwards between her legs. Once. Twice. Again.
Betty tries not to panic. She manoeuvres her numb feet onto the floor using her hands and stands shakily. She unbuttons her coat next and twists around her skirt to check whether something jagged has caught in the nylon, for there must be a simple explanation. That’s when she sees the stain. It is dark and sticky and it blots the back of her skirt, the same way Mother’s port discolours the hearth rug. Then the smell hits her. Cold, liquid metal.
She leans forward to examine the stain but, as she does, a sharp pain slices through her middle, as though an invisible man with an invisible knife is carving into her stomach sac and wrenching downwards, but she is too startled to scream. She stands upright and the knifeman pauses for a moment, then returns with another hack. All she knows is that she can’t stay here. She needs to find help or perhaps hide away until she is herself again, but for a long moment she is frozen. The lavatory, she decides eventually. If she finds a lavatory, everything will be all right.
She opens her lunchbox and grabs an empty brown paper bag in case she is sick on the way. Bits of broken eggshell and an apple core fly out. She crunches over them as she hurries out of the carriage. The train twists at sharp angles and Betty concertinas along the passageway, slamming against the walls. Every few steps, she glances behind her: Mr Paxon must be here. He must have stabbed her in her sleep. She is his next victim. She stumbles into the toilet compartment, just as another blade of pain rips through her. She thinks she might vomit but everything turns white for a minute, maybe for ten minutes.
When Betty comes to, her cheek is pressed to the floor, her knees are folded beneath her and someone is knocking on her skull with a mallet. She lifts her head and looks around but she is still alone. The knifeman has disappeared too but a dull ache has set in her spine. She wants Mother to tuck her up in bed and press the hot water jar to her back, but home is far from here. So is Mother.
The knocking returns then. It sounds like knuckles on wood. He is at the door, she realises horrified. Mr Paxon is hunting her down.
‘Get away,’ she screams at him.
‘Are you having a picnic in there or something?’ replies a woman with a cross voice.
Betty is washed with relief.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Hurry up or I’ll call the guard.’
‘Please don’t. I’ll just be a second.’
Betty presses her palms to the floor and tries to hoist herself upright but she is too weak.
‘Actually could you give me five minutes?’ she calls.
There is a sharp little sigh, then the woman clicks away. Betty tries again to push herself upright. She makes it onto her knees this time. She wiggles up her skirt to her waist and is about to pull down her knickers to check where the pain is coming from, but there is another strange sensation between her legs. Her bladder seems to leak. She is wetting herself, only it is warmer and sludgy. Something stabs at her insides at the same time. She wants to reach up inside herself and pull out the blade or whatever it is that is ripping her to shreds.
It subsides eventually and slowly, still shaking, Betty pulls down her knickers to her knees. The colour hits her first. A tomato-coloured puddle fills the gusset of her good, white underpants. Some of it has seeped onto the floor too. It is a tiny red swimming pool, big enough for tadpoles, not quite for frogs.
Betty feels sick. A great snake of it slithers up her tubes and out through her lips. Acid burns her tongue. She vomits a second time. Her stomach convulses and a fist of pain sits in her pelvis, replacing the knife blades. The ache in her back deepens too, as though someone is trying to split the base of her spine in two.
She looks again, properly this time. In the middle of her gusset is a clump, no bigger than her little finger. It is the shape of a broad bean but, in texture, it is a raw chicken giblet. It wobbles with the train’s vibrations. She stares at it, lumped there on the blood and a streak of something grey. Betty thinks she knows what it is. No, she is certain she does; only she hadn’t known it was there. Not one of those in a girl like her.
Gallagher’s face sits in her mind, or is it Mother’s face? Their noses merge and chins clash.
‘I’m sorry,’ she cries out, just as the train brakes squeal.
The carriage slows – into a station, probably. She can’t stay in this cubicle; the guard will come or the woman will return or worse, the train will pass Liskeard and she will be stuck on here all the way to Penzance. She needs to concentrate.
She flushes the toilet and glances at the fleshy giblet. It is an ogre inside this tiny cubicle and she isn’t certain what to do with it. She uncrumples the brown paper bag and is about to drop it inside, then toss the bag into the waste bin, but something stops her. It isn’t right to throw it away like rubbish. Instead she picks it up gingerly between her fingers and examines it, her teeth clenched. Stringy clots of blood hang off. It is squidgy with a sort-of shell husked around it. She looks at it one last time through blurred eyes and rests it in the bag alone. It looks tiny inside. She twists the top to seal it, preserve it.
It takes a while to clean the scarlet puddle from the floor. The tap is stiff and her hands ache, so she uses spit and handfuls of scratchy toilet paper as a cloth. It doesn’t absorb well, so she kneads the patch in lethargic circles until it fades. She wipes out her soiled knickers next, lining them with toilet paper before she pulls them back up. She picks up her paper bag, takes a deep breath and walks back to her bunk, her head tucked down, her coat drawn around her and her thighs squeezed tightly together because the peeing feeling still comes.
What surprises her most is that the carriage looks exactly as she left it. Bits of eggshell still speckle the floor. There is still a condensation-frosted window, a hard sleeper bed with stickyout springs and her lunchbox lying open on it. The train steams on regardless.
She would like to haul herself onto the topmost bunk and listen to the soothing hooves of rain on the roof but she is too weak. She slumps onto the bottom bunk and draws the curtains, still clutching the paper bag. If Gallagher were here, he would know what to do. She tries to loathe him but she can’t, so she clings onto the paper bag and draws it to her chest.
Her eyes open and close, her grip on the neck of the bag slackens and tightens and, through the fug of half-sleep, she realises that the bag is pulsing; she wonders whether it is just the judder of the train or whether there is still a minuscule heart inside it, trying hard to beat.
No one else leaves the train at Liskeard. Betty steps cautiously onto the platform, her lunchbox in her right hand and the paper bag in her left. She waits for relief to settle in now that she is almost home but she only feels exhaustion and, surrounding it, a vacuum of nothingness.
When the tracks stop hissing, she sets down her lunchbox and settles herself under the hedge where no one will notice her if they pass, still clutching the paper bag to her chest to protect it from the dew. Betty isn’t sure how long she sits there but, when she moves off again, the sky is a sharper blue, the bushes are dry and the platform is still empty.
She makes her way to the road in a daze. Her bloodied thighs rub together and a different sort of pull draws down between her legs, uncomfortable but less urgent. Her head stays empty. It is as though someone has plucked out every feeling and left her with nothing but a map of the road that zigzags down to St Steele.
From the highest point, she can make out a cliff that jags into the water and envelops the little cove. Beyond it is a small cluster of trees. She staggers slowly towards them; she couldn’
t walk faster if she tried. If Mr Paxon rolled up here now and hauled her inside his car or stabbed her in the heart with a bait hook, she is sure that she wouldn’t care. She would just be glad to be horizontal.
‘The pond,’ she mumbles, woozy and swaying. ‘I need the pond.’
She kicks off her pinching sandals and leaves them on the roadside, walking barefoot the rest of the way. The earth is damp under her right foot and her left is pricked by the gravel road. She pictures the pond: she can see Gallagher lying on the grass, an arm propped under his ear, and she can see a version of herself too. It is a younger, lighter version of herself. She is dipping her toe in the pond and laughing; a strange sound.
The walk drags on. Betty passes Hotel Eden but doesn’t notice it. She focuses on nothing but her mental photograph of the pond and the willow until, finally, they are both in front of her. She touches the bark to make sure that it really is there, then she sits against it, the trunk supporting her back while the stagnant pond sleeps in front of her.
Betty must have fallen asleep because when she looks up next, dusk has settled in and the evening smells of mint. It reminds her of the mint that Mother planted in the scrubby patch of garden at the back of Hotel Eden years ago. It was so strong, it strangled the thyme and the lupins.
When Mother saw the dead herbs and flowers, she slashed up the mint in anger and piled the cuttings in the larder. They ate mint soup and mint sauce and mint-flavoured casseroles for weeks after that. Mother even tucked mint into their sandwiches instead of cucumber, and arranged clumps of it on the dining tables in eggcups in place of flowers. The hotel stank of mint. It only stopped smelling when Mr Eden made an unexpected inspection and told Mother gently that he was disappointed she had turned his hotel into a crematorium for dead weeds. Mother has grown nothing since.
Mother!
Betty leaps to her feet, forgetting her pain for a second. How could she have forgotten Mother? She will be panicking probably, and furious that she has been abandoned for so long. She might think that Betty has been hurt. What if she has contacted Inspector Napier? He will demand to know where she has been; it might all spill out. Mother would find out about the giblet baby and, worse, about Gallagher.