by Stef Penney
We’ve been driving down the A3, with the sun low and piercing through the windscreen, broken by trees, lighting up the squashed insects and other debris that smear the glass so that you can hardly see through it. The journey takes hours—and I’m really hungry, which makes it seem even longer. I’m trying to remember what’s in the fridge, and wondering if Mum is in a good enough mood to splash out on a takeaway. There’s a Chinese on the edge of the village and it’s barely out of our way. I point out the benefits to her—no cooking, no washing up—and, amazingly, she agrees. So when we get there, we order our Chinese—chicken and cashews for me with egg fried rice, and she has sweet-and-sour wings and rice. We get a portion of chips, too, with curry sauce, to share.
“What the hell,” says Mum.
Fragrant steam from the bag of food fills the car and mists up the windows, driving me almost dizzy with hunger. Suddenly I feel a reckless happiness sweep over me, quite different from my recent gloom. Christo is going to get better—he’s on drugs to help his immune system; they’ll find out exactly what it is, and then they can treat it. We’ll go to the zoo again—and other places: like the seaside, and films. School starts again soon, and I find I’m looking forward to it, to thinking about something different, not just the family. Right now, anything seems possible. I grin at Mum, and she smiles back; she’s probably thinking it’s just because of the Chinese, but I don’t care.
It’s only a few minutes to home, when suddenly Mum says, “What’s that?”
“What?”
“That! Oh, God . . . Oh, Jesus Holy Christ . . .”
I look out, through the steamed-up window, through the mist hiding most of the view, but not all, no; there’s not enough of it to hide the thick black smoke that pours out above the trees. Our trees. Our site. Where we live. I swipe the windscreen clear. It can’t hide the writhing black smoke or, as we get nearer, the flicker of blue lights.
As soon as we start bumping down our own little lane, I can see blue and red and black and orange—like a film, but one that jumps and jerks like something’s gone wrong with the projector. Two red fire engines are parked as far as possible from the fire—which is Ivo’s trailer, outlined in the middle of its own blazing light. White foam is already pouring from one of the engines onto the blaze, which fights back with more and blacker smoke.
A wave of relief clashes with a wave of horror at myself. Gran and Granddad’s cars aren’t there, and I can’t see anyone other than the firemen. At least it’s only Ivo’s trailer, I think. And then: Has Ivo come back to do himself in? And then: Good.
A fireman—a bulky black figure whose helmet seems enormous, far too big for his head—sees our van and runs over.
“Do you live here?”
“Yes!”
“Who lives in that trailer?”
Mum shakes her head.
“It’s my cousin’s—but he’s left. It’s empty. Mum and Dad . . . ?”
She gestures toward their trailers, their chrome trim winking with reflected flames.
“There wasn’t anyone here when we arrived,” says the fireman. “We checked inside the other trailers, and they were all empty. I’m afraid we had to force the doors. To be sure.”
“Oh . . .”
Mum is too relieved to be angry.
“So there’s no one in there?”
I’d already seen that all the cars are gone. Presumably, Gran and Granddad took Great-uncle out somewhere—to the pub, possibly, maybe?
“What about the other trailers—are they safe?”
“It’s coming under control. But I wouldn’t go inside until we’ve got this out. Was there any flammable material in that trailer, do you know?”
I think back to my last, fruitless search. The holy water didn’t do much good then . . . unless by a perverted miracle it turned into petrol.
Mum shakes her head.
“A gas bottle for the cooker, I suppose.”
“It was burning so fiercely when we got here that we thought it might be a fuel fire. You didn’t keep spare petrol or diesel stored in there?”
Mum shakes her head.
“No.”
“Well, if you’ll just stay back until it’s under control . . .”
So we sit in the car and watch. It’s incredibly weird, like being at a drive-in movie—or what I imagine that would be like. Only instead of a film, we’re watching my uncle’s trailer burn itself to a skeleton.
I eat my takeaway, but Mum says she can’t eat a thing. So I eat hers as well. Then all the chips we were supposed to share. In about an hour the flames are out, and there’s only a dark, evil-looking smoke rising from the blackened metal. All the paint has burned away, and the frame has buckled and twisted so that it’s almost unrecognizable. The whole thing is covered with lumps of whitish stuff from the foam.
Our fireman comes over to the car.
“It should be okay now. We’ll keep an eye on it for a bit longer. So if you want to go inside your trailer now, that’s fine.”
Mum nods; she still seems shell-shocked.
“But how could it have caught fire?”
The fireman shrugs.
“We won’t know that until someone can go in and have a look, and that won’t be today. It’ll take a while to cool down. Don’t go anywhere near it. We heard one explosion, but if there’s more than one gas bottle in there, it could still go off.”
He looks from Mum to me, with a look of significance.
“Thank you,” says Mum. “I . . . Would you all like a cup of tea?”
“Wouldn’t say no.”
“Right, then.”
The fireman winks at me. I’m surprised to find that I don’t mind.
When Mum goes inside to put the kettle on, I wander around outside, looking at the damage on the doors. They don’t look too bad. Another of the firemen comes over and explains how they’ll fix the locks so that we can still use them. He’s nice, very polite and respectful. I wonder what it might be like to be a fireman; you wouldn’t get bored, presumably, unless there just weren’t any fires. I start to feel sort of important, like this is an exciting adventure that has happened to us. Now that the danger is over, it becomes a story I can tell people. I have to get it right, though; arrange it properly so that it’s really thrilling.
I walk through the trees and around the site, trying to notice all the details, all while keeping a wide gap between the burned, smoking wreck and me.
Because of the way he parked it—at an angle with the door and awning toward the trees and away from the entrance—I suppose that’s why none of us noticed it before, and for a couple seconds I can’t make any sense of what I see, even though I’m staring straight at it.
It’s leaning drunkenly against the steps, rendered strange and unfamiliar by fire and foam, but a dark murmur of dread stirs deep inside me.
I run to Great-uncle’s trailer; it’s empty, empty, empty.
Then I run to Mum, who’s handing around a plate of biscuits. I grip her elbow and hiss in her ear.
“Mum . . . Great-uncle’s chair is by Ivo’s trailer. Why would he leave it there?”
We both know the answer to that.
Mum puts the plate on the ground; her eyes never leave mine.
“His chair? You’re sure?”
“What’s this?”
“My uncle’s wheelchair—it’s over there . . .”
She starts to run toward it.
“Does he have a spare?”
The firemen put down their cups of tea, all consternation, and two of them pick up their helmets and run to the trailer.
Mum’s face is ash white. One of the firemen is in front of her, holding his hands out so she can’t get past him. I’m trying to get closer, but someone is holding me by the arms.
“Please, you have to stay back. Please. It’s not safe.”
“Oh my God! Get him out!” Mum cries, her voice a shriek.
“Maybe they took him out without it,” I say, trying to imagine such
a thing, and failing. “Maybe they just went for a drive, and so, or . . . or . . .”
But the firemen go inside, and they call the police, and we know the truth long before Gran and Granddad return from the pub on their own, and before Gran starts screaming and wailing, and ranting at the men in uniform, who ignore her and string yellow tape around the whole site with us in it, as though we are bits of evidence, and whose cars sit beside us, with their doors wide open, silently flashing their blue lights until daybreak.
55.
Ray
There is always the possibility that there will be no answer. That the broken pieces of bone will be filed away in a drawer unidentified, that no connection will ever be established. But, ignoring that possibility, I have come back to the Black Patch, because I don’t know where else to go. I know most of the faces now. They’ve seen me with Considine, or Hutchins, and I am tolerated. Behind the wire fence and the poster advertising the future, there is little sign of building works; all the machinery has gone. The ground around the find is pegged out in a grid like an archaeological site; necessary because the digger and the flood between them did such a thorough job of spreading the remains. The surface of the mud is drying out and cracking. It has turned light brown, and smells. Eventually it will shrink; the forensics team will pack up their things. And then the diggers will be back.
In Huntingdon, Hutchins is in the laboratory, assembling pieces on a table like a large jigsaw puzzle. Although the dead girl’s official name is Unknown #34, I am pleased to hear that the staff call her the Gypsy Girl.
“Still sniffing around? Any progress on your missing mother?”
“No. Nothing. You? Any more candidates?”
“If there are, they haven’t told me.”
“You’re doing well here.”
There seem to be hundreds of pieces of bone on the table, though most of them are unrecognizable as human—or even as bones.
“Well . . . yeah. We’ve got some skull fragments now.”
She points with her pen. The largest piece is no bigger than my palm. “Any sign of cause of death?”
“Nothing. No. But the same developmental abnormalities. What about the kid—got a diagnosis yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
She gives me the over-the-glasses look.
“You don’t know? Have they stopped talking to you?”
“Well, now that Rose is found, we’re not investigating anything officially. They haven’t asked us to find the boy’s father; he seems to have cleared out. So . . . it’s not really my case anymore.”
I must have sounded pathetic. She laughs.
“Sounds like a good time to go on holiday.”
I haven’t been on holiday since Jen left. “Yeah, I should think about it.”
Hutchins goes to a drawer and takes out a plastic bag—it contains one of the wooden flowers they found in the grave. It’s squashed and blackened but recognizable, and it instantly reminds me of my grandfather. When I was about eight he gave me a knife—against my mother’s wishes—and tried to teach me how to carve a chrysanthemum out of a piece of elder wood, cutting strips of the white heart and curling them back. Sometimes they were dyed bright colors, but he liked them left raw. It’s quite a skill. At eight, I didn’t have the patience, and what patience I did have was devoted to model aircraft. Now I wish I’d paid more attention.
“I don’t suppose . . .”
“Definitely not.”
“Could I take a photograph of it? It might be useful.”
“I’ve probably got one you can have . . .”
She rummages through her files—there seem to be several copies of everything. She also gives me a photograph of the gold chain they found entangled in the vertebrae. I feel new energy flood through me. I wonder how soon I can get down to the site.
“One more thing—could the remains have been there as long as twelve years?”
“Twelve? Yes. I would say so. It’s possible. But then it wouldn’t be your kid’s mother, would it?”
“No.”
“Why twelve?”
“The husband had a sister—a seventeen-year-old who died about twelve years ago.”
“Did she suffer from the same disease?”
“Well . . . I don’t know. Not according to the official story. But I don’t have much faith in official stories anymore. She supposedly died in France, in a car crash, but there was no funeral. There is no record of death, in fact. It could all be a red herring.”
She’s polite, but I can tell she’s not that interested in more of my wild theories. Conversation moves on to her forthcoming holiday in Switzerland. She tells me she goes there every year and climbs mountains with her husband and daughter. All three of them are doctors, although the rest of her family deal with the ears, noses, and throats of the living; she is the only one who picks up pieces of the dead.
56.
JJ
They interviewed us all, without, I think, ever believing that we were responsible for the fire. They asked a lot of questions about Ivo, which, of course, we couldn’t answer, not knowing where he was or why he’d gone there.
I didn’t say anything about what he might have done to Mr. Lovell, either. I thought about it, and it might sound weird, but I just couldn’t do it, despite what I thought of him. I must admit, I clung to the idea that it was Ivo’s burned remains in the trailer, even after they told us it was the body of an elderly man and it was wearing Great-uncle’s rings.
The police told us what they thought had happened. That morning, Mum and I had driven off to London early to take Christo to the zoo. At lunchtime, Gran and Granddad decided to go and visit some friends. They said they wanted to take Great-uncle along, but he refused and insisted they go without him, so they left him all on his own, even though he hadn’t been well. I didn’t say anything about that, although I was angry at them, because who am I to talk? Once on his own, he went over to Ivo’s trailer, left his chair outside, and pulled himself up the steps. Then he poured petrol over the soft furnishings, turned on the gas, and lit a match. They found him on the floor near the cooker. They said he would have been killed by smoke before he was burned.
They said it wouldn’t have hurt.
I don’t know if they can really know that, or if they just say it because it makes it less horrible to think about. One thing no one could tell us is why he dragged himself into Ivo’s trailer to do it, rather than staying in his own. I wondered if he was so angry with Ivo for leaving that he wanted to burn the last traces of him away, or if he was destroying some sign of Ivo’s crimes— something I had obviously missed. We all searched through Great-uncle’s stuff for clues, or reasons, or anything, really. But there weren’t any. None.
So they were saying that he did it on purpose. That he wanted to kill himself. Gran wouldn’t have it. She told me I wasn’t to repeat what the police said to anyone.
“After all,” she said, “we don’t know that it wasn’t just a terrible, terrible accident. It’s wicked, them saying he meant it. They don’t know. They didn’t know him.”
I looked at Mum when she said this. I could tell that Mum couldn’t, any more than me, think of any accident that could happen like that. But we didn’t say anything.
I don’t know for certain that it’s true, but I remembered how odd he was that time in his trailer. Some of the things he said, now it seems like he was saying good-bye. I’d never seen him cry before. And while I think Ivo is a coward and despise him for running away and leaving us to clear up his mess, I can’t feel the same about Great-uncle. He didn’t have anyone depending on him. He was old. He was in a wheelchair. He had suffered in almost every way you can think of, and then, recently, had got a new illness to put up with. I cried. If I had gone back into his trailer that time, would that have made a difference? No one answered this question, because I didn’t say it out loud.
Word gets around. And with Gypsies, it gets around really fast. We had to get on and lay him out, bec
ause people started asking about coming to pay their respects, and it wasn’t as simple as all that, because the police took away his remains and kept them. There was to be an inquest. And then there was a massive row about the trailer.
Great-uncle’s trailer, even though he didn’t die in it, was mokady now that he was dead. Auntie Lulu came down—this was two days after—and said that old Westmorlands like his were worth a lot of money and we should sell it, and keep the money for Christo, who needs everything he can get, and is Great-uncle’s only descendant now (not counting Ivo, that is, because he is gone). Gran got really angry and said that it would have to be burned, that it should have been burned years ago when Great-aunt Marta died. In fact, it should have been burned when their first two sons died. And since it was still around after that, it should have been burned when Christina died. According to Gran, his trailer should have been burned four times, and it is four times mokady because it’s still here. Basically, it’s so mokady that if we don’t burn it this time, we’re all going to die. I’ve seen Gran angry before, but I’ve never seen her quite as angry as this. Lulu was furious, too. She said that if Great-uncle (they call him “our brother” now, instead of saying his name) wanted to keep it on after Marta’s death, that was up to him, because he was hoping she would come back and see him, and Christo was going to need all sorts of equipment and special help, and that costs money. She said the trailer and the things in it were worth at least two thousand pounds. She said lots of people buy a cheap trailer for the laying out, and then get rid of that, and he didn’t die in his trailer, anyway. She looked at Mum when she said this, as if she thought she would back her up, but Mum was never going to stand against Gran in this. No one asked me what I thought, but I agreed with Gran. I think we’ve had enough bad luck, and money’s only money. Christo, who hasn’t done anything to deserve all that’s happened, deserves for it to stop. Mum said she was in favor of burning the trailer, and I was glad.