I didn’t buy papers, avoided the radio and the television that blared in the B&B’s lounge, but the news filtered through all the same. The body had been found, had been brought down from the mountain, what there was left of it. The ravens had come down lower now as though following the body, drifting in circles over the town, and their calls were constant in my ears, guttural, croaking, low and harsh. I turned, my eyes from them, the thought of their claws and their tearing beaks, what they had feasted on. The feeling of being watched, of being pursued, intensified. I avoided the police station now, kept to the park and the back streets, biding my time, still lost in the past.
My father had turned to me for confirmation, once Juma had gone back to the kitchen. He crouched down to my level and his voice was soft and kind, his eyes levelled on mine. I basked in his attention.
‘Did Juma use the phone, Manda, while we were out?’
So many things I can see now I could have said. From the kitchen came banging pots, plates clattered down on the counter, no singing, no bantering with the garden boy.
‘You won’t get into any trouble.’
But it wasn’t that that caused me to hesitate, mind racing, choosing an answer. I felt the stillness of her attention, for all she lounged in such a casual pose. I felt his eyes catch mine.
‘I need you to tell the truth.’
I chose the answer that might make him smile, make him love me, make me his favourite girl.
‘It was her,’ I said.
My face blew through the streets, crumpled on newsprint, lifted on a summer breeze that tore through the town. It was caught on the legs of the bench where I sat in the park, watching the ravens, waiting for them to land. It was a terrible picture, one from my staff pass, badly pixellated. David’s photo was better, relaxed, gently smiling, unrecognizable as the person I’d known. ‘Great promise,’ the paper said about him. ‘Troubled history,’ it said about me. The police wanted me to help with their enquiries. I smoothed out the crumpled sheet and folded it, wanting to hide my face away. On the other side they had interviewed his sister and her face, her hawkish profile so like his, caught my eye. I looked a long time at the photograph, read through her words over and over, trying to make sense of what she had said.
‘A gentle soul,’ she had called him. A Don Quixote, chivalrous, a knight errant, protector of the women he thought he loved. ‘They were just crushes really,’ she said. ‘I suppose some girls found it a bit annoying, but he was harmless. I never thought it would end in tragedy.’
This time I left the town, taking the track up through the forests, out to the hillsides as far as I dared. I turned her words over as I climbed. The ravens flew up, guarding their kingdom, casting huge fleeting shadows over the slopes, blocking out the sun. Their voices sent me back. It was they who were watching me, tracking my every move. I felt their eyes on me, assessing me. I was running out of money, out of time. People were eyeing me too in the town, curious, suspicious, no longer a passing stranger. I waited till dark to slip through its streets and back to my room. I averted my eyes from the shadowy face in the mirror. The ravens were perched round my bed. From time to time I could hear them, shifting a little, clearing their throats with a soft murmur, otherwise patient and still. Voices came and went in the street outside. Then it was just the voices in my head. A gentle soul. A knight errant. A brother. A son. The newspaper picture floated before my eyes, the smile suddenly contorting with fear as he slipped away from my grasp, tumbling and turning in the fall from the cliff, transforming himself into a great black bird that flew off, laughing. But it wasn’t David in the dream, not any more, but Tom, Tom’s face, Tom’s mocking laugh. I woke up and sat up, gasping for breath in the empty room, still swept up in the emotion of the departing dream and unable to shake it off. Not fear, after all, not sudden blinding panic, but anger; a burning sense of rage.
There was sunlight filtering into the room, the early sunlight of the Scottish summer. The ravens had gone, the face in my mirror my own. I got up and dressed and walked through the quiet Sunday streets. Even the police station was closed, its door firmly bolted. I stood on the steps and knew I couldn’t face it alone. I walked down to the phone box and picked up the heavy receiver, fumbling for coins in my pocket. The digits came up unbidden under my fingers. Zannah’s voice was unchanged but wary, answering a call from someone she didn’t know, an unfamiliar number.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I think you’d better come and get me.’
I knew from the moment the words left my mouth that I’d given my father the wrong answer. I saw something shift in his face as he slipped through the gap between suspecting and knowing, even though I was too young to understand then what that might mean. He jerked his head backwards as he heard my words and she moved sharply behind him, sitting up straight and letting out a sharp hiss of denial.
‘She called someone darling,’ I added, in for a penny, knowing that I was sunk now anyway, unsure of what I had done wrong. It was no more than the truth, after all. No more than what he had asked for. ‘And then she lied.’
I held my breath, waiting for the coming explosion, but he had forgotten my presence and had turned to her instead. He said nothing. He stood up slowly and carefully, moving like an old man. She tipped up her chin in defiance. The ice cubes in her glass rattled and rang like tiny bells and she took a long drink, draining her glass, never moving her eyes from his. I longed for someone to speak, even to shout, to break the tension of their silence, but he never opened his lips. He just stood and watched her finish her drink and then turned on his heel and was gone in the click of a closing door. She put down her glass on the table, missing the coaster, and gave me the full force of her glare.
‘Satisfied?’
They are clever birds, ravens. They have the ready opportunistic intelligence of the scavenger. They are generalists, like humans. Long lived, for birds, and long memoried. The Scots call them corbies, but it wasn’t just his name that put me in mind of them with Inspector Corby. And nor was it his bright dark eyes, and the way he cocked his head as he put a question to me, waiting for the answers that never came. It was his constant, restless intelligence, revolving the facts, always ready to find another picture, another arrangement that fit.
The lawyer, too, had something corvid about him, with his black glossy head. A magpie, maybe, or a thieving jackdaw. He sat beside me, alert to pounce on the slightest slip in correct procedure. I might as well not have been there for all the part I was playing in their proceedings. Ravens are the only birds that will turn their heads to follow another creature’s gaze; awake to the existence of other animals’ desires. Yet if these two had followed mine, they would have seen that up through the high window of the interview room there could be glimpsed a square of blue sky, and in it, today, the screaming flight of the swifts.
The inspector talked. I listened. We had established that routine already in our two days together. Then, afterwards, the lawyer talked and Zannah listened, while I just watched the way his face moved, the rubbery precision with which he closed his mouth over the words, like the closing of a fridge door. I grasped at a few phrases as they passed through the air between us and turned them carefully in my mind while the rest of the words flowed on and Zannah nodded and took notes. ‘Manslaughter’ was one of them. ‘Self-defence’ was another. ‘Not proven’ seemed to be a particular favourite of his, pronounced with a peculiar Scottish relish.
I wasn’t under arrest, not yet, not formally. Zannah had come up straight away, with the lawyer, rounded up from some Edinburgh contact of hers, and we had walked into the tiny police station together. From there we had gone to Aviemore, greeted by a knot of photographers pressing against the car window. We fled from the aggressive glare of the flashes with our heads down. I had wondered sometimes how a bird felt at a big twitch; now I had some idea. Hunted.
‘Prejudice,’ the lawyer said, examining the papers the next day, my dazed face gazing out of the front pages. ‘Innocent u
ntil proven guilty,’ he had added, looking over the top of his glasses at me, for that was back when he was still bothering to address me.
Inspector Corby had started the first day briskly enough with his questions. But even the police find that hard to keep up when they are met not with answers, nor even with a refusal to answer, but with someone who is gazing up through their high windows at the convocation of swifts. The lawyer was struggling too, with an absence of information beyond what I’d told Zannah in my first outpouring of relief, over the phone. So by now, the second day, the questions had sidled round, had stopped being mere requests for information, become more in the nature of speeches.
‘My client is the victim of harassment,’ the lawyer tried now. ‘First by this disturbed – this deeply disturbed – young man. And now by the police.’
Inspector Corby picked up a file, a fat file full of loose bits of paper, and let it drop six inches to the table, throwing up a dance of dust that filled the shaft of light from the high window.
‘Do you know what a stalking case looks like, a harassment case?’ he said to the lawyer, to me, to the mute blonde policewoman who sat beside him, her face gravely turned towards mine. ‘It looks like this. Page after page of calls, of complaints, of infringements and restraining orders and witness statements and anonymous letters. Thick. Huge. The desk sergeant will roll his eyes at the mention of it. And you know, we’ve talked to Thames Valley Police about this, about this young man and about Miss Brooks, and they have nothing. Nothing.’
He paused. It was hot outside, muggy and oppressive. The swifts were spiralling lower, following the insects which rode the falling air pressure of a storm front. If I leaned and twisted my head I could see the edges of the clouds building, ramparts of them bruise-dark against the mountains. Rain coming.
‘Nothing. And so we tried nationally, looking for evidence of this alleged’ – he laid a heavy emphasis on the word – ‘stalking. And this time, Miss Brooks’s name did crop up. Once. It’s an unusual shortening of Amanda, Manda, and so it stood out. Years ago. More than a decade. West Sussex have been getting their files onto the computers, it seems. One Manda Brooks, age seventeen, accused by her father – the accusation later withdrawn – of pushing her mother over a cliff.’
He let the word hang in the air. I turned my eyes to him for a moment. He laid down first one, then a second sheet of paper, squaring them carefully on top of each other, then looked straight at me.
‘It seems you’re a dangerous person to be around.’
We took a break after that, after the lawyer had protested strongly at the accusations. He went off and huddled with Zannah in the corridor. I could see their faces through the reinforced window glass, his dark head bent towards her as she made some point, stabbing with her finger. I sat on in the empty interview room and watched my cooling tea. The policewoman had brought it, hovering sympathetically for a moment, then leaving as silently as she had come.
As we started again the policeman tried another tack.
‘You know,’ he said, as we sat down again, resuming our accustomed positions. ‘The police these days, we’re not monsters. Whenever we see a case of a man dying at a woman’s hand, we have to ask ourselves: who is the predator, here, who is the prey? The courts are lenient now with women who kill, much more lenient than they used to be. A full and frank admission of the circumstances, a plea of self-defence, we would be lucky to get you even for manslaughter. Leaving the scene of an accident, failure to report a death – you might only be looking at a suspended sentence. But without an admission now, without a sob story – well, the courts don’t like that at all. It looks,’ and he paused here, as if to choose his words, ‘well, it looks a little cold blooded.’
We sat in silence. The walls were too thick, the windows too tightly sealed for me to hear the screaming of the swifts. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the sound, but failed. When I opened them again, I found that the policeman seemed to be waiting for me, waiting for my full attention to continue.
And there’s another thing the courts don’t like, that juries especially don’t like,’ the policeman went on meditatively, ruminatively, as though in conversation. ‘Up there on the mountain it’s your word against – well, against nothing. So they’ll be looking for corroboration, evidence that you have told the truth when that truth can be checked. Like this harassment. Starting in . . .’ he made an elaborate show of checking his notes. ‘Starting in around January. And continuing more or less without letup until June.’ He paused, as though for confirmation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the hesitant nod of the lawyer. That is what I had told Zannah, after all. What she had told him.
‘And yet, this man, this young man, this disturbed – yes – and unfortunate young man had suffered what we lay people would call a nervous breakdown towards the end of March. A breakdown so bad that his GP had recommended he be hospitalized for treatment, for his own safety, which he duly was. He remained there, under more or less close supervision, until the beginning of June.’
‘More or less, you say,’ cut in the lawyer, leaning forward.
‘More or less. More as in a locked ward. Less as in his presence being noted, checked, accounted for by one person or another three or four times a day. Making it difficult for him to get from Berkshire up to’ – and again, the elaborate show of checking his notes – ‘Norfolk, I believe, and Derbyshire, and points north, and back without his absence being noted.’
Silence from the policeman, his point made. Silence from the lawyer. Silence from me, for I had nothing to say, nothing to add beyond what I thought I knew. Silence. Silence. Silence.
That evening Zannah continued my interrogation. She sat on the bed I was trying to lie on and talked at me.
‘Why won’t you talk to them, Manda?’
I didn’t know. I couldn’t say. I’d come here fully intending to tell them everything, to make a clean breast of it, to offer my wrists up to the handcuffs and be led away, but it hadn’t been quite like that. I had found myself caught between the pair of them, lawyer and policeman, like scavenging birds. They tore at the shreds of the story, the few fragments they had of it, pulling it now this way, now that. A cold-blooded killer who torched her own van to cover her tracks, destroyed her own phone to prevent its tell-tale signals from tracking her down like a radio tag. Or an innocent victim, firebombed out of her only home, who had fled unaware that her tormentor had already killed himself. I recognized neither story, and worse, the one I knew, the one I thought I knew was true, had just been blown apart, shattered by the fact of David’s incarceration. I shut my eyes to concentrate on what I had, what I remembered, to try and keep some fragile grip on what had really happened, marshalling the facts. But they shifted like shapes in the mist, receding before me. I didn’t know any more if what I remembered was true.
‘Don’t go to sleep on me,’ Zannah said.
‘I’m not asleep,’ I said with my eyes still closed. It was the first thing I’d said all day.
‘Whatever happened up there, Manda, I’ll support you. But I need to know the truth. The whole truth. And your silence is frightening me.’ I opened my eyes to look at her. Her eyes were my eyes, my father’s eyes. Blue shards of summer sky. Thunder rumbled somewhere over the hills and the swifts shrieked and flew lower. When I closed my eyes once more and let her words wash over me I could still see them, bright specks of light against the dark, dancing before me.
The next morning the climate had changed. The storm the swifts had forecast had broken in the night and now the mountains were gone, buried under the lowering cloud. A steady fall of drizzle chilled the air and slicked the roads with rain. The climate seemed to have changed at the police station too. We reported to the front desk as usual but instead of being ushered into the interview room as had been the routine, we waited out in the lobby. After a few minutes Inspector Corby emerged, wiping his palms down the side of his trousers as he greeted us almost cheerily.
‘
No further questions,’ he said. ‘We are no longer pursuing this line of enquiry.’ New evidence had come to light, apparently. The lawyer, wrong-footed, wanted to protest anyway, but the inspector shook his head and waved him away. Zannah went out to make a statement to the few remaining reporters, the lawyer at her side. When they had gone, the inspector pulled a plastic bag out of his jacket pocket and held it up to show its contents.
‘Not yours, I suppose?’
It was a mobile phone, a Nokia, the entry-level one, the kind everyone had. I shook my head. The inspector looked through the lobby window at the rain sliding down the glass and spoke almost as though to himself.
‘We thought you’d sent that text to yourself, as a decoy. But the world and his wife saw you in Aviemore, watching your van go up in flames. The phone companies have just come back with the records. A different mast relayed that message. It was sent from half way up Ben Alder.’
‘David,’ I said.
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘But then the phone ended up in a bin in Kingussie two days later.’ He looked out of the window, still meditatively swinging the little bag with the phone in it. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, not ghosts with mobile phones. There was someone else up there on that mountain, someone who must have known you.’
Then he turned and looked at me and said, as though it were a casual remark, ‘Of course there’s more than one way to send someone over the edge of a cliff.’ And his eyes were bright with the penetrating intelligence of the raven, seeking truth, as though he could see right through me, right into the layers of lies I’d built up over the years, right past them into the core, into the heart of it. As though he saw back through into the chasm of the past, through the blanketing fog and the haze of memory to the seventeen-year-old walking along that promenade, away from the hateful spite of her drunken mother. Walking away, and then stopping and turning back. And seeing the shrunken figure of her mother getting unsteadily to her feet, her brave red lipstick a smear across the wreckage of her face. Saw me stop and watch her as she made her way to the first steps that led up the face of the cliff, hundreds of feet above the promenade. And staying there, still watching, as my mother turned to look at me, to give me an imploring wave, asking her daughter to stop her from doing what she was about to do. And seeing me not move, not go and lay a restraining hand on her arm as she clutched the handrail. Seeing me stand instead and fill my lungs, fill them with sea air and hate and shout it out so loud that the birds themselves were startled. ‘Go on, then, and kill yourself; see if I care.’
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