Mud Pie

by Emma Lee Bole

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spare Room

  Becki’s death had odd side-effects. It infected some of the pub’s regulars with garrulous excitement, while others were turned mute and slow.

  Rhoda was one of the latter. Next morning she was unusually quiet, softly saying, “Thank you, Lannie,” when I handed her the post, as if I were the bereaved; or maybe as if she was – though I didn’t think she and Becki had been particularly friendly. I certainly hadn’t seen them talking at the party.

  I suppose I was creeping around in the same subdued way. While I was trying to unload the dishwasher in deferential silence, there was an abrupt ear-mangling clatter and I turned to see a whole tray-full of clean plates colliding with the floor. Rhoda was leaning heavily on the table where the plates had just been. A piece of paper fluttered in front of her.

  “Rhoda! Are you okay?” She was looking taut and yellowish, as if she might faint. I put an arm around her and guided her onto a chair. “What is it? Shall I fetch Brendan?”

  She shook her head. “Get me a drink, Lannie,” she said huskily, so I gave her a glass of water and picked up pieces of smashed plate while she drank and closed her eyes. I glanced across at the sheet of paper. It was a letter, short, printed, and official-looking.

  “Is it bad news?” I asked tentatively.

  “Read it,” said Rhoda in a croak, so I did.

  To the bitch at the woolpack, it began.

  You ugly heartless self-righteous cow, you were supposed to love him and look after him, not make him suffer. You deserve everything that’s coming to you. I hope it hurts.

  That was it.

  I turned to Rhoda, whose hands were gripped tightly together. “Rhoda, it’s not for you.” Her obvious shock made me feel quite calm.

  “But I do,” whimpered Rhoda, staring, anguished, at the paper.

  “You do what? No, you don’t deserve anything, Rhoda – I mean you don’t deserve anything bad. This isn’t meant for you. It’s meant for me.” I almost took her white, clenched hand, but I didn’t think she’d like that, so I just added, “I’m sorry you had the shock of opening it.”

  “There was no name on it,” she murmured.

  “Where’s the envelope?” I fished the envelopes out of the bin and found the right one amongst the junk mail.

  No name. Barely any address, just THE WOOLPACK, FYLINGTON hand-written in angry black capitals. I looked at the postmark. It had taken nearly a week to get here, and no wonder.

  I showed Rhoda. “Look. It’s a Manchester postmark. It’s meant for me. I’m sorry, Rhoda. It’s a – it’s from somebody I fell out with before I moved here. It’s not the first letter they’ve written. Sorry.”

  “Manchester?” She dragged her gaze towards me. “Boy trouble, was it?” she said, sounding more like herself.

  “Um, yes.” It seemed a good enough excuse. I was glad the letter wasn’t more specific, and surprised it wasn’t nastier. Hugh was right; they were quite literate. As I read it through again, I felt its contempt blast over me like the heat of a bread oven. It struck me as the sort of letter a woman might write. Maybe Karl had a girlfriend who couldn’t resist a dig at me. But of course when this was written they were already planning to come and kill me. I hope it hurts. I winced.

  “Can I keep this?” I asked, thinking it might be matched to the notes that Charlotte had received. But Rhoda, roused to sudden life, jumped up, whisked the sheet off me and tore it into long shreds which she dropped into the bin. She poked them down deep amongst the teabags and bacon rinds, and piled the broken plates on top.

  “There,” she said, breathless. “Best place for that sort of thing. Good riddance. Forget about it, Lannie, case closed. Now then, what are you doing here anyway? It’s your day off.”

  “I thought you might want some help.”

  “I don’t want any help. There’s not much needs doing. You get out for some fresh air: go for a walk. You’re looking pale.” Her own colour was much better now, and her briskness was returning, so I thought I would obey.

  She was right: I needed the fresh air. Outside I drank cold mouthfuls of it. You deserve everything that’s coming to you. The trouble was, it hadn’t come to me.

  I needed to be doing something. So I walked to the bus stop and caught the next bus down to Fylington. Two police cars were parked outside the parish hall: I skirted them to get to the library, where I flinchingly scanned the national papers. These had some brief references to Becki’s death, but no names or pictures, and few details. Even those weren’t accurate: Becki’s throat hadn’t been slashed but rather, I thought, stabbed. And so had her chest and shoulders, several times. Blood everywhere. One paper called it a frenzied attack. That was accurate, at least.

  I read the report again, more carefully. If the killer was reading it too, he might well think he’d got me and not bother coming back. The letter-writer would be satisfied. The rats would run back to their sewers. My hopes rose, until it hit me with a thud that I was finding a reason to be glad about Becki’s death. Feeling sick, I refolded the paper and went out.

  I took more deep gulps of air. I hope it hurts. Well, it did, even if not in the way the writer intended. My head hurt, my throat hurt, my chest hurt so that I could hardly breathe. The air was icy and smelt of damp earth. The smell of the grave. I began to shake. I needed to talk to someone calming, someone unexcitable. I went to seek out Frank.

  His yard, I knew, was on the other side of town, and eventually I tracked it down, wedged between the canal and the disused railway line. The canal here was not picturesque. The railway line was even less so despite its thin sprinkling of snow. An attempt to weedkill it had been only partially successful and petrified clumps of brown nettles were interspersed with scrawny saplings. Frank’s yard was vandal heaven, a maze of snow-pocked piles of bricks and lumps of wood and wonky corrugated sheds.

  As I walked in, a large dog, half Alsatian, half kangaroo, bounded over to me, yelping in excited panic. Otherwise the place seemed deserted until I spotted somebody moving around in a carport. I clambered over a heap of paving stones to reach him and recognised a brawny member of the first team to whom I’d never spoken as he never stayed on for a drink. He hadn’t been at Hugh’s party. When I asked where Frank was, he replied in a South African accent. “You’ll find him in the office over there.”

  The office was a portakabin. It was stuffy and warm with a strong smell of paraffin. Frank was hunched over a yellowing computer that made a strange whirring noise.

  “Sounds like the fan,” I said.

  “Lannie.” He rested his hands on the keyboard and stared at me. “You all right?”

  “Fine.” I felt very far from all right.

  “Sit down. I won’t be a minute.” But there was nowhere to sit, so I went back outside and perched on a heap of bricks with my head on my hands until Frank came out.

  “Lannie, you look like shit.”

  “Thanks, Frank. Can we go for a walk?”

  “Where to?” he asked, unsurprised.

  “Anywhere. You said you’d take me to Mam Tor some time.”

  “Sure,” he said with a glance at the sky: clear, hard blue with a few grey patches, stone-cold and implacable. “Jake can hold the fort for a couple of hours. We’ll take Dottie.” The dog looked at him enquiringly and had to be encouraged into the van. Not the brightest of guard dogs.

  It was a perilous drive on icy roads; further than I’d thought. I wasn’t sure if Frank’s van would cope, but it skidded at last into the car park above slopes streaked with sledge marks. When we climbed up to the top of Mam Tor the wind was fierce, trying to knock us off as if we had no right to be there. This was the real Peak District, with a tiny train rattling far below and bare hills bowling away into the distance.

  We began to walk along the paved ridge. It was freezing under the angry wind. Dottie loped ahead, recoiling occasionally from her own footprints in the snow. I didn’t know how to start.

  �
�How is Sue?” I asked eventually, although I hardly cared.

  “Pretty shaken. Though of course she’s seen all sorts in casualty.”

  I felt ashamed. Sue saved lives. Me, I made puddings. No contest. “She seems very nice,” I said, and in a rush of atonement added, “She said she left some china at your house. I’ll have a tidy up and find it for you.”

  “She told me off about that parlour wall. I’ll try and come down and finish it some time. Other things keep taking over.”

  “Like murders.” I couldn’t help myself.

  “So what do the cops think?” said Frank. Although he wasn’t tall, he had a swift stride, as if he was heading for somewhere that might slip out of reach. But he showed no impatience when he had to stop for me to catch up.

  “They’re not saying much. Have they interviewed you yet?”

  “They came round yesterday morning, asked one or two questions and took away some clothes. But they’re not interviewing me properly till tomorrow. I suppose there are a lot of us to get through.” He looked at me directly. “What do you think happened?”

  I still didn’t know what to say. I wanted to find a way of letting him know that it was all my fault and not the club’s, that it was nothing to do with any of his mates. I wanted to tell him about the trial and the tram and the letter I’d just received as proof – if proof were needed – that the gangsters had worked out where I was.

  But I found I couldn’t spill out my story. It wasn’t just that I was bound by my promise to the police. I feared Frank’s thoughtful judgement. I was a grass, there was no getting round it. A snitch. A nark. A traitor.

  So I said, “Brendan thinks it was someone outside the club who did it. That seems to make sense.”

  “Not much sense,” said Frank doubtfully. “Possible, I suppose.” We walked another twenty yards or so before he added, “She could get people’s backs up.”

  “Not enough to make them murder her!”

  “No. But just say, what if she had the knife, and if she got annoyed with someone – even had a go, you know what she was like – and say they wrestled–”

  “Frank,” I said, “she was stabbed several times. That’s not something you do by accident.” I was snappy. I’d come to Frank looking for comfort, and I was finding none.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No. But it wasn’t accidental. That’s why I’m convinced an outsider did it. It was nobody from the club.”

  “I don’t want to think it of anyone,” said Frank. “But what I want has nothing to do with what is. KK had a downer on Becki. He said she was too careless, whatever that means. And he thought she was nicking from the till.”

  “Did he?” That was the wrong way round, surely. “Frank, you can’t believe KK killed her.”

  “I’d hate to think so. But he’s got a temper. And he’s the one the police’ll pull in first, when they see his record.”

  “He has a record?”

  “GBH. A few years back, but still.”

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody annoyed him in a pub.”

  I thought about this. The rapid walk was slowly warming me: the cold wind didn’t rip quite so hard through my Oxfam coat.

  “Niall ever get done for GBH?” I asked.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Capable of violence, though?”

  “Possibly.” We trudged past the battered ribcage of a long-dead sheep, inadequately blanketed by snow. Dottie disdained it.

  “It might have been you,” I said, annoyed at him for pointing out possibilities.

  “It might. Though it wasn’t.”

  “How many of the club members do you reckon are capable of violence?”

  “They’re rugby players,” said Frank.

  “So all of you?”

  “All of us, on the pitch. Maybe not Drop-goal or Henry. But all the forwards, certainly, and most of the backs to a degree.”

  “Jesus. The police are going to be busy.”

  “On the pitch, I said. That’s non-violent violence. It’s controlled. If you asked me who’s capable of killing a girl with a knife, I’d say none of them. But I’d be wrong. Obviously someone is.” He fell silent for a moment. “Or it could be a woman.”

  “The police probably think it’s me,” I said bitterly.

  “I’d say it’s unlikely.”

  “Oh, thanks!”

  “I’d say it’s unlikely a woman did it,” said Frank.

  I felt faintly aggrieved. “Not capable of enough violence? Or just not strong enough?”

  “Both,” he said. “Though I suppose it could be you. You found the body. Your knife. And knowledge of butchering techniques, after all.”

  “Jesus. Can we stop now?”

  “Stop walking, or talking?”

  The paving stones had given way to mud. It was frozen hard as concrete, ridged aggressively underfoot. “Stop walking,” I said. “Let’s turn around.”

  “She wound you up though, didn’t she? Trying to be boss. Wound a lot of people up.”

  “It didn’t bother me.”

  “Of course, it could be Tamara,” said Frank matter-of-factly.

  “What, jealous?” Becki had wound her up all right, that was for sure.

  “It’s possible, that’s all, not likely. I can’t see Tamara killing someone she’d only just met. More likely to be someone who’d known Becki for a while.”

  “Or who didn’t know her at all. Frank, I’m sure it was an outsider. Tamara couldn’t stab a sausage. It was someone from outside the club.”

  “We do get druggies wandering around,” said Frank thoughtfully. “They’ve broken into the yard before; that’s why I keep Dottie.” We both watched the dog cringe as a thin flurry of snowflakes hit her nose. She ran to hide behind Frank’s legs, and he stroked her ears.

  “The ultimate deterrent,” I said. “Well, that’s the answer. It’s a drugs crime.” I couldn’t spell it out any more clearly. “Becki was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “No,” said Frank, his brows tight. “She was in the right place, at the right time. Someone else was in the wrong place. It makes me very angry. Let’s stop talking.”

  We stopped talking. The only sound was the bluster of the wind. High above us sailed a single paraglider, a small, bright patch of colour stitched to the enormous, unforgiving sky.

  The acute slippiness of the path back down to the car park made Dottie slide and yelp. I felt like sliding and yelping too. I wanted busy pavements and warm doorways that smelt of cooking fat. I wanted the shelter of tall buildings and the doleful hoot of the tram and the unintelligible rasp of a news-vendor advertising humdrum murders that had nothing to do with me.

  Frank said suddenly, “But how did they get round the back of the club? They didn’t come through the building.”

  “They came through the car park,” I said.

  “Somebody would have seen them.”

  “They came round the other side of the club, then.”

  Frank shook his head. “It’s a mess of undergrowth behind that fence, and barbed wire along the top.”

  “That wouldn’t stop them,” I said. “It would take more than that.”

  He gave me a look. “You sound as if you know who it is.”

  “I do. Frank, believe me, it’s nobody in the club. It’s outsiders, I’m sure of it.”

  He raised his eyebrows but made no comment. We both fell quiet on the slippery drive home. After he had dropped me off at Nan’s house I felt worse than ever. How was I going to convince anyone that the killer wasn’t from the club?

  Then I realised, with a lurch of the soul, that I might just have convinced Frank that it was me. I’d been too vehement about it being an outsider despite the murder weapon being my knife. And oh, God, my knowledge of butchering.

  Of course Frank suspected me. They probably all did: new cook arrives in the kitchen, next thing you know her knife’s the chief exhibit in a murder...
r />   My knife. Why the hell had I left it lying there? Why hadn’t I kept it by me? I’d let myself get too relaxed, too carefree, and now Becki’s blood was on my hands.

  I couldn’t stand this. I had to be doing something. I jumped up and filled a bucket with soapy water and attacked Nan’s parlour walls like Lady Macbeth, soaking and scraping furiously until the whole house smelt of soggy paper and the walls were as blotchily bare as cold, scrubbed skin.

  “What do you think, Nan?” I said. “What do I do now?” Nan did not deign to answer.

  I thumped my head with my fists. “Oh bloody hell, Nan, I didn’t do it.”

  You did enough, said Nan. They followed you. It’s all your fault. Becki got what you deserved.

  “Belt up,” I said. “I know.”

  I stomped out of Nan’s domain and went up to Frank’s, the spare room. I would hunt for china, well out of Nan’s earshot. I needed to get away from her. I was fed up of Nan. I shouldn’t be talking to her. It was Becki who was dead, not me.

  The spare room smelt of mud. That was the old rugby boots, which were dry and cracked. In a frenzy of tidying I tipped them into a box along with the collection of ripped rugby shirts, shin-pads and a vintage bottle of witch hazel. I stacked window-frames under the window, fire-surrounds against the wall and tiles in a neat tower in the corner, checked the TV, which still didn’t work, and inspected the other bent and broken cartons.

  One: inferior fossils, bits of shell embedded in limestone. Two: books – old motorbike manuals, Building Regulations 1998, Cheshire Brick, The Victorian House, Birds of Britain, pages spotted with mildew.

  Three: china dinner set, spriggy flowers, nothing special, not worth all the fuss. I set it aside for non-washing before handing over to Sue. Four: ancient cassette tapes, labels hand-written. Muddy Waters. Paul Rodgers. Van Morrison. Beneath them was an antique radio cassette player. I inserted Van Morrison and plugged it in with trepidation. Nothing blew up, though the music sounded metallic and imprisoned. I left Moondance on to play hollowly while I opened the last cardboard box.

  A dusty leather jacket. A T-shirt announcing Bradford RFC. A single motorcycling glove, seam split. A bottle of beer, unopened, with a drink-by date of fifteen years ago. A pint pot wrapped in a football scarf. A green school exercise book, inscribed Dean Haddon, 10F. Haddon rocks! R.U.M.B.L.E. I flipped through. Geography. Glaciers, exports, benefits of tourism, laid down in a firm, rather spiky hand. Someone had played dots on the last two pages and drawn an eagle on the back inside cover. A proper eagle, in flight. Not bad. I closed the book.

  So this was Dean’s room, his ghost nurtured by Frank all these years. Frank had loved Dean. I repacked the things carefully, opening the T-shirt to refold it. A handkerchief fell out, white but for the stiff brown stains of ancient blood. I saw a motorbike sliding sideways, a man spread-eagled on the crash barrier, soft hills cushioning his head.

  More blood. Would I never be free of it? Would Becki’s blood follow me for years to come, haunting me the way Dean’s death haunted Frank?

  I couldn’t bear that. I knelt there holding Dean’s blood in my hands, while the silence sang around me.

  Time moved on, and left Dean, and Becki, a little further behind. I put the handkerchief and T-shirt back in the box and pushed the lot against the wall, beside That Bloody Motorbike.