The Burning Girls

by C. J. Tudor

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it, and we’ll see you soon.”

  I watch Rushton and Clara leave and reach for my hoodie.

  “Are you going?” Mike asks.

  I hesitate. I should. I’ve had two glasses of wine. Normally, my limit. Flo is waiting for me. On the other hand, I feel mellow, comfortable. It’s only nine thirty. I suppose one more couldn’t hurt.

  “Well.”

  “I can give you a lift back.”

  “Just a small glass.”

  “Okay.”

  I slip my hoodie back over my stool and he saunters toward the bar. I note that Emma and Simon Harper have gone and wonder again about the conversation in the toilets. Emma had obviously had a drink, and maybe something else. Not that I’m judging her for that. Guilt is a little like grief. A cancer of the soul. They both hollow you out from the inside. But while you can learn to live with grief, guilt only grows as the years go by, spreading its tumorous tentacles. Who wouldn’t take a pill for that?

  Mike returns from the bar with a small wine for me and a black coffee for himself.

  “No Cab Sav left. Hope Merlot is okay.”

  “Fine.” I nod. “Call me a philistine but, after the first glass, I always think most wine tastes the same.”

  He smiles. “Been a while, but I tend to agree.”

  I raise my glass. “Well, here’s to our uneducated palates.”

  He lifts his coffee cup. “Of course, I have now become a terrible coffee snob.”

  “How does that one measure up?”

  He takes a sip. “Not bad. A little on the mellow side, but a good effort, considering I saw him spoon it out of a tin.”

  I laugh. We sip our drinks. There’s an awkward pause, then we both start to speak at the same time.

  “So—”

  “After you,” he says.

  “Well, I wanted to apologize for getting off to a bad start the other day. I suffer from an appalling case of foot in mouth.”

  “That must be a bit of a problem, being a vicar.”

  “I get by on a wing and a prayer.”

  He mimes a cymbal bash. Then he looks at me more curiously. “Don’t take this the wrong way, and I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but you don’t seem much like a vicar.”

  “Because I’m a woman?”

  “No, no.” He flushes.

  “Joking.”

  “Right. I mean you just seem, sort of…less fuddy.”

  I chuckle. “Fuddy? Haven’t heard that one before.”

  “I suppose, I mean, normally you can tell someone is a vicar even without the collar. Like Reverend Rushton. But you’re more…normal. Oh God.” He buries his head in his hands.

  “Here,” I say. “Let me take that shovel before you dig any further.” I take a sip of my drink. “I do know what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  “I meet a lot of vicars. Male and female. And you’re right. Most of them are sort of…fuddy. A lot of the people who come into the church already come from religious backgrounds. Many also come from quite privileged backgrounds. They don’t have a lot of life experience outside of the Church. That can make them a little disconnected from everyday life.”

  “That isn’t your background?”

  “No.” I hesitate. “I didn’t have a great childhood. Our mother was, well, I guess ‘mentally unstable’ is the best description. Home was not a good place. I left as soon as I could. Slept rough, begged. I could easily have become another statistic. And then a good man, who happened to be a vicar, helped me. He showed me that you can do a lot of good working for God. Helping the homeless, the lost, the abused.”

  “You can do that in other ways—working for charities, Social Services.”

  “True, but for me it was also about a sense of belonging. I’d never really had that before. God needed me, and it turned out that I needed him too.”

  He stares at me and I find myself dropping my eyes and taking a larger than intended sip of wine. I’ve told him more than most. But it’s still a sanitized version. One without all the messy bits. The only difference between a truth and a lie is how often you repeat it.

  “I used to be an atheist,” he says.

  “Used to be?”

  “Yeah. Fervent. There is no God. Religion is the cause of all evil. We’re just animals. There’s nothing after death. Heaven and hell are just wishful thinking, et cetera.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  His face clouds. “I had a child, a beautiful daughter…and I lost her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say again.

  “Suddenly I realized all that rhetoric, all that smug, clever conviction, was just bullshit. Because my daughter was not just flesh and blood. My joyful little mess of contradictions. Her glorious heart, her curiosity, her dreams, her vitality and energy. All of that couldn’t just disappear. Like it meant nothing. Like she meant nothing. I have to believe that her soul still exists somewhere. I couldn’t go on if I didn’t.”

  His voice breaks. He looks down. Instinctively, I reach over and clasp his arm.

  “Your daughter’s soul is very much alive. I can feel her, in everything you just said. A wonderful energy that’s all around us. That’s how she lives on, in you.”

  He looks up and his eyes meet mine. I see something in them and, for a moment, I feel naked, exposed. Then he blinks.

  “Thank you.”

  He picks up his coffee with a trembling hand.

  “Sorry. It still—”

  “Of course.”

  It always will. The pain might get less sharp, less insistent. But it will always be there, until eventually he won’t remember what life was like without it.

  “So,” he tries to gather himself, “that’s me laying myself bare. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “I sensed some hostility the other day—to journalists?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really.”

  “Really?”

  “Drip, drip. You don’t take my Ruby.”

  Maybe it’s the wine, maybe I feel I owe him, but I find myself saying: “A terrible thing happened at my last church. A little girl died. The press weren’t kind.”

  Vicar with Blood on Her Hands.

  He looks down and then says, a little sheepishly, “I know.”

  I stare at him. “You know?”

  “I googled you. Sorry. It didn’t take long to find the story about your previous church. But also, I found this stuffed through my mailbox this morning.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a folded piece of paper. He places it on the table. “I didn’t want to bring it up while the others were here.”

  I take the paper and unfold it. It’s a photocopy of the same clipping I found pinned to the doll in the chapel. Underneath someone has typed:

  Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. (Proverbs 28:13)

  The wine sours in my stomach. I look at Mike.

  “D’you have any idea who it might be from?”

  “No. But somehow, I doubt I’m the only person to receive one.”

  I swallow. Great.

  “I was going to inform the police, but I thought you might like to know first.”

  “Thank you. I’d rather not involve the police.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just, I don’t really want it all dragged up again. Coming here, it was supposed to be a chance to put it behind us.”

  “Understood. How’s that going?”

  I smile thinly. “Not great.”

  “D’you want to talk about it?”

  I look at him. And, actually, I find that I do.

  “Flo?”

  Wrigley draws closer, his face white.
/>   “Get away from me!”

  She tries to scrabble backward across the rough, damaged stone, but her leg is still stuck fast.

  “Whoah. Don’t try to move. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was outside, and I heard you scream.”

  “What were you doing outside, creeping around the graveyard?”

  “I wasn’t creeping.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I came to see you.”

  “You couldn’t call?”

  “You never gave me your number.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why are you waving a knife at me?”

  “Because I…was scared.”

  “Of me?”

  She remembers Rosie’s words: “Stay the hell away from Wrigley.” But who does she really trust?

  Slowly, she lowers the knife. “No.”

  He moves around and crouches down next to her. “What happened?”

  “I…I thought there was someone in here and I…fell over and my foot just went through the floor.”

  “Shit.” He tugs at a bit of the stone. “This must have been hollow underneath. No wonder they cordoned it off.”

  She tries to nod, but her head throbs. She feels exhausted and really, really cold. She starts to shiver.

  “Here.”

  Wrigley pulls his hoodie off jerkily and gives it to her. Gratefully, she pulls it over her head.

  “Thanks.”

  “Now, give me that knife.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m going to try and use it to move this bit of paving.”

  Flo hesitates then hands him the knife.

  “Why have you got a knife, anyway?”

  “I thought there might be an intruder here.”

  “Was there?”

  He wedges the knife under the stone slab and wiggles it. She thinks about the burning girl, arms outstretched.

  “No.”

  He shrugs. “I used to carry a knife.”

  “What?”

  “For protection.”

  The stone gives a little. She bites back a wince.

  “From who?”

  “Just kids. At school.”

  “You carried a knife at school?”

  “It was stupid, I know. But you don’t know what it was like. The stuff that happened.”

  The knife scrapes at the stone. It’s very close to her leg, but she’s sure she can feel the slab loosening.

  “Was this at your old school?”

  He tenses. “Who told you about that?”

  “Rosie—”

  “Of course.”

  “She said you tried to kill a girl.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “So you didn’t set the school on fire?”

  A pause. The only sound is the grating of the knife on stone. He isn’t going to answer, she thinks.

  He sighs and looks back at her. “No. I did try to burn down the school.” A small, thin smile. “So, now you know. I’m a psycho.”

  “Why?”

  “Just born that way, I guess.”

  “No. I mean, why did you try to burn down the school?”

  Their eyes meet. Such odd eyes, she thinks. That strange silvery green. Weirdly hypnotic.

  “Because I hated that place. I hated everything about it. The teachers, the other pupils. The smell. The rules. I hated the way they treated anyone who didn’t fit their mold. Schools say all sorts of stuff about how they deal with bullying. But they don’t. All they care about is the good, normal kids who boost their inspection reports.

  “Once, this gang of kids surrounded me in the playing fields. They made me take my clothes off and crawl on my belly in the mud. Then they forced me to me eat worms. When I made it back to the school, covered in mud and naked, you know what the teachers did? They laughed.”

  “Christ.”

  “Even when Mum went up to the school to complain, nothing really changed. There weren’t any good days. Not one. Just days they didn’t torture me quite so much.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I just cracked. I…I wanted to obliterate that place.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “I didn’t know she was in there.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Someone called the fire brigade. They got her out. I felt terrible about it. I would never, ever hurt anyone.”

  “What about you?”

  “I got off lightly. My mum paid for some fancy psychologist. I got counseling, supervision. We moved and I changed schools. Not that things are much better here.” He turns back to the stone. “Almost there.”

  A chunk of the stone slab breaks away. Her leg is free. Painful, but free. She pulls it gingerly out. Her jeans are torn, and she can see a deep laceration and bruising through the ripped denim. She wiggles her foot. Hurts like hell. But it could have been worse.

  “Thank you,” she says to Wrigley.

  “You should probably get that cleaned up.”

  “I should call my mum too.”

  He looks around and picks up her phone from the floor. “Not sure it’ll work. Looks pretty badly smashed up.”

  He hands it to her. Their fingers brush. It suddenly strikes her that they are sitting close. Really close. She swallows. Then she thinks about what Rosie said.

  “Wrigley—there’s something else…”

  But he’s looking past her. “Shit. Have you seen this?”

  He’s peering into the hole where her leg was stuck.

  “What?” she asks.

  “This is really deep. You were lucky you didn’t fall all the way through.”

  She turns stiffly and joins him. They stare down through the jagged hole in the floor. She can’t see much, but she can tell Wrigley is right. The hole is deep. Far deeper than it should be, surely? Unless there’s something underneath the church? Some kind of cellar?

  “Have you got a light on your phone?” she asks.

  Wrigley takes out his phone and shines it into the hole.

  “Holy crap!”

  Flo gasps. “Is that—”

  They look at each other and then back down, into the hole.

  Coffins.

  I first saw Ruby when her aunt brought her to be baptized. She had just turned five. Chubby-cheeked and the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen. I didn’t know her back story, not then, but it gradually came out through other parishioners. The church community was tightly knit. People knew each other’s business. A bit like a small village.

  Ruby’s mother had died from a drug overdose. No father around. Her mother’s sister had stepped in to foster her. Aunt Magdalene was a large, jovial woman who hadn’t been able to have children of her own. She lived with her friend, Demi, a thin black lady, as skinny as Magdalene was fulsome.

  I didn’t know them particularly well. Prior to fostering Ruby, they had attended another church, but then decided to join my congregation. The two women brought Ruby to St. Anne’s every Sunday for the family service and occasionally to the children’s art group on Thursday evenings.

  Lena (as I grew to know her) was chatty, always smiling and laughing. Demi was quieter, more reserved. However, they seemed a devoted couple, even if, sometimes, I got the impression that a child had perhaps been more Lena’s desire than Demi’s. But still, I didn’t see any warning signs. Not at first. Or maybe I did, and I just tried to ignore them. Like we all do.

  At the christening, I remember Lena saying she was relieved she had got it done. It seemed an odd choice of words, so I asked why.

  “Her mother was godless,” she told me. “She would have let her child die and Ruby would have remained in purgatory.”

&n
bsp; I had politely and gently said that God welcomes all children, even those who are not christened. She had looked at me strangely and said: “No, Reverend. They will forever wander the earth. I want my Ruby to go to heaven.”

  I had dismissed it. I shouldn’t have done. I should have known that there is a fine line between being religious and religious fervor. But then, many of my congregation were far more “Old Testament” than me. I tried as much as I could to update their views, to encourage them to think more about love and tolerance than hellfire and damnation, but their views didn’t mean that they were bad people.

  Perhaps the first proper warning sign came when Ruby turned up to the art group with a large bruise on her forehead. She fell, Lena told me. And young children did fall. A lot. I knew this. Flo was always covered in bruises at Ruby’s age. I remembered a time when Flo had run into the living room, tripped on the rug and headbutted the fireplace. Her head had immediately erupted into an egg-shaped lump and I had driven to A & E in a blind panic. Accidents happened.

  But they seemed to happen to Ruby more and more. Bruises, scrapes. And then a broken arm. She fell off the climbing frame in the garden, Lena explained. All reasonable, plausible explanations delivered in Lena’s reassuring, smiley tone.

  I knew where they lived. Lena once invited me around for tea. It was a small council terrace on the edge of St. Anne’s. Neatly kept when I visited. Ruby’s toys stacked in pink plastic boxes. I was aware that by calling in again, unannounced, I was overstepping the mark. But my unease was growing. I couldn’t ignore it any more. I bought some sweets for Ruby and told myself I was just putting my mind at rest.

  When I reached the house, no one appeared to be home. And the house didn’t look as neat and well kept as when I’d first visited several months earlier. Even from the outside. The curtains were pulled, but I could see through gaps in the falling-down fence that the garden was overgrown. Old toys lay discarded in the grass. Rubbish bins overflowed. More disconcertingly, there was no climbing frame.

  That was when I first mentioned my concerns to Durkin. He had smiled (benevolently).

  “I’m not sure an overgrown garden is proof of ill-doing.”

  “What about the climbing frame?”

  “Maybe she meant a climbing frame at the park.”