The Butterfly Tattoo

by Philip Pullman

  Then it got worse: foul tobaccoey kisses, hands inside her panties. And worse still. Her mother might have helped, but she was tired and impatient and Jenny couldn’t even say it, anyway. She would have liked to tell her teacher, but the school was suffering such a rapid turnover of staff that Jenny knew none of the teachers long enough to trust.

  After five years of it, desperate, she got a knife and hid it in her bed. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it, though she was ready to kill him. When he came to her that morning, she jabbed it at him and cut him on the hand, not badly, but enough to make him bleed a lot. The blood made her feel faint, and it frightened him, too; but when he saw how trivial the wound was, he hit her. From then on the pattern changed. He carried on touching her, but now he hit her as well – cruel, painful blows in places where it didn’t show. Jenny had given up expecting help by this time. She’d seen that by taking action herself, she could change things, though not necessarily in ways that she’d wanted. It was a useful lesson.

  After another year or so, her father finally got a job. He had to leave the house early, and he had less opportunity to be on his own with his daughter. The abuse slowed down, but that made no difference to Jenny, who’d made her mind up to leave home as soon as she was sixteen. She waited until then because she wanted to be completely, legally free of any obligation to live at home and go to school.

  So on the morning of her sixteenth birthday she got up before anyone else in the house, had a last breakfast on her own in the little kitchen, and washed the bowl and the spoon before taking her rucksack and walking out. She left a note saying Bye, Mum, I’ll be in touch, and went to the bus station. She caught a coach to the south and left her home town for ever.

  Nothing that had happened since had wiped out the shame and the fear and the hatred. She had slept with a number of boys, including Piers; and though some were fun and some were kind and some were attractive, she saw her father looking out of their eyes, and when she closed hers, it was to hide. Maybe, one day, she’d tell someone; maybe she’d tell Chris. But not for a long time yet.

  Chapter Three

  On the following Monday, Barry Miller asked Chris to help him with a special job. Chris thought it might have been another ball, but it turned out to be less glamorous than that.

  ‘I got this shed,’ Barry said, as they drove up through Oxford in the van with Chris’s bike in the back. ‘Well, more of a chalet, really. On the canal. I want to wire it up and decorate it – use it as a workshop or something. Put in a bed, maybe. Make it comfortable.’

  They went into Kidlington first, two or three miles north of the city, to pick up some bits and pieces from home. Barry lived in a neat little house in a modern development. They got there at about four o’clock, and Barry’s wife, Sue, offered to make them a cup of tea.

  She worked as a school secretary, she told Chris. Their ten-year-old son, Sean, was playing soccer outside, and Barry stopped and kicked the ball about before taking a shot that banged against the garage door, where the goal was. Sue rolled her eyes. She was a pretty woman, blonde and quiet, with an odd air of cheerful common sense shadowed by anxiety, as if someone near to her – her son, perhaps – was better now, but had recently had a serious illness from which he wasn’t quite free. Chris found himself warming to her at once. It was curious that in the van on the way there Barry had asked him not to mention the shed to Sue; but she seemed to understand her husband and didn’t ask what job they were on.

  ‘How long have you lived in Oxford, Chris?’ she said, as Barry showed Sean how to bend the ball around a defender.

  ‘All my life. I was born here. D’you come from London?’

  ‘Yeah. We moved here three years ago. We were going to go to Australia, but my parents are getting on, you know how it is … Barry’s happy, anyway. Have you left school? You look too old …’

  ‘I’ve got another year. Then I do my A Levels and try for university. Sue, d’you think if a person’s clever enough, they should go to university and use their talent?’

  ‘If they’ve got the chance, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m doing a degree now with the Open University. It’s amazing. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. I’m learning so much … I’m doing English literature. Barry thinks I must be really clever, but I keep telling him he’s cleverer than me; he should do a course too. But he’s practical, clever with his hands, really.’

  ‘He’s busy,’ said Chris. ‘The firm’s got a lot of work on.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding, looking out at the neat lawn, their happy son. ‘It’s come on well. It was probably the right thing to do, to come here.’

  Barry and Sue were fond of each other in a way Chris admired enormously. They seemed to like each other, to tease and tolerate and laugh with each other, as well as being close physically. When Barry had come in, he had embraced her, and she had hugged him back tightly. And he obviously loved his son and was loved in return. There was one moment that Chris saw through the window as he drank his tea: Barry was dribbling the ball, and Sean tackled him and surprised them both by winning it. Barry turned deftly and got the ball back from Sean’s feet, then spun and shot in the same movement. It was an excellent shot. The ball hit the garage with a deafening clang. But in the shooting, Barry lost his balance and sat down with a sudden thump on his backside. It was Sean’s reaction that captivated Chris: his laughing, flushed expression showed him simultaneously admiring his father’s shot, laughing at the comic fall, and becoming concerned in case he’d hurt himself. Somehow in that expression Chris saw a lifetime of love, an image of what a family should be. A look like that on your son’s face would be something to be proud of.

  On their way to the shed by the canal, Barry told Chris about Sean.

  ‘He’s the king of the world as far as I’m concerned,’ he said. ‘He takes after his mum in all the good ways. He’s quick and clever, but he’s kind-hearted, too, you know what I mean? He’s not soft – I don’t mean that. I mean he’s kind … he’s a kind boy. I worry about him sometimes.’

  ‘Why? He seems really happy.’

  ‘You never know what can happen. I used to know some villains … I’ve seen some bad things. I’ve done some bad things, come to that. Once you look under the surface, kind of thing, you never feel safe, not really.’

  Chris didn’t know what he meant. They turned off the highway and down past the motel, towards the village of Wolvercote. They went over the steep canal bridge and almost immediately took a right turn along a rough track under the trees.

  ‘I haven’t been along here for years,’ Chris said. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Barry. ‘The less people know about this place, the better.’

  ‘Why? You going to open a secret casino or something?’

  Barry said nothing until they pulled up, about a half-mile along the canal, in a clearing beside a cluster of tumbledown farm buildings.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Just a place to go to ground in. Keep out of sight for a while.’

  ‘What for?’ said Chris, getting out with him. ‘Is someone after you? I mean, you know, don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but …’

  Barry looked around. In his yellow polo shirt and light trousers, he looked young, tough, cool – like an actor playing the hero in a thriller.

  ‘Listen, Chris,’ he said. ‘I’m going to trust you, OK. You’re a bright kind of bloke. I can’t tell Dave or Tony; they haven’t got two brains to rub together. But I gotta tell someone. The thing is, a few years back I had a run-in with this family, right. Three brothers – name of Carson. They were villains; they were evil. Actually they were worse than villains. They had connections with terrorism. Irish, you know, paramilitaries … They stuck together like the Mafia. Code of honour. Anyway, I had something to do with putting two of ’em behind bars … Straight up, honest. So I gotta be careful. They won’t touch Sue or Sean; that’d be well out of order. But, you know, just in case. That’s
why I got this place. You never said anything to her?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Good lad. She’d only worry. So it’s just a matter of wiring it up, really. Make it habitable. Nothing posh; couple of lights, sockets, storage heaters. Day’s work, maybe. Like I said, Dave or Tony’d be talking all over the place, all mouth … Good lads, mind you, fair old workers … Grab hold of this.’

  He handed Chris a roll of heavy cable from the back of the van and took a tool box and various fittings himself, then led the way to a substantial-looking shed half-buried in nettles. It was made of precast concrete panels, and the roof was of corrugated iron, and despite the air of decay all around, it was impressively solid. Barry turned a key, and they walked in. The concrete floor was unbroken; there was no smell of dampness. There was even a working electric light, with a fluorescent tube mounted clumsily on the wooden beams holding up the roof.

  ‘Not bad, eh? Well built, you can say that for it. I’m going to insulate it, put some fibreglass stuff in the roof, panel the walls, do it all decent. There’s water laid on, look …’ He jerked his head at a metal sink in a corner. ‘Could put a shower in, actually, now I think of it. You done any plumbing? Shouldn’t be too hard to put a toilet in, really, should it? Common sense, really. Yeah, little shower room, toilet, kitchenette … Be worth a bit, wouldn’t it, eh? There’s an idea in that, you know. Holiday chalets. Get the design right, and bingo. Property in Europe, now, that’s dirt cheap. Get in quick. That’s a good idea, that …’

  What Chris liked about Barry was his quickness. A minute before he’d been full of dark hints about Mafia-style revenge, and now here he was making a mental fortune by building holiday chalets in Europe.

  However much wishful thinking went into his forward planning, he was practical enough when it came to details. He’d made a wiring design that Chris had no difficulty in understanding, and all the cable, the fittings, and the tools were soon out of the van and in a neat pile on the concrete floor.

  ‘Course, strictly speaking I shouldn’t take this out of the business, being as it’s a private dwelling. It’s going down as a business expense, though, taxwise. I always pay me taxes. Some blokes don’t, but it’s a mug’s game. It might take ’em years, but they get you in the end. Right, Chris. You all right to cope with this?’

  Chris nodded. ‘There’s one thing on this plan … You don’t want a switch by the door? A main switch for the lights?’

  ‘Ah, I knew I’d forgotten something. I’m going to get one of them infrared detectors, right, so as soon as anyone comes near the shed, the lights come on. It’s going to go there, outside the door, with a timer on it. So as soon as you come near the shed, the lights go on automatically, and you got a minute to open the door and go to the switch inside by the electricity meter. After a minute the timer switch cuts out, but by that time you got the other switch on, see, to override it and leave the lights on.’

  ‘Is a minute enough? Suppose you drop the keys or something?’

  ‘You can set it to any time you want – ten seconds, ten minutes …’

  It looked a bit overcomplicated to Chris. If the infrared unit failed, you’d have to fumble about near the floor in the dark before you found the light switch. However, it was easy enough to understand.

  ‘Where’s the infrared detector?’ he said, looking at the pile on the floor.

  ‘It’s a special one. I had to order it. It ain’t come in yet. Just treat it like a normal switch; put the wire there, like it says in the diagram, and tape it up safely. We’ll put the infrared switch in when it gets here. OK? Can you get on with it on your own, then, now you know where it is? Take the key, look; I’ll give you the key – I’ve got a spare. I reckon it’ll take a day. That fair?’

  ‘I reckon so,’ said Chris, thinking he could do it in half that time. ‘Easily.’

  ‘So I’ll unload your bike now and leave you to it. Start tomorrow, start now – do it when you like. I’ll expect you … What’s today? Monday? I’ll expect you in on Wednesday morning, with the job done. Give us a call if you hit a problem.’

  Chris pocketed the key and watched the van bump away down the shady track under the trees. Soon there was no sound at all but birdsong and the perpetual distant drone of traffic on the highway, but that was so muffled by the leaves that it was hardly there at all. The little group of huts lay drenched, drowned in green; ivy was swarming over walls, nettles were crowding at the doors, tall rank grass had obliterated pathways. Chris spent a few minutes looking around the other buildings (a chicken house, what looked like a milking shed, and something else that had nearly fallen down) before looking for the canal. It was invisible, though he knew it must be less than a stone’s throw away; the encircling green – a burgeoning riot of leaves, twigs, branches, grass, weeds – disoriented him. Finally he saw a gap in the bushes and pushed through it to come out on to the empty towpath.

  The canal was quiet, narrow, and brown. A blue dragonfly skimmed the surface. Some way off to the right a small abandoned cabin cruiser lay half-sunk, gently sliding into decay, some of its molecules no doubt already blooming triumphantly in the reeds that grew alongside. Chris had watched the canal from the bridge in Wolvercote. Half a dozen narrow boats a day, if that, passed along, with holiday-makers sunning themselves as they manipulated the lock gates or leaned on the tiller. There was no one in sight now, no other creature but the dragonfly and an incurious brown horse in the parched meadow across the canal.

  Chris went back through the bushes to the shed – or chalet. He could see it vividly as Barry saw it: cedar-clad, with plate glass windows, a patio with a table under an umbrella, window boxes cascading brightly coloured flowers; Barry and Sue and Sean, perhaps in swimsuits around a barbecue. It was an illustration from a holiday brochure.

  The reality was less glamorous. The interior of the shed was just a blank space. It could have served equally well as an artist’s studio, a temporary classroom in a crowded school, or a Central American torture chamber. Alone, happy, apprehensive, Chris began to sort out the tools and the cable for the job, and, as always when he was alone, he let himself daydream. Soon it was not Barry who lived there but himself and Jenny. Her slender ironical presence already filled the clearing like a ghost.

  Barry’s story of the Carson brothers was partly true. It had nothing to do with terrorism, though. Nor had Barry’s name always been Miller.

  He’d been living in South London. His name was Barry Springer, and he was working as an electrician. He’d become involved in a casual way with two brothers named Frank and Billy Carson, who liked to think of themselves as gang leaders, like the famous Kray twins. And, like the Krays’ world, that of the Carsons overlapped the fringes of show business. Barry enjoyed the feeling of danger and glamour; he especially liked mixing with half-famous people like snooker players and TV actors, buying them drinks in clubs, being regarded by them as one of the Carson gang.

  In fact, the Carson brothers were incompetent thugs. They’d carried out a number of robberies from jewellers’ shops without being caught, but without getting rich, either. They decided to rob a Securicor van delivering money to a bank, and with the money from that to buy their way into a big drugs operation.

  But Barry Springer had a conscience about drugs. He had a slight conscience about theft anyway, but at least money was clean. He decided privately that the Securicor job would be his last, and that he’d take his share of the money and go somewhere else to start up a little business.

  The robbery went wrong. The Carson brothers were carrying guns, which they’d never done before, and the Securicor guards were far more alert than they’d expected. Billy Carson panicked and shot one of them; the guard died at once, and the gang fled with only a fraction of the money they’d hoped for.

  Over the next couple of days the Carsons ran wild, as if they knew they were finished. They shot and wounded a building society cashier and got away with four thousand pounds; they shot and killed a sub-postmaster
and stole three hundred; and then by pure chance they got their biggest haul of all. They were driving about more or less at random when they saw another security van, this time taking money away from a bank.

  If they hadn’t been drinking, and desperate, and if they hadn’t known they were doomed, they’d never have tried it. But on the spur of the moment Frank Carson pulled the car to the curb, and ninety seconds later they were speeding away through the South London streets with a hundred and forty-seven thousand pounds in the car and two men lying dead on the pavement behind them.

  They hid the car and the money at once in a garage they rented behind a row of shops in Deptford. While Billy went home to pack, Frank went to a travel agent’s to buy tickets for Spain. He never got home. When he got off the bus, he could sense that something was wrong; and as he turned the corner and saw the police marksmen outside the block of council flats, the roadblock, the megaphones, he knew that Billy was either going to be taken prisoner or shot.

  He quickly stepped back into the main street and took a bus to the garage. At least with the money he could lie low and get another passport, his own still being in the flat with Billy.

  But the money was gone. Frank knew that the only other person who knew about the garage was Barry Springer, who hadn’t been on any jobs since the first Securicor one when Billy had shot the guard.

  Frank was a little cooler-headed than Billy, but not much – not enough to prevent himself from getting in the car and speeding to Barry Springer’s house in a fury.

  It was too late. Springer wasn’t there, nor were his wife and his small son. Instead, Frank burst through the door to find himself facing armed policemen lying in wait for him. He was arrested at once.

  By that time Billy had been shot dead. He had wounded two policemen in the gunfight; one of them died in the hospital. Frank was tried for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The chief witness for the prosecution was Barry Springer. Because he’d turned Queen’s evidence, he was not charged himself. He was allowed to go free. He changed his name to Miller and moved away from London with his family; the police helped him to cover his tracks.