The Facts of Life and Death (34 page)

‘No,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Let Tim take you home, Alison,’ said Mrs Braund.

‘No, that’s fine,’ said Mummy. ‘I’m sure John will be at the car waiting for us.’

‘I’ll take you,’ said Mr Braund firmly. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour. The queue probably won’t even have moved.’

So that’s what they did. Ruby said bye to Adam and he said bye to her and they followed Mr Braund all the way to the car park at the top of the village, as the first big drops of rain began to fall.

Where Daddy’s car had been parked was now just an empty patch of grass.

The rain hammered down on the windscreen and the roof, and the wind jostled the Range Rover all the way home.

Mummy and Mr Braund didn’t talk. Mummy chewed her thumbnail. Ruby sat on the pale-cream leather back seat, and pushed her feet under the driver’s seat again, the way she had that day when Mrs Braund had picked her up near the empty paddock.

Her foot touched something and she ducked her head to look, then reached down and took hold of the thing under the seat.

It was the matching glove. The left hand that belonged with the right hand she’d found under the sofa.

And now she knew they both belonged to Mr Braund.

She stared at it, holding it loosely in her lap. Adam had said his daddy had a girlfriend. He’d said it was someone in London. But was he right? Or was it Mummy all along?

Call you later. T.

Ruby didn’t know what to do. Ask? Or push the glove back under the seat with her toe?

How much did she want to know?

‘Look what I found,’ she said, before the decision had been consciously made in her mouth. She leaned forward and waggled the glove between Mummy and Mr Braund.

‘Been looking for those,’ said Mr Braund. ‘Well done, Ruby. Where did you find them?’

‘Under the seat,’ said Ruby suspiciously. ‘But there’s only one. I found the other one in our house, behind the sofa.’

‘Wonder how it got there,’ said Mr Braund. ‘I’ll run over and get it sometime.’

‘Ruby will bring it down tomorrow,’ said Mummy. ‘Won’t you, Rubes?’

Ruby nodded slowly. Neither Mummy nor Mr Braund looked guilty about the glove behind the sofa. Maybe he really
did
have a girlfriend in London. And did it really matter any more? Ruby wouldn’t even blame Mummy for having a fancy man. Not after what just happened.

They were almost home. The forest that whipped and waved over the steep road to Limeburn gave some shelter from the wind, but when they parked on the cobbles and Ruby got out, she was blown sideways.

Even though it was night, she could see the white tops of the waves hurling themselves at the cliffs.

They thanked Mr Braund and Mummy grabbed Ruby’s hand and together they ran up to The Retreat, past the stream that was swollen anew by the downpour and by the thousands of muddy rivulets running out of the forest and off the surrounding cliffs. Daddy wasn’t home and Ruby was grateful.

They went upstairs and got ready for bed. Ruby hadn’t been in hers for five minutes before Mummy came in and sat beside her.

‘I’m so sorry about today, Rubes. Are you OK?’

Ruby twiddled her bed cover while the tree outside clawed at the window. ‘Why was Daddy so cross?’

Mummy sighed. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. Daddy’s had a hard time, you know? Losing a job is very difficult for a man, and sometimes they can get upset for no real reason.’

‘But why did he punch Granpa?’ said Ruby.

Mummy shook her head and bit her lip and started to cry big tears that tipped out of her eyes and down her cheeks in shiny rills.

She held out her arms and Ruby reached up and let herself be gathered up in them and pressed against her mother’s shoulder.

Mummy rocked her and Ruby let herself be rocked. ‘Everything’s going to be OK, Rubes,’ said Mummy. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’

Ruby didn’t think Mummy was lying.

But she also didn’t think it was true.

CALVIN TOOK LESS
than five minutes knocking on doors to establish where Georgia Sharpe lived, but five minutes was long enough to get thoroughly soaked. He’d lived in North Devon all his life and he couldn’t remember a storm like it. The wind drove rain deep into his ear as he hunched his shoulders and ran up the narrow path to the cottage on the end of the row.

Everybody knew Georgia Sharpe, as he’d suspected. Mostly because she had a pet rabbit. ‘In the house!’ said more than one neighbour. Calvin understood. Around here, rabbits were pests and vermin, not cuddly pets that you paid to feed while they shat on your floor.

He knocked and got no answer and immediately ran round to the back door and knocked there too. He wasn’t messing about in this typhoon.

Calvin noticed the small pane of glass missing in the door and tried the handle. It was unlocked, and he stepped out of the wild elements and into the calm of a well-ordered kitchen. Only a scattering of what he assumed was rabbit food on the floor and a small but untidy pile of books and stationery on the counter interrupted his eye. And the smell of burned meat made him wrinkle his nose.

‘Hello?’

Just the way the word distributed itself through the air told Calvin that the house was empty.

He wouldn’t find Georgia Sharpe here.

Still, he couldn’t put that on any kind of official documentation, so he searched the house, just to rubber-stamp his instincts.

For some reason, the house creeped him out. There was no logic to it. There was nothing out of place, nothing disturbed, no nasty surprises. And yet he felt his hackles tingle on several occasions.

When he found the handbag on the chair in what he assumed was Georgia Sharpe’s bedroom, his heart sank. This wasn’t good. Calvin didn’t know much about women, but he did know that women and their handbags were like conjoined twins. If they had been separated, then
anything
might have happened.

After he found the handbag, he put on a pair of blue latex gloves and went through the house again – this time opening all the wardrobes.

Nothing.

Back down in the kitchen, he noticed the bag of Bugsy Supreme was upright next to the dustbin. If the rabbit had pulled the bag over to get at the food, it certainly hadn’t righted it. And where
was
the rabbit? There was a full litter tray in the utility room and a bowl filled with water near the back door, but no sign of the rabbit itself.

‘Here, Bugs!’ he called. ‘Here, Bunny!’

The bunny didn’t show itself.

Calvin sifted through the pile of random items on the counter. Three blue exercise books, a red card covered with gold stars with the handwritten heading
For Good Attendance
, and a pencil case in the shape of a banana with googly eyes. Inside the banana were two ballpoint pens, a pencil sharpener and the shoe from a Monopoly set. Georgia Sharpe was a teacher, but these were not the contents of a teacher’s bag, but a child’s.

It was puzzling. Something was definitely amiss. Calvin wished Kirsty King were here to work it out, but she wasn’t, so he’d have to do his best.

Calvin picked up the first of the exercise books and smiled. In the top-right corner of the cover, in sloping, uneven handwriting, were the words
My Dairy.
And then – underneath that – the book’s apparent owner:
Ruby Trick.

He knew that name!

He wound back through his memory. He was young and he got there fast. Ruby Trick was the child he’d spoken to in her father’s car. In Instow, on the same night that Steffi Cole had made her last, traumatic phone call home.

Calvin’s neck prickled again and he laughed out loud. Ridiculous! Getting a chill from a child’s diary. There was no connection, only coincidence.

But his hackles wouldn’t let him off the hook so easily.

Feeling pretty stupid – and glad that nobody else was here to laugh at him – Calvin Bridge flicked through Ruby Trick’s diary.

He stopped near the end, and this time the ripple of unease raised every hair on his body.

My Daddy’s got a gun …

Calvin told himself not to be stupid. Not to overreact. This was a ten-year-old girl’s diary, not a treasure map in a pirate film. He needed to be objective. He needed to be cautious. He needed to be
modern
– because his ancient body was tingling and fluttering with warning.

He read the entry again, then put the diary down with a hand that shook a little. Fuck modern – this was important. This was
something
– even though he didn’t know what. Yet. Right now he could only see a jumble of fleeting images that skittered about in his head while he tried desperately to grab them and make them fit together.

Kirsty King tapping her teeth with the gall-stone scoop.

Jody Reeves sticking out her thumb for a short ride to death.

Lips moving through the slit in a black balaclava.
Call your mother.

Mother-of-pearl stars in a chocolate sky.

Ruby Trick’s father at the boot of his car – squinting into the headlights.

My Daddy’s got a gun.

Frannie Hatton’s bruises.

Frannie Hatton’s bruises.

Frannie Hatton’s bruises.

Maybe they only needed one body, after all…

Calvin felt two pieces fit together like a puzzle, and reached for his phone.

When Kirsty King answered, he didn’t even say hello.

‘I know why he doesn’t shoot them!’ he shouted. ‘The gun’s not real!’

THE STORM CAME.

The forest around Limeburn had stood for five hundred years and seen few like it.

The wind and the rain combined to bring more water off the surrounding hills than ever before. Instead of raindrops falling on to leaves and weighing down the branches of the trees, they were immediately dashed from their resting place to the ground, where they gathered together and rushed downhill towards the sea.

The stream broke its mossy banks and flooded the road and the cobbles three inches deep. It filled the Bear Den.

In the clearing on the top of the cliff, the wind was even more punishing. Small things bent double to get out of its way.

Big things fared less well.

The giant oak that bore the swing was alone on the bluff. Unlike the forest behind it, where each tree sheltered its neighbour, this oak had stood on the cliff above Limeburn in splendid isolation for over two centuries – a lookout and a landmark – facing down nature.

But this night would be its last.

It swayed and it creaked and it strained under the assault that was a north wind coming straight off the ocean, sweeping all before it. The frayed rope whipped about until it swung so hard and so high that it got tangled in the branches. The oak started to moan, and then to squeal. If any human being had been crazy enough to be sitting on the nearby bench at the time, they would have felt the ground move beneath them as the mighty roots strained to hold on to Mother Earth. Rising and falling, rising and falling, as if the land itself were gasping for breath.

Some time just after midnight, a sound like a gunshot fired through the forest and the bench was tilted, then tossed aside by a great upheaval of soil and roots that rose vertically in the sky for ten, twenty feet. They hung there like witches’ fingers, as the tree they’d nourished for so long clung to the only home it had ever known.

With a horrible shriek, the mighty oak tipped slowly forward and peered over the edge at the raging waters below and then – with a final rending sound – it tumbled off the cliff and into the ocean.

The storm was so loud and the sea so wild that when the giant tree hit the waves, it barely made a splash.

Ruby woke at the sound of a gun.

She lay there for a moment, the sweat that was cooling fast on her body the only evidence of a bad, bad dream.

But even though she was awake, something was still very wrong.

The wind and the rain outside were momentous and the branches squealed and banged at her window, but something
else
was wrong. Something closer.

She frowned in the dark and realized what it was.

She had wet herself.

Ruby sat up in slow disgust and switched on the lamp. Then she pushed her bedsheets down. She hadn’t wet herself in bed for years. Not since she was tiny. She couldn’t believe it had happened now.