The Facts of Life and Death (38 page)

If John Trick had done something instead of nothing at all for the past three years, he might have had the strength he needed to haul himself out of the hole in the floor with the gun in his hand. He certainly tried. He gripped and strained and cursed and spat, and on two occasions he almost made it.

But pissing in the sea like a castaway is no kind of workout. Not like scaffolding, or labouring, or fixing the windows or the roof or the walls of a crumbling little house, where a family is cold and getting colder all the time.

Only his anger kept him from falling straight through the floor and dropping silently past the dark cliffs, into the raging sea.

Only his anger and his madness.

Ruby could see it in his eyes, and when Mummy moved instinctively to help him, Ruby cried ‘No!’ and held tight to the sleeve of her cardigan.

They knelt and watched in numb silence as he strained and struggled to save himself. Somewhere in the sky below the house, the Jingle Bobs tinkled. Trick’s head twisted from side to side and he bit his lip so hard he drew blood as he battled to lift his body on one hand and one elbow.

But because he’d done nothing at all for so long, John Trick finally needed full use of both hands.

He laid the gun down and flattened his palms against the splintered planks.

He hissed as he started to raise himself from the hole like an angry snake.

Ruby squealed. If he got out, Daddy would kill them both. He’d said,
Hello, whores
, and now Ruby knew for sure that Daddy killed whores.

That was just a fact of life.

Daddy hated women, and Mummy was a woman, and now she was a woman too.

He would kill them both.

Ruby’s legs didn’t want to move at first. But when she
forced
them, she moved faster than she ever had – running on her hands and feet across the floor like a giant spider.

Daddy saw her coming; knew what she was about. He snapped his bloody teeth inches from her face and roared, ‘Touch it and you’re dead!’

Ruby faltered. She’d promised. She’d
promised
not to touch the gun. Never. She stopped on all fours, mesmerized as Daddy rose slowly beside her – his arms shaking with effort as they straightened, his hips clearing the splinters, his knee starting to worm its way on to the edge of the broken boards, to lever himself out.

‘Ruby,
run
!’

Her mother’s cry galvanized her. But she didn’t run. Not first. First she snatched up the gun, and
then
she turned to get away.

She nearly made it.

Daddy’s fingers snapped shut round her ankle in an iron grip and he collapsed back into the hole in the floor – this time dragging Ruby with him.

‘BITCH!’ he screamed. ‘FUCKING BITCH!’

He was up to his armpits, with her leg in his fist.

Life slowed like syrup.

Ruby twisted on to her back, trying to get purchase on the floor. Her Mickey Mouse T-shirt rumpled and hitched, and her bottom scraped painfully towards her father as he sank into the hole – his elbows rising like chicken wings, his teeth gritted, his throat on fire, his hand locked around her bare ankle.

Sinking. Sinking.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Ruby’s heel tipped gently over the splintered edge of the hole. If she had tied her own laces, her shoe would have slipped off her foot. But because Mummy had tied them, she was following him. Following him down into the dark.

She started to cry.

‘Daddy,’ she sobbed. ‘Daddy, please let me go.’

John Trick said nothing, but a high noise started from inside him like a kettle whistling up to the boil. Jagged splinters dug into his arms and ribs like barbs, slowing his descent and staining the perimeter of the hole with blood.

Ruby’s foot twisted painfully as her ankle tore slowly over the piercing edge, and her knee lifted to keep her ankle from breaking.

‘Daddy! You’re
hurting
me!’

His mouth opened just enough so Ruby could see his bloody teeth. ‘I’m not your Daddy,’ he said. ‘I’m not your Daddy.’

Then Mummy was there. Mummy smashed the china dog into his hands and arms until it shattered. Then she got Ruby under the arms and pulled.

The slide stopped.

‘Let her go!’ Mummy shouted. ‘Let her go!’

But Daddy didn’t let Ruby go.

Instead he started to climb up her leg.

Ruby shrieked. It wasn’t the pain of being stretched between them; it wasn’t the agony of the twisted foot or of the splinters, or of her father’s nails digging into her soft flesh …

It was the
horror
of the thing that used to be her Daddy crawling up her wounded leg. Up her calf, her knee, her thigh.

And when it had
used
her to pull itself out of the hole in the floor, then it would kill her.

The gun was heavy in Ruby’s right hand. It didn’t feel like a toy – it felt real. It felt real when she raised it, and real when she pointed it with both shaking hands, and real when she squeezed the trigger so hard she thought her fingers would break.

The noise and the shock of the recoil knocked her backwards into her mother’s arms and flattened them both.

Ruby opened her eyes and for a moment she stared at the sagging ceiling. Then she scrabbled backwards across the room, slapping hysterically at her own leg, as if her father’s hand was still there.

It wasn’t.

He
wasn’t.

All there was was an empty black hole in the floor, in the place where she’d once kissed Adam Braund.

THE SEA HAD
taken the worst of Limeburn, but it left other things in its place.

First of those were hundreds of dead rats. So many that even the Labradoodles got tired of tossing them in the air, and the council had to send a bulldozer to scoop them all up.

Then there was the sand and mud and kelp and splintered wood and debris, knee-deep in every house, and the giant oak in the square that took four men nearly two weeks to cut up and haul away, until only the rope from the swing was left rotting on the cobbles.

Finally, there were the bodies.

Bodies that John Trick had hidden in the dark, stinking limekiln, and that the sea had found and returned to their families.

Miss Sharpe had not gone far after keeping her promise to help Ruby Trick. After the tide went out, she was found wedged behind the garden wall of The Retreat, her not-pretty face further uglied by unhealed, concentric burns that the pathologist later matched to the stove in her kitchen.

Old Mrs Vanstone looked out of her window the morning after the flood to see Jody Reeves hiding near the Bear Den. Her face had been eaten by rats, but she was still wearing those stupid shoes.

And when the stream had subsided once more between its own banks, Steffi Cole was found jammed under the little stone bridge, with what Professor Mike Crew later said was ‘half the Instow dunes’ in her lungs.

The sea never returned John Trick to Limeburn – or to any other place, as far as anybody knew – but the police came down the hill in waves. They ebbed and flowed around The Retreat for days, but – apart from the bullet they took from Pussy Willows’ dead eye – only one piece of physical evidence linking John Trick to the murders ever came to light.

Fittingly, it was Calvin Bridge who found it as they searched The Retreat. It was in a twist of toilet paper, hidden among a dead man’s underwear.

When he unfurled the paper and saw Frannie Hatton’s nose ring, Calvin felt an unexpected surge of emotion. He kept his back to PC Cunningham and DC Peters as sudden tears threatened to make him a laughing stock.

They were tears for Frannie Hatton, whose own beaten-down mother had ignored her last phone call, and they were also for Shirley, because he’d had to hurt her to preserve his own happiness. But most of all they were from sheer bloody relief that this case could now end, and he could be released from the shackles of serial ignorance and get back into uniform. Drink, drugs and debt awaited him and he would embrace them with new affection. After the past two months, constant ironing seemed a small price to pay.

Calvin half-laughed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. All this from finding a little silver ring.

‘Got something?’ said DC Peters.

Calvin Bridge turned to show him but, before he could speak, there was a loud rumble, the floor shook – and the whole front wall of The Retreat fell into the garden.

After that, the crumbling, sea-softened house was cordoned off and nobody ever went inside it again.

Only children, of course.

And trees.

ALISON AND RUBY
Trick left Limeburn, and never went back. They didn’t go to stay with Granpa and Nanna though – not even for a night. They stayed at the Red Lion on the curved sea wall at the foot of Clovelly until Mummy sold her earrings and necklace, and Tiffany brooch, and then they moved into their very own little cottage halfway up the hill.

Ruby loved it. She only had to look out of her bedroom window to see little grey and brown donkeys pulling sledges up the street, loaded with tourists’ suitcases, and Mummy promised next summer they’d have window boxes filled with red geraniums.

The bruises on Ruby’s legs faded from black to purple to brown, and finally to banana yellow. One morning, she examined her legs in bed and couldn’t see a single mark. It was one of several improvements. Her chest still ached now and then, but she got used to reading in a chair, and walking up and down the hill twice a day to stroke the donkeys in their big green paddock chased away the last of her puppy fat.

For a while the police kept coming to see them to ask them questions about Daddy and the posses. It took Ruby a little while to let go of her loyalty, but eventually she told them almost everything.

Almost.

One time a policeman asked about a gun and Ruby said,
What gun?
just like Mummy had told her to, and that worked, because they didn’t ask again.

So she never told them how on the morning after the storm – when the sea had finally finished with Limeburn – Mummy had lifted up the pedlar’s flagstone, and Ruby had put the gun underneath it.

Then they’d picked their way down the Peppercombe path – she in her jumper and bruised, bare legs, Mummy in muddy pyjamas and diamonds – and Mummy had told the police all that had happened, half talking, half crying.

The only bit she’d left out was the gun.

That was their little secret.

A month or so after they moved into their new home – just as the sun was making its sheepish return to North Devon – there was a knock on the door and it was Adam. He’d walked all the way from Limeburn.

It was chilly, but it was bright and dry, so he and Ruby played with Harvey for a bit, then they went up the hill to the visitor centre and bought ice creams, and ate them together next to the donkey paddock. Ruby told Adam all their names – Sarah and Eli and Peter and Jasper and all the rest. ‘You can ride them and groom them and everything,’ she told him. Then – in case he doubted such wonders – she added, ‘I do it every time I get my pocket money.’

Adam told her about their house falling down, and the huge hole that was left in the cliff where the mighty oak used to be.

None of it mattered to Ruby now. It was as if Adam was talking about another place she’d only heard about.

‘I’m cold,’ she said, and Adam gave her his hoodie. It smelled just the same as before, and made her feel just as happy.

They didn’t talk about Limeburn again until Adam was getting ready to walk the four miles home.

Then he asked, ‘Are you ever coming back?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Are you?’

‘It’s a long way,’ said Adam. ‘It took me ages to walk here.’

Ruby nodded, but she felt sad. Adam was the one thing she missed about Limeburn.

She turned away and leaned over the fence. She put her palm against Eli’s broad forehead with its Catherine wheel of grey hair in the middle. His heavy head relaxed and his eyelids drooped, as she rubbed him there like a magic lamp.

Adam climbed on to the fence beside her.

For a little while he just watched her.

Then he also reached out, and stroked the donkey’s long, fluffy ears and said, ‘Maybe I’ll get a bicycle.’