In the Moors (20 page)

“Are you Kissie?” I hissed. “Or Pinchie?”

The creature shook its head, but not at me. It hadn't heard me at all. It was preoccupied to find itself in such a dreadful state, as if it, as much as I, had expected a beauty to emerge from the mane of hair, not this … horror. It tried to shake off the grotesqueness of its appearance, like a dog tries to rid itself of burrs, scratching the skin of its cheeks, pushing and pulling at the bulbous nose. There was no relief. It swept the hair up from the floor and tried to cover its pockmarked scalp, but the wig would no longer fit. The creature threw the wig at me and wailed in anguish. The gaping hole of the mouth showed blackened teeth filed to sharp points. I smelt the fetid odour of its breath. The cry grated on my ears.

“Please,” I called. “Trendle!”

Instantly I was on the soft grass beside Trendle's brook. My knees trembled so much they couldn't hold my weight, so I curled into a ball and lay, with my eyes closed tight, until the call-back sign came from my CD player.

SIXTEEN

“So,” said Rey. “You
are finally prepared to make a statement.”

I'd arrived at the police station at just after nine in the morning and was swiftly ushered into an interview room. Abbott and Buckley were sitting on either side of a small square table, with me between them like a prisoner. I didn't respond. I refused to respond to such harassment. I'd told Abbott as much on Saturday.

“How is Cliff?”

“He's in the remand wing of Horfield Prison, Sabbie,” said Rey.

“Yes, I know.” I didn't bother pointing out that I'd asked
how,
not
where,
he was.

“Are you happy if we record this conversation?” DC Abbott placed a finger on the recording equipment and spoke into it, detailing the date and who was present at this interview. A tiny tape spun round and round, hissing like a snake. “The information you're bringing,” he prompted. “Is it relevant?”

“Yes … no …” I looked down at my hands and forced them to relax under the table. “I don't know. You'll have to make up your mind about that.”

“But you can give us information?” said Abbott.

“Yes,” I said and, in a sudden fit of anger, added, “
sir.
”

“It's okay, Sabbie,” said Rey. “We're all on the same side.”

Abbott said nothing, as if he wasn't sure Rey was right.

“This may not be of any relevance at all.” I fished out the envelope that contained the glittery hair slide and let one finger push it across the table.

“Is this something Cliff has given you?” Rey picked up the envelope but didn't open it.

Finally I could see how their minds were working. “This isn't about Cliff.” Instantly, I realized that wasn't perfectly true. “This
starts
with something that Cliff—that I …”

I trailed off and in the silence that followed, I watched the miniature spool revolve inside the tape recorder.

“Sabbie?” said Rey. “Just tell us what's on your mind.”

“I don't know where to begin.”

“Start at the beginning and just keep going,” said DC Abbott. I was instantly reminded of Alice in Wonderland. So Abbot was the Knave of Hearts, was he? Perhaps because I was thinking of rabbit holes and strange, reversible worlds, I did exactly the opposite of what he advised. I started at the end.

“I've found two bodies,” I said.

For a long time after I'd finished, they sat me in a sort of visitor's room, a place with no windows, but it did have softer chairs and an ancient coffee table with a pile of magazines, reminding me of trips to the dentist, weighted down by a glass ashtray.

I stared at the ashtray for long minutes.
Trust the police to proffer the means to disregard the statute book
, I thought, wishing that I were still a smoker so that I could (a) pass the time, (b) soothe my split-end nerves, and (c) blatantly flout the law.

I was glad that the hair slide was at last in police custody, because I'd hated having it on my person, especially after the journey I had taken last night.

I was still in a sweat about that. Nothing had seemed right. I had taken last night's journey to soothe my bent and broken spirit, but instead I'd confronted a fickle river goddess who had sent me to the place I hated most in the entire spirit realm.

After the call-back from the CD, I had sat up on my sun lounger in the darkened therapy room and made notes on all I had seen and experienced on that journey. But when I'd reached the part where I had to describe the creature in the kitchen at Brokeltuft, my pen stopped of its own accord. I had wanted to write
witch
, but Rhiannon and Bren were witches and they only ever did good with their work. This creature was not of their ilk. This was a black witch, and I had not ever thought to encounter such a thing in my spirit world. Because of this, I was still angry with the Lady of the River. I would not trust her again if she came to me.

Hours seemed to pass before Rey reappeared, carefully closing the door behind him. He laid a thin cardboard folder on the coffee table and sat down in the chair next to mine, one of those old-fashioned winged things, with rough brown upholstery that had gone shiny at the edge of the seat.

“Did you find them?”

“Yes,” said Rey. “Two bodies. Skeletal remains only.”

For some stupid reason, I felt as though someone had swung a body kick into my midriff. “I've been hoping I'd found the hulls of boats.”

“No. No.”

“They looked like hulls of rotting boats.”

“Sabbie.” Rey touched me gently on the arm, as if to wake me. “You know these are bodies, that's why you came to us.”

My breath fizzed from my lungs. “D'you think they're Kissie and Pinchie?”

“Who?”

“That's what they told me they were called.”

“However would you know that?”

“I just said. She was desperate to communicate.” Boiling fluid filled my veins as I recalled the slow rasp of her voice. “I'm glad those people are dead. They were hardly human.”

“W
ait a moment here,” said Rey. “Let's see what the pathologist comes up with before we start down that track. Dead bodies are usually considered victims of a crime, not perpetrators. Even so, we would love to wind up that old case. I'll check to see if those names were being bandied about in the Eighties and Nineties.”

I felt all pumped up. “You're finally taking my information seriously, Rey, thank you so much for that.”

“We take everything seriously, even the whacko phone calls.” Rey was jotting notes into a pad. “Even the half-truths.”

“Sorry?”

“No one could have found those bodies if they hadn't been given a few clues.”

“I did have clues. From my journeys.”

“And the names? Who gave you the names?” Rey stuffed the notepad into his jacket pocket and opened the folder on the coffee table. “My colleagues—”

“You mean Abbott.”

Rey ignored the interruption. “Any day now this might become a double murder investigation. Dead kids make the blood run high in this department. We need to know how you found the cottage.”

A sort of buzzing welled up in my head. Being proved right about something wasn't necessarily a good thing. “You think Cliff told me where the cottage was.”

Rey said nothing. He just set his gaze on me like I was a nut and he was the nutcracker.

“If that's what you want to believe, nothing I say now is going to change your mind.”

“Detectives aren't the most trusting of people,” said Rey. A glimmer of a smile tweaked at one side of his mouth, as if he wanted me to know he was sorry about that. “And you do say some crazy things.”

“They only sound crazy because they're out of context,” I began, but Rey moved smoothly on.

“
Take this notebook of Houghton's.” He shook his head in despair. “Reads like a bad horror movie most of the time. Sacks of hair? Whatever's that about?”

“If you took the time to hear Mrs. Houghton's story, you'd know. When he disappeared as a child, he came back with his head completely shaved.”

“The disappearance she reported to the police?”

“Yes. She thought his mates had done it for a dare, but honestly I don't …” I trailed off. Rey was smoothing out papers from the file he'd brought with him.

“Summer holidays, wasn't it?” he said, glancing up briefly. “Clifford Houghton, aged eleven years, three weeks. Reported missing by his mother. Returned home uninjured within forty-eight hours.”

“You've got the report,” I said.

Rey shuffled the papers. “June the twenty-ninth, just weeks earlier. Disappearance reported at Taunton Police Station by parents Diane and Arnold Napper. Patricia, commonly known as Patsy. File closed, as she never returned. Can't blame her, looking at the address.” He let a photocopy drop onto the coffee table.

I felt my mouth gape. “How did you know?”

“My colleague informed me of your visit, of course. You think we sit on our asses?”

“He said he had no intention of doing anything about it.”

Rey grinned. He was enjoying my surprise. “The two bodies you've just discovered rather changes things.”

“You've just spent the last ten minutes explaining why you aren't interested.”

“I've never said that. But I have to pose questions. If this missing girl was taken by the murderer, why did we never find her body?”

“It could be anywhere, Rey.”

He gave a brief nod, as if to concede this. “Okay. But if Cliff was abused in any way, why didn't his parents come back to report the full story?”

I thought about this. “He was trying to protect his mum. His dad was in hospital at the time …” I trailed off, confused by dreams and fantasies, truths and trances. “You're never going to believe anything I tell, are you, Rey?”

Rey hunkered down in front of me. “Not true.”

His eyes were directly across from mine, and in them was something that disturbed him. “What?” I begged.

“Plastic carrier bags, Sabbie. Stuffed under the floorboards and placed on the bodies of the two victims. Gnawed through, of course, so the contents had fallen all over the skeletons.” He shook his head, as if the image distressed him. “They were clothed in it. As if their spines had grown fur.”

The memory of the gently rustling, squeaking mattress came back to me. “What?” My voice was weak. “What!”

“Carrier bags of hair. Until forensics have done we won't be certain, but human hair, I'd guess.”

“They shaved the heads of all their victims,” I whispered. “And kept it. Is that what you're saying?”

Rey gave me a lopsided smile. “You wrote about hair, sacks of hair. How did you know so early on, before, as far as I can see, Houghton had confessed to his early memories?”

I reached out for the photocopies. Rey got up and walked over to a pin board on a wall, as if the notices were suddenly of great interest. He'd made the copies to give to me, but he didn't want to witness the fact. “You should go home,” he said, without turning round. “Get some sleep or something.”

“I can't afford to do that. I have clients. If I don't work, I don't eat.”

“Apart from eggs,” said Rey. He glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes, green as a sprite's, wrinkled wonderfully.

I hadn't dared tell Rey that I had a visitor's pass for Horfield Prison the following day. He'd probably think I was still interfering in “police business,” but I badly wanted to see if Cliff was doing all right.

Visiting started at two p.m. and I skipped lunch to make an early start. I couldn't have eaten anyway. Some form of butterfly had hatched out in my stomach and was fluttering round, taking up all the room. I'd never known a prisoner before, despite my reprobate past, and this time round I didn't have Linnet's hand to hold.

After queuing outside the visitor's entrance along with wives and mothers and other assorted loved ones, I decided that the prison system went out of its way to humiliate people connected with its inmates. I could feel my shoulders hunching and my eyes following my feet as I shuffled down the line towards the bag search. I thought it might be bullet-proof glass and telephones, like it is in films, but the visitors' room for remand prisoners was a spread of cheap tables and plastic chairs.

Cliff was sitting at the far end of the room, bent as an old man. I took the chair on the opposite side of the table and realized they were bolted to the floor. To prevent use as missiles, I supposed. I stretched my hand across to him. As soon as I touched his skin, he spoke.

“I didn't do it.”

“I know that, Cliff.”

“Yeah.” He risked a tiny, piercing look into the very heart of my eyes. I would have lurched backwards, if the plastic, bolted chair hadn't stopped me. There was a glint of crazy in them, anguish that could not be quenched. “But no one here does.”

He kept his voice down. There must have been twenty tables in the room, most of them occupied, but people spoke in quiet tones, apart from a woman at the far end who was losing it big time.

“It makes you crazy, this place,” said Cliff, as if he knew what I'd seen in his eyes and needed to explain it.

“You're not crazy, Cliff.”

“I think I've always been mad.”

I found I was trembling. In the course of four days, Cliff had changed. He'd become a convict. “Have you seen your mum?”

“No. I can't see her. She'd only cry. I can't watch that.”

“But she wants to support you.”

“You and Linnet are doing that. Linnet's working so hard. She says the only real evidence is Josh's toy, and she's trying to prove that it could have been planted in my flat.”

“That's great! What's she come up with?”

“My landlady,” said Cliff. “She has a spare key.”

“The woman who runs the post office? I've met her.” I hoped my voice didn't tell him I'd taken an instant dislike to her.

“Linnet thinks she might have a grudge against me.”

I felt a tiny seed of hope begin to germinate inside me. “Do you think that she let someone into your flat?”

“Mrs. Gale? She'd never do anything like that. She wouldn't give a person a second-class stamp unless they paid up-front. She has her position to maintain.”

“So how is Linnet going to make this work?”

“It's what she calls a ‘counter argument'. Any opportunity that the toy could be put there by someone else would make a jury see things differently.” His voice sounded stronger as he said the words, but he didn't look up or unfold his arms from a permanent self-hug that reminded me of the pull of a straightjacket.