2003 - A Jarful of Angels (25 page)
Read 2003 - A Jarful of Angels Online
Authors: Babs Horton
Three minutes, while he stopped to piss in the river.
Ugh. Poor river. Poor fish.
Five minutes to waddle back up the hill to his house in Sebastopol. Close on his heels they crept across the bailey behind him, weaving between washing lines hung with dancing clothes that acted as camouflage.
Outside Dai’s house Fatty stood on a battered bucket and then one by one, except for Bessie, they took a turn on the bucket and peeped through Dai’s filthy window.
They watched as Dai kicked the cat off the grandfather chair and sat down by the fire. His wife Ruby served tea at eight. She stumbled across the kitchen and launched a chipped plate bearing a mountain of bubble and squeak and scorched sausages, all drowned in brown sauce towards the table.
It took five minutes for Dai to shovel it down his neck, then there was forty-five minutes of sleeping.
At ten to nine Dai came out the back to the outside lav.
Each day they watched and made more notes.
They made the final plans in Billy’s coal shed. Fatty sat them down in a half circle as if they were kids in school. He drew plans on an old piece of wallpaper he’d found up at the ash tip. He put on a really posh voice, swanky English with plums, the way they talked on the wireless.
There was a lady on the wireless who Fatty copied. She sang dead daft songs. “I love little pussy. She’s so soft and warm. And if I don’t hurt her she’ll do me no harm!” It made them roar with laughter the way she sang it. They had to bend up double and hold their bellies. She sounded like a mental case.
“Are you sitting comfortably?” said Fatty.
They grinned up at him from the coal-littered floor where they sat, except for Bessie, who was wearing wellies and was perched on her hanky on top of a box.
“Right! Shut your traps, and then I’ll begin!”
And they listened. Goggle-eyed and open-mouthed, hardly believing they were going to do such a fearsome thing.
“Fatty, I’m afraid!”
“Just stand by the gate and keep your eyes peeled. Whistle if anyone comes. You can see the house from there,” Fatty hissed.
“What if the dog barks?”
“She won’t. She knows me by now.”
“Fatty, don’t leave me.”
Iffy stood by the gates of the Big House, too close for comfort. Fatty had been into the grounds of the Big House several times and pulled away some of the overgrown bushes that shielded the house from outside view. There was a small gap now and if Iffy got up close enough she could see the French windows.
Iffy was shaking uncontrollably with fright.
“I’ll be in there in a couple of minutes, just the time it takes to get through the tunnel.”
He disappeared over the river bank with the statue’s head under his T-shirt and, in his pocket, a small bag of concrete mix he’d scrounged from some builders in town.
Curiosity made Iffy look into the grounds. She only had a small view through where Fatty had managed to tear away a few branches. The lights behind the French windows were burning brightly. They were fancy lights, loads of them hanging from the ceiling like dripping tears.
Seconds slowly built into minutes.
The lights were like a magnet, drawing Iffy in like a moth to the candle flame.
Barny the bulldog howled from Old Man Morgan’s farm. The Labrador in the Big House howled back hopefully. Iffy turned her back on the window.
The red kite sliced across the moon above Blagdon’s Tump. Red as blood.
“Whee ooh wit!”
He was in.
“Hurry up, Fatty!”
The Old Bugger hooted.
Iffy leapt with fright. A light had gone on in an upstairs window of the Big House.
She saw a black shadow cross the lighted window, a hooked nose, coiled plaits, a Bible.
“Hail Mary full of grace. Shit! Shit! Fatty, come on!”
The light went out in the upstairs room and she heard the sound of a window opening. Torchlight shone into the blackness of the garden.
There was a shout from the house.
Someone screamed, a wild mad scream.
Iffy was paralyzed with fear. She heard the waters of the fishpond begin to stir and the soft pad of a statue’s feet in the damp grass. Bubbling noises filled her ears.
All the lights in the Big House went on.
A hand came out of the blackness and grabbed her.
On his way back through town it began to rain heavily and Will decided to take shelter. There were only a few people in the café when Will entered. He sat down at a table and the old man he had seen in the cemetery came out from behind the counter to take his order.
He smiled at Will, a gold-toothed smile of welcome. He took his order and then disappeared back behind the counter singing softly to himself.
He delivered the ice cream and coffee to Will’s table with a flourish.
“I hope a you enjoy. Iss a long time I think since you have a knicker a bocker a glory, eh?”
“A very long time,” Will said. “Too long.”
The old man laughed, and retired behind the counter. He busied himself washing and polishing cups and glasses. Then he settled himself on a high stool behind the counter, took up a battered book and began to read.
Will glanced at the book cover. Laurie Lee’s
As I Walked Out One Midsummer’s Morning
. He’d read it himself many years ago. He’d always thought he might try and follow in the writer’s footsteps and walk the route from the north-west of Spain down to the south, but like so many other things in life he’d put it off.
Will got up, paid his bill and held open the door for a young woman who was carrying a small child into the café. The child was soundly asleep in her arms. His head lolling backwards, a sweet smile of contented relaxation on his flushed face.
“Hiya, Mario! Give us a coffee please,” the woman said. “I’m knackered. I been all over the place with him to buy new trainers. You need a mortgage with the price on them!”
Will glanced back at the child. He was wearing pristine white trainers and Will blanched when he caught sight of the price tag stuck fast to one of the soles.
As he left the café the sun slid out from behind grey clouds and a glorious rainbow hung above the houses of the town.
The hand that grasped Iffy’s wrist was strong and the fingernails were sharp against her skin. The scream that grew inside her chest never made it to her lips. As she opened her mouth the sound died away inside her. She stiffened with fear.
The face that stared back at her from behind the gates of the Big House was old Mrs Medlicott’s. The face was close enough for Iffy to reach out and touch and was contorted with terror, with wide staring eyes and lips stretched back over yellow teeth.
The hand loosened its grasp. The eyes closed, the bushes folded together like curtains, and she was gone.
Fatty was suddenly behind Iffy, pulling her arm, dragging her down over the river bank and shoving her under the black archway of the bridge.
The Labrador began to bark again in the grounds. Old Sandicock was shouting out to someone. The geese began to honk.
They stood together catching their breath. Fatty could feel Iffy’s heart pounding through her T-shirt.
There were muffled voices close by, in the darkness. Fatty put his finger to Iffy’s lips. Someone else was there under the bridge, hiding in the shadows.
Fatty squeezed Iffy’s hand tightly.
Somebody groaned.
“Now, I think you’ll do what I want. You wouldn’t want me to spill the beans to that little bastard son of yours.”
There was a rustle of clothes and a whimpering noise like that of a wounded animal.
“So let’s have it nice and easy.”
“Let me alone. He’s a good boy.”
“Your old man knows, does he? It’s a wise child who knows its own father.”
More grunting noises and the sound of a woman sobbing somewhere near them. The groaning noises came faster. It was a man: Dai Full Pelt; and a woman crying quietly.
Fatty pulled Iffy up over the bank, the sound of his wild sobs hung on the night air.
Far in the distance could be heard the ringing of an ambulance bell.
Will sat in his room at the Firkin looking through his old notebooks and thinking about the moment when Elizabeth Tranter had closed the front door and left him standing in a daze looking up at the house.
The last time he had been there he had been on police business. He’d visited the middle cottage in Coronation Row with Sergeant Rodwell. Coronation Row where Lawrence Bevan had lived out his short life.
He and Rodwell had called round at the house looking for Mr Bevan. There had been no sign of anyone at home and yet the front door was unlocked.
Will had pushed open the door and he and Rodwell had stepped inside the darkened house. There had been an unpleasant, fausty odour about the place, an uncared-for, dirty smell.
Each room on the ground floor was strewn with discarded clothing, piles of old racing papers, empty milk bottles and fish and chip papers screwed into balls. A mountain of beer flagons filled the floor in the pantry.
They had climbed apprehensively up the uncarpeted stairs. There were two bedrooms. The largest was a mirror of the downstairs rooms. The smell was rank, of sweat and greasy bedclothes. A brimming piss pot festered beneath the bed. On the bedside table cigarette butts overflowed from a saucer and a cup of long-cold tea was surfaced with mould.
When they’d entered the smaller bedroom across the landing it was as if they were in a different house. There was an iron bed against the wall nearest to the window. The sheets on the bed had been made from old flour sacks, slit down the sides and tacked loosely together with pink thread. The makeshift pillow was made from a roll of newspapers wrapped round with an old ripped towel and tied with string. The bare wooden floor was scrubbed clean and was dust free. There was a bookshelf cobbled together from old wooden cider crates.
Will had picked up one of the books. The
Waverley Medical Encyclopedia
. It was a battered old copy, and where the spine had broken it had been carefully mended with adhesive tape. Lollipop sticks had been inserted between some of the pages.
“A queer sort of book for a kid to read,” he’d said to Sergeant Rodwell.
“Well, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir, he was a queer sort of kid.”
“In what way?”
“Well, scruffy as hell for a start. Always up to something.”
“Takes a bit of gumption, though, to keep your room clean and tidy like this when the rest of the house is a bloody tip,” Will’d said.
Will had turned to one of the pages of the encyclopedia which had been marked with a lollipop stick. Page 614, SPEECH. He’d read the text that had been underlined faintly in pencil.
When the voice is lost suddenly and there is no obvious abnormality to be seen in the cords, the cause is hysteria.
The second lollipop stick marked page 369, and carefully underlined were the words:
Thus…successive generations of human beings may have an excessive number…or a deficiency of fingers and toes.
Will sat very still, thinking.
He looked back at the notes he’d made all those years before. He’d recorded that in the margin of the book someone had written ‘MEASURE BOTH CATS FEET’.
Will remembered raising his eyebrows at the time, he had closed the book and placed it carefully back on the bookcase. Then he’d looked quickly through the rest of the books. There was a school atlas, a boys’ annual, a well-thumbed copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. Not the usual reading matter for a ten-year-old, he’d thought at the time.
On the top of the boy’s bookcase had lain a small red collar with a silver barrel attached to it.
“Did he own a dog?” Will had asked Rodwell.
“Not as far as I know, sir. No, I don’t think so. He was mad about animals though. One of those kids who’d pick up birds with broken wings, kept snakes and toads in his pockets, that sort of thing.”
“He wasn’t known to you for any criminal activity?”
“No. He wasn’t into thieving or anything like that. Couple of things we suspected him of but never caught him for.”
“What were they?”
Sergeant Rodwell had coughed. “I think it was him who…er…tipped a bag of manure over a woman in town.”
Will had laughed, an echoing laugh in the sparsely furnished room.
“What?”
“Somebody got into one of the empty flats above one of the shops. Along came this particular woman and Bob’s your uncle, someone emptied a sack of the stuff all over her. Still steaming it was too. Miss Riley, she’s a local schoolteacher. Gave her a right turn I can tell you!”
“Nice woman?”
It was Sergeant Rodwell’s turn to laugh.
“Ah, no, sir. She taught me. A right old dragon.”
“The case is closed then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any other crimes?”
“Well, Mrs Carmichael, the Sunday school teacher swears she saw him mooching about the church the day somebody sabotaged the nativity scene.”
“Sabotaged! That’s a strong word, Sergeant.”
“Well, there were sixteen bangers strapped to the shepherd’s leg, sir. Did quite a bit of damage, as you can imagine. Straw blown everywhere and knocked the stuffing out of the Virgin Mary.”
“Sounds quite a boy.”
“Ay, he was, sir.”
Rodwell’s use of the word ‘was’ had filled Will with acute despair, as though the boy had already been consigned to the past.
He had knelt down and looked under the bed. There were two boxes pushed up against the wall. He had slid them out, and lifted the lid on the first box. It was empty except for a layer of dirty cotton wool, indented, as though something very heavy had lain on it. He sniffed, the smell of strong soap rose from the cotton wool. He replaced the lid and opened the second box. It contained two jam jars with holes punched in the metal lids, and a copy of a Shakespeare play,
Hamlet
. Will’s favourite. He had opened the book. It was on loan from the local library and the ticket showed it to be ten years overdue. There had also been two new candles in the box, a third half burned, and six bangers tied around with string.
Will had slipped the copy of
Hamlet
into his jacket pocket, replaced the lid on the box and slid it back under the bed. There was no wardrobe or chest of drawers in the room, no clothes of any description lying around.
“No clothes anywhere. Looks as though he’s taken everything with him,” he’d said.
Rodwell had cleared his throat.
“Only ever seen the boy in one set of clothes and they were the ones he left behind on the river bank. He’s been wearing them for the last few years. Funny thing I noticed…”
“What?” Will had asked.
“There was no cricket belt. He always wore a red and white cricket belt to keep up his shorts. They were about five sizes too big.”
Will had sighed and wondered. Had the boy been strangled with his own belt? But without a body they weren’t going to find any answers. It was probably only a question of time before the body was discovered. Children didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth.
“Well, there’s not much to see, nothing to give us a clue as to what’s happened to him.”
Will had gone down the stairs of the house in Coronation Row with a heavy heart.
