Authors: Clare Chambers
Burning Secrets (9 page)
I
T DIDN'T TAKE
long for news of Helen Swift's hasty departure to spread. Islanders seemed to feel that it was their duty to pass on any piece of fresh gossip to as many people as possible. Once a rumour was in circulation it was impossible to halt its progress. Only Louie and Mum, isolated at The Brow, remained cut off from this network.
There was no shortage of theories: she had assaulted a student and been suspended; she was an illegal immigrant working without a permit; she'd had a nervous breakdown; she was an outsider, and outsiders never last.
All these suggestions were the subject of discussion at the Arkins' dinner table.
“Perhaps she's got a boyfriend back home in London and she's missing him,” said Ramsay, twirling spaghetti round her fork. It was two days since the fireworks and Daniel still hadn't called round. She'd waited in all day Sunday, not daring to go out in case she missed him, and had come rushing home from school today. But Fay, who had been playing hockey, said she thought she'd seen him in the music block. So he'd been in the neighbourhood and hadn't bothered to call. It was almost enough to put Ramsay off her dinner, if only spaghetti carbonara wasn't her favourite meal and she wasn't starving.
“Well, I don't think she's done anything illegal. I thought she was really nice,” said Fay, “even if she was a bit mean about our singing.”
“I wonder what will happen about the Christmas concert?” said Ramsay.
“Oh, I expect someone will step in,” said her mum, grating parmesan over her pasta. “The problem is, there aren't enough of us islanders with qualifications to do all the jobs, so they bring these outsiders over and they don't fit in.”
“I don't think outsiders are that different from us, really,” said Ramsay, yet at a deeper instinctive level she doubted it. Daniel, for instance. The way he lived was so impulsive and free. And Louie, with her manic tears, self-harming and God knows what else was like no one you'd ever meet on Wragge.
“Speaking of outsiders,” said Mr Arkin, who had not contributed to the previous debate, “I found out something about those new people at The Brow today, which makes you wonder whether the residency office does even the most basic checks before handing out permits.”
Everyone looked up from their plates, Ramsay a little more quickly than the rest.
“You learn all sorts of interesting things reading old court reports,” Mr Arkin went on, helping himself to salad with a pair of tongs like giant tweezers.
“Wasn't it the boy from The Brow who took you to the fireworks?” Mrs Arkin asked Ramsay.
“He didn't take me. I just met him there. With a load of other people,” Ramsay replied, a little defensively.
“You're not seeing him, are you?” asked her father, chasing a slippery tomato around the salad bowl with the tongs.
“I don't know. No, I'm not
seeing
him,” Ramsay said, hoping that Daniel wouldn't choose this particular moment to call round. “He's actually really nice.”
“And his sister's nice too. When she's not freaking out,” Fay added, not particularly helpfully.
“Did he tell you anything about his past? What he did before he came here?” Mr Arkin enquired.
“Yes,” said Ramsay instinctively, feeling that he must have done. But now she'd come to think about it she couldn't remember a thing he'd told her about himself, except that he'd stood outside their house at two in the morning. She could hardly admit that. “Um, no.”
“This really nice boy didn't mention that he'd spent four months in a secure unit for young offenders?”
Ramsay shook her head in denial. She wished she could think of some evidence to disprove it, but she knew it was true. She recalled those little snippets of conversation that she'd forgotten â that he'd missed too much school last year to take exams; that he couldn't bear to be cooped up inside any more.
“What's he supposed to have done?”
“Set fire to a building,” said Mr Arkin. “Burned a man to death.”
“H
OW MANY FIRES
have you started?” Alan asked me. “Roughly?”
“None. I mean apart from the shed.”
“Interesting,” said Alan, turning the pages of my file. “Because it says in the transcript of the trial:
Prosecution: Why did you set fire to the shed?
Defendant: I didn't set fire to the shed. I lit a little bonfire behind the shed, and the shed caught fire by accident.
Prosecutor: Why did you light âa little bonfire'?
Defendant â
that's you â
Because I like lighting fires.”
Alan looked up. “You like lighting fires, but until this point you'd never actually lit any fires. So how did you know you liked it?”
“I don't remember saying that.”
“It's down here in black and white.”
“I must've said it then. They ask so many questions that are almost the same â after a while you can't remember what you said.”
“Does the name
Sidney Robsart
mean anything to you?”
I wasn't expecting that. Blood rushed to my face. “I know who he is. Was.” Even when I'm ninety and so senile I can't remember my own name I won't be able to forget Sidney Robsart. It's always at night when I'm dropping off to sleep that I think about him. I can hear his fists on the wooden door and his dog howling.
The old woman who came to do the allotment had brought a new padlock with her that day â she was fed up with kids using her shed as a shelter, leaving fag ends and takeaway cartons all over the floor. It never crossed her mind that a tramp might have crept inside out of the wind to curl up with his dog and a bottle of cider and fallen asleep.
The weird thing is, in my dream I'm always the one
inside
the shed. Trying to get out, throwing myself against the locked door, while the smoke and flames rise up and choke me.
D
ANIEL SAT IN
the doctor's waiting room at Darrow, reading the health notices on the opposite wall:
Incontinent? Don't suffer in silence. Meningitis: Know the Signs. Smoking: We Can Help You Quit
. His mum warned him never to touch the magazines at a GP's surgery as they were riddled with germs from the unwashed hands of diseased patients. He wasn't convinced there was much science behind this â surely doctors of all people would be aware of this potential hazard under their noses. Not that there was much to tempt him amongst the decades-old copies of
The Countryman
and
Women's Realm
.
He had woken up with a raging sore throat, as if he'd swallowed acid, and when Mum had peered into his mouth using a pen torch and a ruler to hold his tongue flat he'd nearly gagged. She decided that he needed antibiotics and had made him an appointment for that afternoon. She'd even gone as far as giving him a lift to the surgery, though her tender care didn't extend to waiting around for the return trip.
Several times during the morning Daniel had picked up the mysterious fragment of cardboard and wondered if Helen had left it for him deliberately, and if so why. He'd shown the logo to Louie without explaining its origin, and she had recognised it as the one on his drawstring bag, but didn't know what it stood for. It was pointless asking Mum; she wouldn't know the difference between a BMW badge and a hot cross bun.
The waiting room was starting to fill up with mums and babies, arriving for a weighing clinic. They all seemed to know each other and Daniel's head was ringing with the babble of female voices, all talking at once above a background of wailing babies. Suddenly he felt grateful he was male.
The doctor was a jowly-faced man with a bald head but plenty of hair emerging from ears and nostrils by way of compensation. His breath, when he leant towards Daniel to examine his throat, smelled of coffee â stale and foul.
“Any earache?” the doctor asked, producing a magnifying torch and forcing the funnel-shaped point into Daniel's ear.
“Ow. No.”
“Any fever?”
“Don't think so.”
“Not allergic to penicillin, are you?”
“No.”
The doctor turned back to his computer terminal and pecked at the keyboard with one finger. A moment later a green prescription sheet rolled from the printer. “Take one tablet four times a day on an empty stomach,” he said as there was a tap at the door and the receptionist appeared, carrying a mug of coffee.
I don't have an empty stomach four times a day
, thought Daniel, and then his attention was caught by something that drove all other thoughts out of his head. The mug, which the receptionist had carefully put down on the desk, had a symbol of a crooked smile on the side next to the word:
Narveng
.
“There we are,” said the doctor, handing over the prescription. “Make sure you complete the course, even if you feel better.” He was too polite to start drinking his coffee in front of a patient, but his hand crept towards the cup in anticipation.
Daniel stood up, hesitating.
“Anything else?” asked the doctor, with a regretful glance at his coffee.
“What's Narveng?”
“Narveng? It's a drug company â like Reckitt or Glaxo. If you've ever had hay fever or a migraine you've probably taken a tablet made by Narveng. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I just saw that logo the other day and now I've just seen it again on your coffee cup. I wondered what it stood for.”
The doctor took this as an excuse to pick up the cup. “The sales reps bring all these freebies with them â mugs, mouse mats, calendars, enough stationery to open a shop. Look.” He opened a drawer in his desk to reveal hundreds of cheap plastic biros; the kind that give no pleasure to write with, and yet stubbornly outlast more precious expensive pens.
“Here. Have one.” The doctor selected one and passed it over.
“Thanks,” said Daniel, putting it in his pocket along with the prescription. He went off with the strange sensation that he had discovered something really important. If only he could work out what it was.
T
HE BUS FROM
Darrow passed through Stape on its winding route around the island, so Daniel got out to drop in on Ramsay, just as she had suggested. He'd intended to leave it a bit longer â he didn't want to look too keen, and hadn't forgotten the way she'd walked off without a backward glance â but after three days the urge to see her again overpowered all other considerations. If he looked keen, it was because he was keen: too bad.
He was still some distance away from the house when he caught sight of her in the back garden, and his stomach gave a kick of excitement. She was by the rabbit hutches, putting in fresh straw and bowls of cabbage leaves, and Daniel was sure she'd seen him as she straightened up. But to his surprise, instead of approaching him or responding to his wave she darted back into the house.
Daniel continued up to the front door and rang the bell, reminding himself that girls were strange creatures. Maybe she'd bolted inside to put on make-up or something. Louie, for instance, would never answer the front door with bare feet. Or bare arms, of course.
He waited on the step for a couple of minutes, feeling increasingly uneasy, and then rang again, pressing the bell down for longer than strictly polite. Its trilling echoed through the house: there was no way anyone inside could claim not to have heard it, but still no one came.
Daniel was just turning to leave when he heard movement behind the door, and it opened a fraction. Ramsay stood in the gap, with a troubled frown on her face.
“I can't see you,” she said, not quite meeting his eye. “You mustn't come round here again.”
“Why not?”
“I'm not allowed. Dad says. You'd better go â he'll be back soon.”
“But why? What have I done?” They had been getting on so well at the fireworks, until Louie stuffed things up. And he'd done nothing since that could have upset her. Had he?
She looked at him reproachfully. “Why didn't you tell me you'd been in prison?”
The question came out of nowhere like something solid and knocked him sideways. All he could do was try to recover his breath and blurt out, “It wasn't a prison. Who told you?”
“It's true then,” said Ramsay quietly. “You killed a man.”
One thing his mum had said through her tears, during those awful months leading up to the trial, came back to him now:
this will follow you for the rest of your life.
She was right. Even on a remote island where you couldn't get broadband or Coke or a takeaway pizza, where they'd barely heard of McDonald's or mobile phones, they'd somehow heard about him.
“It's not the sort of thing you go round telling people,” he muttered. “You try to forget about it.” Since he had been on Wragge, since he had met Ramsay in fact, he almost had.
“You could have told me.”
“So you could have hated me straight away instead of getting to know me first and then hating me?” Daniel retorted.
“I don't hate you.” Ramsay glanced anxiously at her watch. “I've got to go. You've got to go, I mean.”
A new and terrible thought struck him. If one person on Wragge knew, they all knew. The stares, the whispers, the harassment, everything they thought they'd got away from, would start all over again. It would kill his mum. “I suppose it's all round the island by now.
Everyone knows everyone's secrets here
. You said that the first time we met.”
“I haven't told anyone!” Ramsay said, her voice rising with indignation. “And Dad won't.”
“Why? What's to stop him?”
“He promised me. As long as I don't see you any more, he'll never tell. That's the deal.”
