The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (42 page)

He never fucking came. I waited and waited. He called at seven. Said he was caught up—I could hear music and laughing in the background. He wouldn’t tell me where he was—I told him I needed him. That junk on Saturday had been perfect—we should do that again. That shit didn’t come cheap, he said—told me I needed to find one thousand pounds. What am I going to do? I sat in my pew again and I must have a looked a right wreck because someone came over, a priest or something, and asked if I was all right. I wanted to tell him. But I ran
.

Thursday, November 27, 1986

The money from Nan has gone. I’ve even sold my coat. What do I do? I’m missing too many lectures and they’re starting to ask questions. I can’t let them know—I can’t let anyone know
.

Friday, November 28, 1986

I saw Lucy this morning. I thought Seb might be there—I had been looking everywhere for him. She told me all about his lies. The prison stretch, how the uni had expelled him for drug dealing. No wonder he’s got money. Oh shit
.

Thursday, December 4, 1986

I called Dad an hour ago. He’s coming to get me. He’s taking me somewhere for a week or two before I go home—can’t do this with Mum looking at me with those judgmental eyes. Oh Christ, I am so fucking dumb. I am going to stop writing this after today but—future Dani: don’t do this anymore. Remember yesterday and the shame
.

In the weekend, Seb had come round with some shit on Saturday morning and we had got high. Then went to some friends in the evening, four of them. His friends, he said, but they didn’t look like his kind at all. Merchant bankers, Midas-rich and mean with it. We went somewhere expensive—Seb had asked me to dress up all fancy. There was champagne with dinner but I didn’t drink any. Afterward we all went back to a hotel room—a suite. Seb and two of them went off into the toilet. I was left with the other two—they looked at me like I was meat. I knew Seb was selling them drugs in the loo and I was a sweetener—he was giving them me as well. When the drooling pair went into the toilet too, I ran. I was not going to be his whore. Seb caught up with me when I was
almost home. He kicked me. Called me … called me something I would never even write down
.

On Sunday he brought flowers round. I wouldn’t let him in. He called Monday and Tuesday. I didn’t want to let him in but … I needed the stuff. Being without it burned. I let him in yesterday. He started out all sweet then got mean. Told me if I wanted him to keep me in the manner to which I had become accustomed then I needed to be nicer to him and nicer to his friends. Then he dragged me out of the halls and up to the cathedral. He remembered that I loved to sit in the cathedral library. It is the most amazing room I have ever been in—spiritual but you can feel the centuries of learning, of truth seekers searching through the books. It’s tangible, right in the fabric of the building. Whenever I sit there I am filled with awe. The ancient wood that holds the room together is steeped in knowledge—the carvings and ornate stone hold so much pure love of learning. In one room is humanity’s striving to learn and grow—a thousand years of human endeavour. And I can never go back. He defiled the place for me, defiled me in there. He pulled me to the back of the study room, behind a bookcase and made me kneel down and suck him, there in the library. At one point a nun walked by and he groaned so that she would see us—see me. I saw her shock and pity. He laughed. I am so dirty. I don’t know how I will ever be clean again
.

It is the final entry. Marcus Keyson closes the book.

Thursday, February 9, 1989

Heavy doors swing open. Jim stares into a room and feels his stomach clench. It is the final stop after a maze of corridors that have led down and down and down—into the bowels of the hospital. The morgue. Steel, steel, porcelain and more steel—all scrubbed down and smelling faintly of bleach. In the center of the room is a table. A blue sheet covers it, though it’s not flat. Of course it’s not, there’s a body under it. Alongside Jim is a middle-aged woman with a kind face. She is his guide into the underworld to find Persephone.

“Do you need a minute?” she asks.

He looks at her blankly, not understanding the question. “To do what?” he asks. She smiles and waits. “Oh. I see.” She means a minute to brace himself. “No. No, I’m fine.”

He’s been told he doesn’t need to do this. Tom had tried to get him to stay in London, near to Patty. Dani’s flatmate was called out and has positively identified the body, so there is no need for Jim to make an identification—not legally, anyway.

“Don’t go, Jim.” Tom’s voice is soft and kind.

“I need to see her.” Tom stares off into space for a moment and then nods. Of course Jim needs to go—they both know why. Jim opened his heart to the young man on that dreadful day he brought the news that Dani was dead. He had held it inside for so long he thought he might explode if he didn’t share it, so he had told Tom
all about Seb Merchant. The drugs and the lies, the shame and that terrible call he got from her begging him to help. How he’d rushed to Durham and took her away from there, from that awful situation. How he found her a clinic and took her there. How he’d hidden it all from Patty and how he had been scared for his daughter ever since.

Tom heard his confession without a word and at the end he said he would accompany Jim to the morgue in Durham.

“Such a kindness,” thought Jim.

Jim’s guide moves over to the body and pulls the sheet back to reveal a dead face.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispers, then hides for a moment in a memory.

“This is stupid.” Dani calls out. Jim walks into the living room to find her scowling at the radio. She’s about nine years old.

“What’s stupid?”

“This song.”

Jim listens. It’s Donovan.

“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is—that’s stupid. Mountains are big, they don’t walk away to have their tea some place.”

“You’re right.”

“So what is he saying?”

“It’s very complicated …” Jim begins.

Dani scowls at her father.

“It’s Zen, I think. One can get over-analytical in this world …”

“What?” she asks, getting annoyed.

“Okay,” he sits down next to her. “You can look at stuff so
hard—like a jigsaw puzzle—trying to work out what it is, what it does—that you forget it’s just a simple piece of cardboard. It’s a song about just accepting the world as it is and not looking for anything deeper.”

“You have no idea, do you?” she frowns in concentration. “Is it about aliens taking mountains away?”

“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Maybe there never was a mountain.”

She nods. “That’s probably the answer.”

“That’s my daughter,” Jim tells the kind guide.

She takes a notebook from her pocket and writes down the time of his formal identification.

“Could I have a moment alone with her?”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

“PC Bevans will be here. I won’t touch her.” Tom looked into the rules and told Jim that would be allowable, though not encouraged. If she knew Tom and Dani’s history she would definitely say no. But …

“Of course.” She nods slowly and carefully. “I’ll be in the waiting room, take as long as you like and come out when you’re ready.” She smiles and holds out her hand—one human being to another. Jim takes it and feels a little squeeze. A mother to a father.

“Thank you.”

She goes to the door and beckons Tom inside. She whispers something to him and then leaves.

“Jim,” Tom hisses.

“Please stay by the door, Tom—this will just take a second.”

Jim moves until he stands over her, his face cranes down to just above hers; it’s pale, and the tiny traceries of veins can be clearly
seen through the papery skin. Not at all like her glowing skin in life. He knows she is not merely asleep and yet … he slides his arm under the sheet and holds her hand. It’s cold.

“Warm me up, Daddy,” she says from far-off. He squeezes her hand but nothing can warm it now.

“Goodbye, pumpkin.” He gives her the gentlest of kisses on her pale lips.

“And I am so sorry to do this.” He pulls back the sheet. She has been shaved for the autopsy and he’s shocked by the nakedness between her legs.

“Please forgive this intrusion, Dani,” he asks her.

She is covered in bruises, all over her breasts, thighs and where they have shaved her. Her right hip looks terribly swollen. Her ankles and wrists are sliced where she was tied. Tom had told him that the blood settles, making the skin look worse, the marks more livid—but … but this is his girl. With all the strength he can muster, he takes her arm and holds it up. He’s looking for something, something he prays he will not find. Tom has walked over to his side and together they see that all over the inner arm there are puncture wounds, track marks.

“My darling, darling girl,” Jim whispers to her.

He places her arm back down and takes the sheet, pulling it up over her body, leaving just her head exposed. He leans forward and kisses her one final time.

The kind-faced guide is there as he exits. She has been talking to another police officer, a hatchet-faced man with a pencil moustache who disappears once Jim walks over.

“A tea perhaps?” she asks Jim.

“A coffee would be really …” Tears come and he can’t fight
them. He goes and sits, his head down. After a minute or two someone brings him a coffee. All sounds seem to come from underwater. Her arms …

The coffee is almost cold when Jim is finally able to lift his head. In the corner Tom is making the arrangements for the body to be sent to London once the coroner releases it. Jim watches him—he is so thankful to the young man. He is so grateful to him for helping. But now what? How did she lose her way again? Did the drugs make her a target? Is that why she was killed?

“Jim.”

Jim doesn’t hear Tom, he’s so lost.

“Jim.” Tom shakes him by the shoulder—softly.

“Miles away. Sorry.”

All Jim wants is to get home and get into bed with Patty. She’s still sedated, a nurse is with her. She has been drugged to the eyeballs for almost two days now and Jim is terrified that Patty may be lost to him too.