‘It wasn’t.’
‘What did they want to achieve by questioning your mother’s death?’ He doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘And what do they want to achieve by scaring you with dead animals on the doorstep?’
I can see his point. It feels disjointed. Why push me towards the police, then warn me off?
He takes my silence as defeat.
‘It was a fox, sweetheart.’ Mark moves forward and kisses my forehead. ‘I promise. Why don’t I take Ella while you have a nice bath? I haven’t got a client till eleven today.’
I let Mark lead me upstairs and run me a bath, putting in some of the ludicrously expensive bath salts he bought me when Ella was born, which I’ve never had time to use. I soak beneath the bubbles, thinking about foxes, rabbits, blood. Wondering if I’m paranoid.
I picture the anonymous card; imagine the sender’s hand sliding it into the envelope, putting it in the postbox. Did that same person cut open a rabbit with surgical precision? Smear blood across the steps of my house?
My pulse won’t slow down. It beats a staccato rhythm in my temple and I sink lower in the bath, letting the hum of the water fill my ears instead. Someone wants to frighten me.
I wonder if the two acts are really that disjointed after all? I saw the anonymous card as a call to action, a direction to look into my mother’s death. But what if it wasn’t an instruction, but a warning?
Think again.
A warning that Mum’s death wasn’t as it seemed; that someone out there meant my family harm. Still does.
I close my eyes and see blood, so much blood. Already my memory is playing tricks on me. How big was the rabbit? Was there really that much blood?
Photographs.
The thought occurs suddenly, and I sit up, sloshing water over the side of the bath. I’ll take pictures and then I can take them to Murray Mackenzie at the police station and see if he thinks it could have been a fox.
A tiny voice asks if I’m doing this to convince Mark or to convince the police. I bat it away, pull the plug and hop out, drying myself with such haste my clothes stick to my damp skin.
I find my phone and rush downstairs, but Mark has already cleared away the dead rabbit and washed the steps with bleach. When I open the front door there’s nothing there at all. It’s as if it never happened.
FIFTEEN
MURRAY
Winter sun filtered through the bedroom curtains as Murray got dressed. He tucked the duvet underneath the pillows and smoothed out the wrinkles before arranging the cushions the way Sarah liked. Opening the curtains, he noted the thick grey clouds rolling in from the north, and put a V-necked sweater over his shirt.
Later, once the dishwasher was on and he’d pushed the Hoover around, and the first load of laundry was hanging on the line, Murray sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. It was half past nine. The hours stretched out in front of him. He remembered a time when a morning off was full of promise, full of expectation.
He drummed his fingers on the table. He would go and see Sarah. Spend the morning with her – perhaps he could persuade her to go to the café, or to take a walk around the grounds – and go on to work from there.
He was buzzed in by Jo Dawkins, Sarah’s key worker, who had worked at Highfield for the last ten years.
‘I’m sorry, love. She’s having a bad day.’
A bad day meant Sarah didn’t want to see him. Ordinarily, Murray would go straight home, accepting that everyone had times when they wanted to be alone. Today he felt different. He missed Sarah. He wanted to talk about the Johnson job.
‘Would you try again? Tell her I won’t stay long.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Jo left him in reception, the hall of the original country house. It had been clumsily converted, long before listed buildings had become something to protect. Thick fire doors, all with key-code access, led off to wards and offices, and ugly woodchip paper covered both walls and ceiling.
When Jo returned, it was clear from her face nothing had changed.
‘Did she give any reason?’
BPD. That was the reason.
Jo hesitated. ‘Um, not really.’
‘She did, didn’t she? Come on, Jo, you know I can take it.’
The nurse looked him square on, assessing him. ‘Okay. She thinks you should be’ – she lifted her hands and made repeated quote marks in the air, disassociating herself from what was to follow – ‘“fucking other people and not wasting your life loving a loony”.’
Murray blushed. His wife ordering him to leave her (and then attempting suicide at the prospect) had been a common theme throughout their marriage, but that didn’t make it any less awkward to hear via a third party.
‘Would you tell her’ – he raised his hands to mirror Jo’s quote marks – ‘that “loving a loony” is exactly what I like best?’
Murray sat in the car park of Highfield, leaning back against the headrest. He should have known better than to have tried to surprise Sarah. She was unpredictable at the best of times, but predictably so in the mornings. He would try again on his way home from work.
So now what?
He had two hours before his shift started, and no desire to go back to an empty house and watch the minutes tick by. The fridge was full, the garden tidy and the house clean. Murray considered his options.
‘Yes,’ he said aloud, as he was inclined to do. ‘Why not?’ His time was his own; he could do what he wanted with it.
He headed out of town across the Downs, pressing his foot hard against the floor for a burst of speed you never got on buses. A shortage of parking at the police station meant public transport was often more convenient for work, but Murray enjoyed driving, and he put on the radio and hummed along to a track he only half knew. The threatened rain hadn’t yet materialised, but the clouds hung low above the hills, and when the sea hove into view it was flecked with angry white tips.
The car park was near-empty, save a half-dozen cars, and Murray found eighty pence among the loose change he kept in the otherwise redundant ashtray, and popped the ticket on the dash. A large sign next to the pay-and-display machine gave the contact number for the Samaritans, and as Murray walked towards the coastal path he passed a series of further signs.
It helps to talk.
You are not alone.
Could a sign make a difference? Might a person, hell-bent on suicide, stop to take in a message meant for them?
You are not alone.
For every person who fell to their death off Beachy Head, there were a dozen more who didn’t. A dozen more who lost their nerve, had a change of heart, encountered one of the volunteers who patrolled the cliffs, and reluctantly agreed to join them for a cup of tea instead of carrying out their plan.
It didn’t end there, though, did it? An intervention was a comma, not a full stop. All the tea, all the conversation, all the support in the world might not change what happened the next day. Or the day after that.
Murray thought of the poor chaplain who’d found Caroline Johnson on the cliff edge, her rucksack weighed down with stones. How must he have felt to learn that the woman he’d talked down from suicide had gone straight back to the same spot and jumped anyway?
Had she been with someone that day? Had the chaplain been so focused on saving Caroline’s life that he had neglected to see a figure in the shadows, keeping well back?