As arranged, Glenn and I met up outside the Picky Person’s Pop In at 9.30 a.m. the next morning, on Wednesday, after Jacob had gone to work. He leaned against the low windowsill of the single-storey, cottage-style building, making some comment to the youngest Jachowski, Roza, about her bike. I waved, and he pushed himself off the sill, sauntering over to me, hands in his parka. Roza sped off, stick-thin legs pumping at the pedals, so that she soon reached the school on the other side of the road.
‘She’s late,’ I observed.
‘She had a dentist’s appointment, apparently. Anyway, I was just finding out about her brother,’ Glenn said.
He bent down and petted Wiggins, who leaned his head into my friend’s hand to ensure his ear got a really good rub.
Guilt at using a seven-year-old child warred with curiosity. ‘Anything interesting?’
A shrugged reply. ‘Not particularly. Only that he likes to read her bedtime stories about princesses.’
Aleksy sounded like a good lad. My heart sank. At that moment, someone emerged from round the back of the shop.
‘Davy! Hi, how are you?’ I sounded so fake.
He gave me a strange, sidelong look. ‘All right, Mel? How’s, er, how’s…’
‘No change.’ I was used to getting that reaction from people, but today I needed to put him at ease. So I made the effort to smile back, trying to make sure it reached my eyes, not just tug my mouth into a weird grimace. Smiling didn’t come easy these days.
‘You remember Glenn Baker, don’t you?’ Introductions proved the perfect icebreaker.
‘Good to have people coming back to the village instead of leaving it,’ Davy beamed. ‘What brings you back here?’
His tiny little nose bobbled up and down as he talked with Glenn. It looked like a small new potato glued to his face, and had earned him the nickname Spud when he was younger. Not that it stopped him attracting women these days. He was all bulging biceps and six-pack. As a consequence, my private nickname for him was ‘paper bag man’ – put a paper bag over his head and he was gorgeous.
Davy was a good bloke, though. Not the brightest in the world, sadly. That was probably the reason why his own Brussels sprout smallholding had failed, and he was now reduced to working on the farm owned by his three elder brothers, Martin, Jon and Peter, who had pooled their resources to buy land.
As the pleasantries between he and Glenn petered out, I struck.
‘I, uh, wondered if I could have a word, actually, Davy. About Beth.’
Instantly his open expression closed down.
‘Melanie… I don’t want to talk about it. It were upsetting.’
I touched his arm. ‘Please, Davy, for me. For Beth.’
Shameless manipulation, but also true. A slow nod of the head conceded his defeat.
‘Look, let’s go to the café. We can sit comfortably there.’
‘No, I don’t really have time for that. What do you want to know?’ As he talked, he shuffled a few steps away so we were no longer in front of the store’s door.
‘Well, how did you find Beth?’
He poked an index finger in his ear and wiggled it, thinking. ‘There were a line of us. We were all just walking along, like the police had shown us. We’d all got our eyes down to the ground, looking for anything she might have dropped. I’d, er, I’d got a bit ahead of the line, and looked up and there she were. Floating, face up, in the water.’
‘So there were lots of you there?’
He nodded furiously. ‘Yeah, yeah, loads of us. The police were there too.’
He sounded so defensive, and I felt a stab of pity for him. Poor bloke had nothing to feel bad about.
‘It’s okay, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just, I don’t know, I wondered if maybe you had seen something, or spotted any of the searchers looking shifty. Anything that might help us get Beth’s attacker.’
‘Mel, honest, I saw nothing.’
‘Why were you ahead of the line?’ asked Glenn.
‘Dunno, just was,’ Davy shrugged. He rolled his thumb and index finger together as he spoke. ‘I didn’t do nothing.’
‘What’s going on?’
We all jumped guiltily at this new voice. There stood Jill, her expression unreadable.
‘We were chatting about when Davy found Beth,’ I explained.
‘He’s told the police all he knows, Melanie. Going over and over it won’t change things.’
She stood with her arms folded over her forest-green pinafore, her stance set in the powerful Henry VIII pose. Her mouth was as flat as usual, her eyes as steely and determined, though softened with pity. But her voice was faster than normal. I looked from her to her son and realised – they were worried, Beth. Twitchy. They knew something.
‘Your brother and dad were there. They saw her with their own eyes,’ added Davy.
He was right. Of course he was right. I was letting my imagination play tricks on me, desperate to get to the bottom of things.
But, judging from the slight frown, the angle of his head, Glenn was having the same thought as me.
Jill stepped back towards the door. ‘Well, if you’re done, Davy, there’s some stock needs shifting. The boxes are too heavy for me.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ he said, dutifully.
It was only a few steps before they disappeared back inside. But in that time Davy had thrown a look over his shoulder that convinced me we needed to speak to him again. It would have to be without Jill, though. No mean feat, given that he lived with his mum – a woman who exerted a powerful hold not just over her sons, but over the entire village, thanks to her network of extended family. There was nothing that happened in the village that Jill didn’t know about. Not usually, anyway…
Thirty-Two
BETH
FRIDAY 22 JANUARY
Beth ran from SSG. Ran from the look in his eyes that made her stomach twist. She had thought she was being so grown-up; had congratulated herself at the way she was handling things. She was a keeper of secrets. She was going up in people’s estimation, where before she had been invisible, too young to consider.
But she had just been playing at being a grown-up. She was no better than a little kid giving pretend tea parties. She was so out of her depth in this adult world.
She wanted to be back on the bus, chatting innocently with her best friend. She wanted to be home with Mum and Dad and Wiggins. She just wanted to be safe, in a world that had suddenly become very dangerous.
So she ran from SSG. Ran into the darkness.
Thirty-Three
The sky was a uniform dove grey. Glenn, Wiggins and I had come to the marsh because it was easier to talk there than at the pub, but I felt antsy. For all the sky was vast, it felt claustrophobic, the air uncharacteristically still as we stood beside the van gathering our thoughts.
I yanked at my scarf impatiently, feeling stifled. Opened the passenger door and threw it onto Glenn’s crumpled coat, which was chucked on the passenger seat as usual. Then I slammed the door shut again and leaned against it with a huff.