Mr Cooke stops to take a drink of water. He cannot look at Peter Manuel in the dock. He is aware of him as a shadow in the corner of his eye, but he can’t look at him. Mr Cooke keeps his eyes down and promises himself that soon it will be over and then he will feel better.
‘She never got to the dance so we knew she was really missing. My wife telephoned the police and I went out to look for her on the road at first, in the train station, then in the fields.’
‘The fields behind your house?’
‘In the fields,’ echoes Mr Cooke, ‘the fields of Sandyhills and Burntbroom.’
His eyes drop to the wooden railing his hands are resting on, the fine oak grain lost to his fingertips. They are numb in the biting December cold. He feels it on his cheek, the tightness of his face closed against the robber wind. He feels wet ground squelch beneath his boots, sucking him into the earth. He looks for his Isabelle in the dark. He walks for four hours, up to Barrachnie, over to Foxley and up to Newlands Glen, returning to the house for tea he cannot taste, for another scarf, to talk to the police. He takes them and shows them where he has already looked. The fields are pitted with old mine shafts. It is dangerous in the dark if you don’t know the area.
At first Mr Cooke is angry with Isabelle. He wants her to know what she is putting her mother through. When the anger lifts he wishes it back because then he is just terrified. He is so frightened he wants to hold his daughter tight and never let go. Then he just wants to hold her hand, then just to see her. Just to see her. The yearning is worse than the fear. The yearning is a sorrowing ache that burrows deep down into the core of him.
As the night wears on he gets less and less tired. Mr Cooke knows how men talk about girls. He knows what might have happened to his own Isabelle. Over the long hours in the dark, as all the hope he will ever feel is sucked out through his soles into the wet, treacherous earth, it comes to feel absolutely vital that he find the dancing shoes that she has worn thin with all her dancing.
In the hazy morning, when the careless sun bothers to come up, Mr Cooke sits in the living room by a fire that won’t warm anyone, his outdoor clothes still on. He sits, listening to the reassurances of policemen who are just doing a shift at their work.
She will be found. She has stayed the night with a friend who doesn’t have a telephone. We are searching the hospitals, perhaps she has been run over.
But Mr Cooke knows what has happened to his daughter. It has happened before out there, in those fields. Girls and women attacked and no one caught. He thought, his wife thought, that women should not be out at that time. He thought and his wife said, they must be peculiar kinds of women to be out there at that time, in a field with a man. They didn’t think these things because they were nasty people, or spiteful or uncaring. They thought these things so that they were not terrified all the time. Otherwise they would never have allowed their Isabelle out of the door.
As the hazy morning breaks Mr Cooke compromises his ambitions just once more: if he could just hold one of her shoes, her dancing shoes. Just one of them. He wants it so much he can feel the brush of soft worn leather, the curve of her heel against the pad of his work-hardened hand.
‘We waited and she never came home,’ he tells the court.
‘And in the morning, what happened?’
‘Her handbag was found in a burn about a mile and a half from the house. Her dancing shoes were missing.’
‘Was the handbag found in the direction of the bus stop?’
‘No. It was in the other direction. They found footprints. They think she had been chased over half a mile of fields. But they still couldn’t find her.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘Nothing.’
Acres of nothing for year-long weeks. They found no more of her possessions. Mines were searched. They dredged the River Calder but found nothing. Until the 11th of January. Then they found her grave.
‘How did you hear about that?’
Mr Cooke drinks again from the glass. He goes to put it down but he realises that he isn’t ready to speak yet so he drains the glass and reminds himself that he is near the end of this and he is just a footnote and no one really cares but him.
‘The police came to see us. They told us that a man had confessed, to that and other things. They said he took them to her grave in the middle of the night. “I’m standing on her.” I remember them saying he said that. He showed them where her dancing shoes were. They were nearby. Under a pile of bricks.’
The shoes had been in the rain and the frost for almost a fortnight, under the dirt. Mr Cooke has yet to get them back but he knows they are not soft or shaped by her feet any more. They are ruined by exposure. They’re just bits of ruined skin now.
The defence have no questions for Mr Cooke. He is allowed to stand down.
As he walks across the court Mr Cooke feels no better. He wonders where the sense of finality is. He is as bereft as he was before but now he feels his sorrow exposed for the entertainment of the public. His loss will be written about in the papers tomorrow, read about on buses by people who don’t much care about Isabelle. People who don’t really care are watching him now from the balcony seats. He wonders bitterly if they found his loss entertaining.
Angry, he looks up and catches the eye of a woman. She is ages with his wife. She is weeping openly, tears coursing down her cheeks, her hands clutched together as if she is holding his dead daughter’s cold feet to warm them. A sob bursts from his mouth and Mr Cooke slaps a hand to his lips, ashamed, shocked at this sudden connection with a stranger. He jumps the stairs to the witness hall and clatters through the door.
In the privacy of the silent room his wife is waiting for him. She puts her arms around him and he sobs into her hair.
Mr Cooke thinks of the weeping woman in the gallery. His unique desolation was all he had left of his Isabelle. Now the crying woman has taken that as well. He has been robbed again.
9
Tuesday 3 December 1957
NETTIE WATT DOESN’T SAY anything, about any of it, ever. She is not called as a witness in the trial, she gives no interviews to the press. She is there though, throughout the night when Peter Manuel tells the story. She hears it sober, with the critical facility of a woman who has spent thirty-five years at the movies. She knows the difference between a good story and a bad one.