The Hunger Trace (13 page)

‘Think of it as David paying you back,’ Maggie said. ‘For all the hard work you did here.’

Louisa looked up sharply, and Maggie met her eyes. It may only have been the quality of the light that triggered the memory, but Louisa thought back to standing in the phone box, waiting for the police to come. She took a sip of whisky.

‘I like it when you’re a bit drunk, Lou,’ Maggie said, blinking slowly. ‘You lick your finger before you pick up your drink. Like you’re turning the page of a newspaper.’

‘I do not,’ Louisa said.

‘You do. It’s nice.’

Maggie laughed and sat back in her chair. Louisa eventually began to smile, too. She watched her friend look out of the window, back towards her own house. Something seemed to occur to Maggie. She straightened up, a little tense.

‘Lou, do you think you’d be able to take Christopher out tomorrow night? Just to the pub. He’s miserable at the moment, and I’ve got so much paperwork to sort out.’

‘Sure.’

Maggie relaxed again. ‘He called you his
partner in crime
yesterday. He says he’s got something he needs to talk to you about, actually.’

‘Sounds ominous,’ Louisa said.

‘It’s
classified
,’ Maggie said.

When the police car arrived at the phone box, Louisa took them to the field where the boy lay dead. She stood back with the older policeman, and watched the young constable pick a path through the grass to the hedge. He crouched down for a moment, and then quickly jerked his head away. After a few seconds, he turned to look at Louisa, and exhaled. He nodded to his partner.

The police station was like school, only more open about its brutality. As she waited on a wooden bench, she could see a bloodied hockey stick in a clear plastic bag behind the front desk. Thick drips of white paint had dried, tacky and shiny, in the grooves between the bricks.

Louisa remained unmoved as she gave her statement to the same young constable who had found the body; she had as much respect for him as she did for her teachers. She said she had borrowed the gun from her friend David Bryant, who had parted with it only on the condition that it be used on a supervised shoot. She said she had taken it to the field alone, and fired into the hedge at the pheasant.

For a moment she imagined David at home, packing his bags, leaving a note and running to the train station. But he wouldn’t do that. He was a good man, she thought. The right man.

She regained her composure, and enjoyed taking David’s place in the rest of the story. She felt the warmth of inhabiting his body. It was her composure, in fact, which caused the constable’s one fleeting suspicion. ‘You seem very calm, I must say,’ he said. ‘You
do
know what’s happened, don’t you? You
do
know what you’ve done?’

Soon after that, however, Richard Smedley arrived, and Louisa’s behaviour began to show signs of disturbance. They argued in the corridor. ‘I have worked so hard to get you where you are,’ Richard said. Louisa looked around and nodded.

‘And you just want to tear this family down.’ He got close to his daughter, so the constable could not hear. ‘Why did you call the police? Why didn’t you call
home
, girl?’

‘I didn’t want to end up like that little boy.’

He slapped her for that.

As they left the station, Louisa saw that a middle-aged drunk had taken her place on the bench. He was crying, and his face was ridden with ashen tracks, dirt clogging around his eyes like makeup. Louisa thought that she might like to cry, if only to feel the dry tightness in her face afterwards.

For a few days, Oakley felt like the moon to its residents. They found themselves awake at odd times, watching the alien lights of police cars spinning through the grey fog towards the canal, and Anna Cliff’s house. As the story crept out, news came of Anna’s initial response: it was said she had spent all night searching the woods and fields for her boy, unaware of what had happened, but too afraid of the police to report her son missing.

Garish tales of the Social Services visit to the Cliff house filtered into the village. The more outlandish stories told that the beds of the other, long-gone children had yet to be made, and that a drove of pigeons unfolded from the dead boy’s bedroom when they opened the door.

Somebody started a rumour that Anna’s house was in reasonable condition, that she had made a careful new start with this boy, whose name was apparently Charles. That particular story was dismissed because people found it much easier to be appalled by Anna Cliff than to imagine her sane, in a room, being told that her child was dead. She never returned to the village.

David’s father, apparently over his flu, played a significant part in the proceedings following Charles Cliff’s death. He had always been taught, he said, that one’s weapon is one’s own responsibility. Around those parts, such codes were commonplace. Louisa never spoke to him, or asked him how much he knew, or suspected. Like everyone else, he seemed to accept Louisa’s admission of guilt.

She watched her own father reduced to bowing and snivelling before Lawrence Bryant, who called in favours from his contacts in law enforcement. Louisa had a licence for a small air rifle she used to kill sparrows to feed her hawks, and this was taken into account.

In her school uniform, although she would not go to school that day, Louisa listened to the coroner return a verdict of accidental death. She looked around the court one last time for David, but he was not there. She felt a hollow sense of panic. It seemed that her act of sacrifice had backfired, for she had not seen him since that day in the field. Surely he had not abandoned her. She wondered if he had been forbidden from speaking to her by his parents. It was as if, she thought with a sad smile, they’d been caught sleeping together.

At first the changes seemed subtle, and perfectly bearable. In the dinner hall, Louisa heard the girls whisper ‘
murderer
’ as she walked past. Somebody put a small wig covered with fake blood in her bag, but in the dark of her rucksack she thought the wig to be the meat-darkened pigeon feathers of her lure, and ignored it. The cool reaction scandalised her classmates more than any screaming or crying would have.

Still she hadn’t seen David, but heard that he barely spoke at school. Louisa did not care about the stain on her name, but she wanted it to mean something to him.

*    *    *

At night, the glow which crept out of Roy Ogden’s underground garage was eerie. It looked like the house might detach from its foundations at any moment. Louisa had been too busy to visit since the accident, but the great thing about Oggie was that he was outside of her life, separate from the awkwardness of school and the anger of home. She walked down the steps into the workshop. Nelly Carter, one of Ogden’s local apprentices, was down there too, working on an engine part that looked like a human skull.

‘Fucking hell, here she is,’ Nelly said.

‘Nelson,’ said Ogden as he emerged from the back of the garage.

‘What?’ said Nelly.

‘I’ve had enough a you. Bugger off, lad. Go on, get out of it.’

Nelson shrugged, and tossed the engine part onto the workbench. ‘Right-o. I’m off for a bath and a wank,’ he said.

‘Wash your hair
first
, eh?’ Louisa said, as Nelly left.

Ogden wiped his hands ineffectively with a rag, for a long time. ‘Y’rate lass?’ he said, eventually.

‘Not so bad. All things considered.’

‘Aye.’

‘Are you out with the hawks this weekend, Oggie?’ she said. ‘Down the reservoir? I could do with getting out in the field.’

He limped towards her and stood under the bare bulb. ‘Not really,’ he said.

‘I can probably do Monday next week, then. Teacher training day, so there’s no school.’

Ogden pinched his moustache. ‘Can’t really do it, kid, to be honest.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea no more, you coming out with me.’

The shock silenced Louisa. For a moment she wondered if he was referring to the accident, but then she realised. Her father had got to Ogden first.

‘What’s he paying you?’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘My dad. Do you think I’m thick, Oggie?’

‘It in’t like that.’

But it was. Louisa knew Ogden’s garage was underground for a reason, and his customers paid cash. That money, along with his disability benefit, kept his hawks in meat. Louisa imagined her father standing where she stood now, jumper over his shirt and his driving gloves on, pointing out that those two sources of income were incompatible, legally.

‘Okay, look, he came ’round. But he made some decent points and I agree with him. Upshot is, schooling’s got to come first. You need to take care with that. And you live bloody miles away. Anyway, you don’t want to be hanging around with a . . .’

Louisa, who had been shaking her head throughout the speech, swiped a socket wrench from a toolbox and hurled it into the dark recesses of the garage, where it smashed into the shelves of parts and tins. Ogden stopped speaking but did not flinch.

‘If you want to carry on with the falcons, I’ve got some names of people closer to home, but you must promise not to tell your old man I gave them you.’

‘You know what, forget it, Oggie. You can piss off. You’re a sad old coward.’

She turned and took the steps quickly because she knew she would cry.

In the end, their parents did forbid David and Louisa from meeting, and Louisa took the decision with a shrug. What did it matter, anyway, when he was avoiding her? But a week after her father made his decree, she found a note speared on the bushes by her house, telling her to go to the roadside trailer that sold tea and bacon cobs just outside the village. The note was written in David’s sharp, slanted hand.

He was waiting behind the trailer, and as she approached him in the shadows she thought he looked cleaned-up, leaner, his shirt crisp. Just as she’d feared – he had moved on. ‘Where have you been hiding?’ she said.

‘Louisa, I’m sorry for what happened,’ he said. ‘It was all my fault and I couldn’t deal with it.’ For all the apparent maturity of his admission, Louisa, now feet from him, could see that he had not recovered. The glossy fullness of his lips actually came from a haze of surrounding dry skin and the balm used to treat it. Louisa could almost see the roots of his fair hair, like those of the dolls her father had once bought her. His weight loss was unhealthy, and forks of broken blood vessels emerged from his nostrils.

‘You didn’t tell anyone what really happened, did you?’ she said.

‘No. Your secret’s safe,’ he said.

‘
My
secret?’

‘I mean mine.’

‘
Our
secret,’ Louisa said.

‘I’m sorry,’ David said.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Louisa said, grasping his wrist, noting the desperation in her own voice. She collected herself, relaxed her grip into a slow rub with her fingers. She tried to smile. ‘Don’t be sorry for me. Be grateful.’

She could already feel him slipping away
. Don’t be sorry for me
. How she had meant that when she first said it. But she learned to take what she could get.

Louisa looked at Christopher’s face in the lamplight of her cottage, and saw again the resemblance to his father. His phone beeped twice as ‘Crow Jane’ played on the stereo.

Christopher looked at the phone message and laughed. His expression grew more serious as the song progressed. ‘Erm. I don’t like that song. I think it’s against women.’

‘Strange to hear that coming from someone who goes to Derby’s only lap-dancing club,’ Louisa said.

‘Certain women are different.’

Louisa nodded. ‘And all men are the same.’

He frowned. Louisa stopped the CD, picked up her guitar and played a few bars of ‘Too Many Broken Hearts’ from a tab she had downloaded. He laughed and then became thoughtful. ‘Louisa.
You’re
a woman . . .’

Louisa raised her eyebrows.

‘Do you think a woman likes a man to have a mortgage, at all?’

‘I would say she’d prefer him not to.’

Christopher looked puzzled. ‘But I’d like to have a wife and a mortgage, one day.’

‘Oh, I see. You mean you’d like to
buy a house
, some day.’

He nodded. ‘Do you, erm, think a woman would prefer you to other men if you had, for example, a GCE Advanced Level Certificate, and, erm, a Batchelor’s Degree?’

‘I think that would be a little shallow of her.’

‘Oh right.’ He paused. ‘I’ve gone back to college, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate on my essay about the Hooded Man because I’ve got love on the brain. But then I know I’m going to need a qualification to stand a chance with the, erm, lucky lady.’

‘So you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.’ Louisa said. Christopher’s eyes widened. Louisa was learning fast.

‘Erm, erm, yes!’

‘Who’s the girl?’