The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (29 page)

The room is swimming a little. Tom thinks Marcus might have fallen asleep. He knows he should get up soon; his bladder feels distended, but it all seems like such an effort. The glass slices into skin, flesh—then grinds on bone. There is blood and a scream.

“I did something awful,” Tom’s voice slurs a little, part alcohol and part melancholy. “I did it for her, Dani. For her. To defend her. She’d been hurt and I knew he’d do it again, hurt more women. I stopped that.”

That is what he has told himself for years. In front of Marcus Keyson, however, it sounds a little thin.

“I thought about it a lot afterward. I did my A levels—even applied to university with Dani. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d done. I joined the police,” he says in little more than a whisper.

He would like to tell Keyson what he did, that he
glassed
a man. But he cannot. It still shocks him today. And he avoids the obvious question: would he do it again? He hears the scream. The warmth of the blood. The bile rising in his throat. He knows the answer is yes.

“So, the love of your life was murdered?” Keyson’s voice sounds warm and surprisingly sober.

Tom is pulled from the nauseating memory. “Yes. Her last year at university. When she graduated we would have been married,
but …” The air above him feels heavy as he lies alongside his confidant, looking up at the ceiling.

“Durham. She was reading classics. I hate Durham.”

“Really?” Keyson sounds a little wistful, enough that Tom rolls his head slightly to look at his friend. “I love it.”

“All surface. It looks beautiful but underneath … there are maggots.”

The two men are quiet for a few minutes, each lost in his own memories. Tom hears his new friend sigh and looks across to see tears running down his cheeks toward the floor.

“Are you …?”

“I was at boarding school,” Keyson begins. “I’d gone from the age of five. I was the sad child with big eyes who waves goodbye to all his friends at holiday time and spends a boring break with the sadistic form master and kindly matron.”

“Your parents?”

“Gone.”

That single word is all he says on the subject of his parents. There is a minute of silence as the two men reflect on this new level of intimacy between them.

“One year, maybe I was nine, I was invited home for Christmas by one of the other boys. We weren’t even that close and I thought it was a cruel joke at first, but at the end of term a car came and collected both of us and our trunks and we went to his home for the holiday.”

“Durham?”

“Yes. The boy’s father had spoken to the headmaster. It had begun a little selfishly, really. The boy had lost his mother and his father was concerned for him. He thought that if he had a friend to play with, that Christmas would be … tolerable.” He pauses and
lets that word fill the air around them. Tom knows how keeping busy makes life tolerable.

“Anyway, it was the best two weeks of my whole life. Sad?”

“No … no.”

“I went home with Paul every holiday after that. His father bought us bunk beds and, well, they were my family. My father and brother.”

“You still see them?”

The pause tells Tom everything he needed to know. “I’m really sorry.”

“I loved them both. Gerald, Paul’s father, inspired me—he was the coroner there, the most dedicated man I ever met.”

“In Durham?” Tom feels ice shift in his chest.

“I followed him into the work, something to prove, I suppose. Oh …” Both men suddenly feel a weight push down on them. “Christ, Tom, your girl died in Durham.”

Simultaneously both men imagine Gerald’s scalpel cutting deep into a young woman’s chest. Marcus Keyson reaches out and puts his hand on Tom Bevans’s arm. Such a little gesture but Tom could not remember the last time anyone showed him such kindness. Tom feels his own hand begin to stretch and, with the lightest of touches, he rests his hand on the other man’s arm. Together, swimming in the memories of those they once loved, they lie and stare at the ceiling.

Tuesday, February 7, 1989

There is a strange crackling from the body on the bench. It happens three times before the figure moves, rolling slightly to free a hand from the black cocoon. It pulls out a squat brick with an antenna, and holds it close to what must be a mouth.

“PC Bevans” is all it says, in a voice syrupy with tiredness.

There’s a long pause. Tom pushes himself up on his park-bench bed, keeping the sleeping bag pulled up to his neck. His shoulders are killing him and his lower back feels compressed, as if he’d been carrying a rock uphill for the longest time. He waits for the voice in the machine to tell him the news.

“They … found ’er.” The voice just peeks through the static. “Call just came in from Durham CID.”

Tom knows the news is not good. He shakes his head free of the last cobwebs of fatigue.

“She’s dead?”

The silence says it all.

“Mate, I am so sorry,” Sarge finally manages.

“How can they be sure?” Tom asks, deadpan—dead.

“An anonymous tip-off just before midnight. A male. He said they’d find Dani Lancing at a private address in Durham. A car went straight there and found the body, the first officer on the scene called it in.”

Tom’s stomach pitches.

“But are they sure it’s her?”

“The first OS had taken the file—all the missing-persons photos. He said he was sure it was her but they called the flatmate over anyway. She made the positive at about one this morning.”

From somewhere an owl hoots. Tom’s mouth feels rank. He spits into the grass.

“How had …? What’s the cause of death?”

“Don’t know. There’ll be an autopsy later.”

Silence. Chill.

“Had she been …?” Tom tries to ask.

“Oh, mate. I don’t know.” Sarge sounds like he might cry; he hates breaking bad news. It was part of the reason he’d taken the desk job in the first place—so he didn’t have to deliver the worst news to people and watch as they disintegrated before his eyes. But he owes something to this young policeman. He grits his teeth.

“She was tied up when they found her … Tom, I’m sorry. That’s all I know, the full report will be in later. Sorry.”

“What about her mum and dad?” Tom’s voice barely registers.

Sarge twists the volume dial and asks him to repeat.

“Her mum and dad, who’s going to tell them?”

“Durham CID are sending someone down. They wanted one of their own to see her parents and talk to the papers—you know, with everything that’s gone on.”

“Oh yeah. The reporters.”

They had been like flies on shit the last couple of weeks, plastering Dani’s picture all over the front page. Hounding them, wanting anything, everything. And that bastard from the
News of the Screws
—he’d been the worst—disgusting. Well, at least he wouldn’t be bothering them again.

“When will the Durham team be here?”

“Hour, maybe two. They’re going to meet the DS at some cafe on the way. Get a quick briefing, then the pair of them will drive in together. I think the plan is to get there at about six. I think they’re gonna ask the parents to do a secondary ID of the … of Dani. But they’re dealing with it as a known victim.”

“Thanks, Sarge. Over.”

Tom feels frozen. He puts the radio down on the bench and swings his legs off. He puts them tentatively on the ground—pins and needles run up and down like electric charges. He feels like a zombie, dragging around a dead body because he’s too stupid or too cowardly to lie down. The radio squawks once more.

“I’m re-jigging the rota. Don’t come in till Thursday night,” Sarge says through the static.

Three days to recover from the loss of your one true love.

“I need to bring the radio back.”

“Thursday’s fine. Go home, Tom.”

“Sarge.”

Tom takes his thumb off the radio and lets the silence engulf him.

He sits for about forty-five minutes, not really thinking, not really doing anything. It’s still dark. Last night the moon had been so bright, but it’s gone now and Greenwich Park is purple and navy. Tom can just about make out shapes. He hobbles over to a bush and pees into it. He hopes none of it is splashing onto his boots, but really, what does that matter? Once again he’s slept in the park like a tramp. He had the idea after Dani had been missing for six days, to keep a walkie-talkie with him at all times. He talked to Sarge about it and he agreed that whoever was on duty would let Tom know any news that came in. The first few nights he’d been at home but he couldn’t sleep, worrying that if a call had come
in he couldn’t get there quickly enough. He wanted to be at the Lancings’ the second there was news. So he started to take a sleeping bag onto the heath, only a five-minute walk from their house. It was cold, but nothing that the four-season Everest sleeping bag couldn’t deal with.

He used his uniform as a pillow, wrapped up in a soft waterproof, and he always remembered to take a change of underwear and a sponge bag. If he was on duty, he’d wash at the station house; if not, then there were public loos that opened at 7 a.m. on the other side of the bridleway. Normally that was fine, but this morning it isn’t good enough. His teeth need a good clean and his chin’s scratchy with a lot more than Mickey Rourke stubble. In the dark he can’t see that the hairs poking through his skin are pure white, like those spreading out from his temples.

Maybe three weeks ago. Maybe then, he would still have been described as a boy: the pale, skinny boy. Of course, nobody who knew him would say it to his face, but he heard it. Old ladies would see the uniform, stop him in the street and then argue with him, insisting he was a tall child dressing up. One even threatened to call the
real
police. He’d tried to grow a beard, but it had been a disaster. He had been thinking about ordering a pair of glasses with clear glass to see if they made him look older … That was three weeks ago. This morning, no person on earth would mistake him for a boy.

He looks toward the old, old tree, where the woods seem to curve down to the horizon. There, that’s where the sky will start to glow soon. In all seasons and all different daybreaks, he always knows when it’s about to start—when that first barely perceptible change will come. It’s no innate skill in him; it’s the birds. No matter what month it is, the birds will begin their chorus two minutes before he sees the first ray. He doesn’t know if they sense the change
or if their eyes are just that much more sophisticated than his, but something alerts them and they sing the new day into being.

For the past nine days, except for two shifts of night duty, he has lain on this bench and slept at least part of the night here before waking for the miracle of dawn. He’d never slept here before Dani went missing, but he had sat in this spot and watched the dawn arrive. He’d done it some two dozen times over the last five years, and always the same thought had been in his head and heart: is this the day I can persuade Dani Lancing to love me?

The first time it had been Valentine’s Day 1984. He’d delivered a card to her house—anonymous of course, and then had run out to the park, amazed by his daring and full of excitement and expectation. He’d not planned to watch the dawn break; in fact it had surprised him. It was an accident—he’d been looking directly at the spot where the sun rose and … He was amazed by the beauty of it. A golden-orange light exploded in the grass and rose to form a miasma around the trees, for a short while making them look like angels; at least they did to a romantic teenager, who had just delivered his first declaration of love.

“Is this an omen of good luck?” he thought. Of course it was not the day Dani Lancing fell for him … in fact, it had been a bit of a disaster, but a love of watching the daybreak from this spot had been born in him. Today, once again, he will watch the dawn from this bench.

The birds begin the overture and there … ta-da. Raspberry ripple smudged into the dusky gray of the sky. It’s morning: February 7, 1989. The worst day of his life. The weather forecast predicted a dry warmish day. Not the weather for this news. It should be raining. Storming. Torrential rain to batter and destroy—thunder and lightning. Drama.