A Nice Place to Die (7 page)

Jess was sitting on the wall outside the house texting Mark Pearson on her mobile phone. There was no point trying to talk to him, she wouldn't hear what he was saying because her brother Kevin had turned up the volume on the radio in Alan's car, which was parked on the drive.

Jess glared defiantly at Kevin, who was lying on his back next to the car working on the underside of his motorbike. He'd messed up her life. He was her half-brother, for God's sake, they were family. All he'd ever done for her was make her pregnant with the child she'd never wanted.

He caught her one night about a year and a half ago when she was drunk in a local disco. She'd had far too many vodkas and a few too many pills and she'd been throwing up in a dark corner, but she was ready for love. He'd taken her round the back of the supermarket and pushed her down on a heap of black plastic bags full of refuse and she wouldn't have been able to stop him even if she'd wanted to. Afterwards she thought better of it. He was almost her brother, he was supposed to look out for her.

She was thirteen and a half then. It wasn't the first time she'd done it with a boy, but Kevin was family and it was different with someone nearly eighteen and your own half-brother. Of course, that made it more exciting. She hadn't thought much about it at the time, apart from it being different because they were sort of blood. She never thought she could fall pregnant when it was between family.

Some time later her best friend at school started on about her getting so fat she looked like she was going to have a baby. Jess told her to piss off but she went to a doctor to get some pills to help her lose weight. He told her she was already six months gone. He also told her it was far too late to do anything about it.

‘Bastard,' she said aloud, meaning Kevin but not quite daring to say it to his face. If Kevin knew she was texting Mark he'd break her mobile for her. She put the phone in her pocket and scowled at Kevin, or rather at the soles of his trainers where he was lying flat on his back messing about with his motorbike. Maybe he was family but that didn't stop her being scared of him. It was all right if he was in a good mood but when he wasn't he was a right bastard.

He never actually said the kid wasn't his, but that was it. Jess wasn't even sure if he knew the child's name; if he did he never called her by it. Jess's mother was the one who'd called her Kylie. Jess couldn't be bothered deciding on a name. There wasn't much point trying to talk to Kylie anyway, all she did was cry. What pissed Jess off was the way Kevin could get away with having nothing to do with the kid, but she couldn't. That one stupid exciting night had spoiled everything for her forever, and for him it was as though it'd never happened. He'd never touched her after that, either, even though for quite a long time she wouldn't have minded.

At least Mark couldn't get enough of her. That was fine, but for her it wasn't like it had been with Kevin. The most exciting thing about sex with Mark was knowing how angry their two families would be if they knew what was going on. Jess didn't understand or care why the toffee-nosed people from the old village hated the Catcombe Mead incomers so much. But she knew why the people from the new housing estate hated the original villagers. She hated them too, as did Donna and Alan and Kevin and everyone else.

They were almost all old, for one thing. They lived differently, they looked and talked differently. They always had really dirty hands from doing primitive things with them. They didn't know the meaning of having a good time. They were slow and stupid, real hicks compared to the people like her who'd moved in from outside and knew something about real life.

Mark was one of them, but he wasn't like the others. He was really good-looking, for one thing; he was cool.

But Jess was still worried.

She hadn't told Mark about having the child. She had tried once, the first day. She'd thought about telling him, anyway, but it was too risky. He wouldn't want her any more if she did. She showed him a photo of Donna and Alan with Kevin and one of Jess with Kylie and when he asked who the kid was, she lost her nerve and said it was her little sister. Jess was sure that if Mark knew the truth, that would be the end between them. Even if he didn't mind her having a kid, it being Kevin's kid was something else. Mark hadn't actually met Kevin, but he hated him anyway because of that day with his bulls.

Jess was afraid, too, of what Mark would think of her if he knew that she, Kylie's actual mother, wanted nothing to do with her? Jess couldn't explain. She didn't want to be anyone's mother, not now, not for a long time to come, if ever. Maybe she was abnormal but that's the way she was and nothing would change how she felt.

So what if she told Mark the child was hers, and he didn't care? What if he didn't mind taking the kid on if that's what it took to be with Jess? No, she couldn't even think about that. What she didn't dare admit even to herself was that her greatest fear was that Mark might find out that she didn't want her own child and be so repelled by her he'd leave her. She couldn't bear the thought of losing him like that. He was her best chance of escaping to a new life in a different place, somewhere where the two of them could do what they wanted away from Old Catcombe and Forester Close and the state of siege they lived in.

But even losing Mark wouldn't be as bad as having to live at home much longer. It was all very well Donna saying what a nice place Forester Close was to live, with the patch of garden in the front and the pretty trees in the street. But there was nothing there for Jess. Except Mark, of course, and he had to keep away. Even living on a farm like a peasant in the old village as he did, and smelling of animals as he did too, Mark made her life worth living.

Jess took a few swigs from a bottle of cider Kevin had been drinking. She lit another cigarette.

She had to get away from the house without anyone asking where she was going. Mark would be waiting for her, parked a few hundred yards down on the main road. The one really important thing now was to get away from Catcombe Mead and find somewhere they could be alone.

‘I'm going down to the shop,' Jess yelled in the direction of the house. And went.

EIGHT

T
he day the police came to question the residents of Forester Close, Terri Kent and her partner Helen Byrne quarrelled over Helen's daughter Nicky.

Helen swept out of the house at lunchtime to go back to work, leaving Terri miserable and not sure what to do for the best.

How could Helen be so cruel? Terri asked herself, how could she say those things? Did she mean what she said?

She can't have, she thought, we're happy together. Surely we are? She's never said she isn't.

But then Helen never said anything much. She just sort of drifted through life, smiling and distracted, not even seeming to think much about what was happening to her.

Terri's strong hands were shaking and she felt sick. Perhaps Helen never really loved me, she thought, perhaps she only came to live with me because she wanted to leave Dave and she knew I'd look after her.

Terri cast her mind back to the magical early days when she and Helen worked together in the Social Services department at the Council in Torquay. They'd been so close then. Of course it had been awkward because Dave worked for the Council too, except not in the same department. But that had made it more exciting, carrying on under his nose and him never suspecting.

He'd taken it very badly when Helen left him. That was before he knew about the relationship between her and Terri. He took it that the two of them living together meant Helen had moved in with a girlfriend until she found a place of her own. It hadn't occurred to him at first what was involved.

Terri recalled how Helen tried to tell him, but Dave didn't believe her. He thought she was making it up to punish him for something, and that if he could put that right, she'd come back. If Helen had gone off with another man, of course, he'd have believed it. Dave was never the faithful type himself. He'd probably have picked a fight with the other man. He'd certainly have beaten Helen up, but that would've been the end of it.

But when she finally said she was leaving him because she was in love with another woman, he didn't know how to deal with that.

That's why Terri had bought this house in Somerset and they'd moved away from Torquay. Terri had found work as an administrator at the local hospital, while Helen seemed happy to give up her Council job and work part-time at the local supermarket.

But Dave found them. Now he wouldn't leave Helen alone. Terri thought, perhaps he's been causing trouble, unsettling her. We were fine till he appeared on the scene. Is that it?

Terri had insisted that Dave should not see Nicky when he came to visit. She'd argued that seeing her father would unsettle the child, that she should be given time to adjust. Helen wasn't sure.

Perhaps I was wrong, Terri thought. He must miss his daughter. Perhaps he'd leave Helen alone if he could see Nicky sometimes. Terri didn't like to admit that the truth was she was afraid of the competition; she did so want Nicky to accept her as a parent.

Does Helen want to go back to Dave? Terri asked herself. Does that explain the things she said?

All she herself had tried to say was that they shouldn't let Nicky get too friendly with the Millers. Jess Miller wasn't a suitable friend for a child as clever and studious as Nicky. Jess, in Terri's opinion, was a destructive force.

And then Helen had started to abuse her.

‘It's nothing to do with you,' Helen had shouted at her. ‘Nicky is my daughter, she's nothing to do with you.'

‘I'm only trying to help,' Terri said. ‘I want the best for her.'

‘What makes you think you know what's best for her?' Helen said.

‘She lives in my house,' Terri said, sounding desperate.

‘If that's how you feel, it's easily remedied,' Helen said. ‘I'm not going to stay where Nicky isn't wanted.'

Terri, stung, said, ‘You've nowhere else to go.'

‘That's what you think,' Helen said, sneering. ‘It isn't good for a young girl living here with you. It's not right. She'd be better off with normal people.'

That's when she had swept out of the house, banging the front door.

So that was why, when Rachel Moody and Jack Reid banged on the front door of Number Five, they got no answer. Terri Kent did not want to speak to anyone, she was too upset.

She crouched on the floor of the bedroom where she had taken refuge in an unthinking effort to feel closer to Helen. She had nothing to say to the police. It was their job to find the murderer of the vicar from the village, let them get on with it and leave her alone. It wasn't as if she could help, anyway.

And if, terrible thought, they had come to tell her that Helen had taken her own life because of what Terri had said to her during their quarrel, then Terri definitely didn't want to know. She told herself, as long as they don't tell me then it isn't true.

DCI Moody turned away from the door when she got no reply to her knocking.

‘Funny,' she said, ‘there's a car in the garage, someone should be in.'

Sergeant Reid tried to peer through the front window into the living-room.

‘No sign of anyone,' he said. ‘Perhaps they're in bed.'

‘In the middle of the afternoon?' Rachel Moody said. ‘It's not likely. Anyway, the child must be due home from school.'

‘We're wasting our time here,' Jack Reid said. ‘It seems to me we're not going to get anything useful out of anyone in this street. It's inhabited by zombies.'

‘I'd like to know what they're all so damned scared of, and why?' Rachel Moody said.

‘Us, probably,' Jack Reid said. ‘They think we're going to find some way of blaming them.'

‘That's ridiculous,' the DCI said, ‘we're trying to help them.'

‘That's not the way they see it,' Sergeant Reid said. ‘They'd rather we went away and let them go back to pretending nothing's happened here since the Old Catcombe villagers burned Hester the witch in 1568.'

‘That's crazy,' Rachel Moody said. ‘They can't be that deluded.'

The Sergeant shrugged and they turned away and walked back down the garden path to the road.

NINE

N
icky Byrne sat on the front wall of Number Five with her back to the road. She was waiting for Jess Miller to pass on her way home from school, but she didn't want anyone to know that. The wall felt very cold and damp on the back of her legs through her school skirt, but she tried to ignore it. Jess's law laid down that doing nothing sitting on a wall making dirty patterns with your heels on the pale blue painted pebble-dash was cool; standing there alone looking bored was pathetic.

Nicky didn't want Jess to think of her as pathetic. She wanted to be as much like Jess as she could make herself, given how different they were.

They were unlikely friends. Big, noisy, uninhibited Jess with her purple hair and her revealing scraps of clothing and her decorative safety pins could never pass unnoticed; Nicky, a colourless little swot with pale sandy hair and red-rimmed milky eyes behind her spectacles, was totally effaced by her.

But friends they were.

Although Nicky was two years younger than Jess, they were in the same class at school. Nicky had jumped a year last term because she was much brighter than the other children her own age. At any rate, she worked a lot harder at her studies. Jess, meanwhile, had failed her end of term tests and been held back to retake the year.

In spite of the age difference, a kind of conspiracy was developing between the two of them. It wasn't obvious at first what drew them together. True, they both seemed freakish to the other children, but at opposite ends of the scale. No one told they were becoming friends would believe it. What, after all, had either to gain from the other?