The Missing Person's Guide to Love (21 page)

John and I nodded. I took off my shoes and scraped mud onto the grass. I narrowed my eyes to see the buildings better. ‘That’s the bingo hall there, isn’t it?’ I asked Annie. ‘That’s where we’ve just come from.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s that big building near it?’ I asked.

‘That’s the new supermarket, CostRight, or something. It used to be McCreadie’s.’

‘But it’s not on the same site as the old one, is it?’

‘Yeah. It is. It’s bigger than the old one but it’s in just the same place. They used the space that belonged to the little shops before the fire.’

‘Oh.’ I gazed down on the long, low red-brick building that had swallowed up not only the old McCreadie’s but also a sewing shop, a baker’s and a sweet shop. The car park was half full. The cars were in rows and clusters, like blanks in a crossword puzzle. ‘It all looks different from up here. It’s hard to make sense of.’

John smiled at the view, put another blackcurrant sweet into his mouth.

‘And if it wasn’t for you, Isabel,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be there. Think of that. All because of you, that jaunty sloping roof, the thick fluorescent lights, the trolleys, the lovely money cascading into tills. Ping, ping, ping. Look at those cars queuing to get into the car park. They’d be going to the shabby old supermarket that was too small and dark and didn’t sell anything interesting or exotic. Be proud of your contribution to the landscape.’

‘I am, actually. I am.’ And I was. The sight of the new building gave me a tingle of pleasure.

John pointed towards the edge of the village where a patchwork of tiny green and brown rectangles had caught his eye. ‘And is that where he had the allotment that the vicar was talking about at the funeral? Is that where Owen was tending his vegetables?’

‘Yes,’ said Annie. ‘It’s only a small plot but he managed to grow quite a lot. He’d bring boxes of stuff home with him, different kinds of beans, carrots, squash. Fruit, too, but it wasn’t so good. I had to pretend to like rhubarb every summer. At least I won’t have to do that any more. There’s a silver lining to every death, isn’t there? I think he taught himself to garden. He liked having his own bit of territory so he didn’t mind learning slowly. He was very private, as you know.’

‘Not much chance of privacy in prison so, no, I wouldn’t know. Don’t most people round here have gardens?’

‘Yeah, but the allotments are still popular. Owen had his name down for years, I think, to get that particular plot. Our granddad used to have it, a long time ago. Owen was determined to have that one and no other.’

We stared in silence again. Pictures moved around in my mind, the picture that I could see of the allotments and the setting sun, and others that had been stuck inside my head all day. I think John and Annie were seeing them too.

John bent down, picked something out of the grass. It was a tennis ball. ‘It’s waterlogged.’ He held it up for us to see. ‘We can still throw it, though. Come on.’

He lobbed the ball at Annie, who threw it to me. Annie and I both pulled faces when we touched the wet old ball but we formed a triangle and continued to chuck it to each other. I suppose we were all aware that we had just learned something important, but none of us knew what to do with the information. I threw the ball to John, he to Annie, Annie to me. Droplets of water fell as it flew through the air.

Annie dropped it. Her fingers were so wet and cold that each time she tried to pick it up again, it slipped back to the ground. She began to swear, a mumbling of curses,
fuckingshittingcuntingstupidbastard
. Finally she grasped the ball in both hands and held it up in front of her face. I don’t want to play any more. We need to talk about what I just said.’

‘What’s that, then?’ John asked, but I knew that he had heard it. We both had.

‘About Owen wanting that particular plot of land. It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’d never thought of it before but now I think we have to.’

‘Do we have to talk about it now? This minute? Let’s mess around a little longer.’

‘No, we can’t. It’s a fact and we’ve all got to face it. The allotment is very close to the bingo hall.’

‘But how do you get from one to the other? I didn’t see any kind of path when we were down there.’

‘You’d have to cross the road.’

‘With a body?’

‘No, no, no. Julia was still alive then. They would have gone to the allotments together from the bingo hall, or even met there before Owen went on his own for his cigarette.’

‘Ah.’

‘Let’s not think about it yet. Chuck the ball over, Annie. Isabel’s piggy-in-the-middle.’

‘No. We can’t do it any more. It’s disgusting. It used to belong to a dog. Look, there are tooth marks in it.’ Annie threw the ball, over arm, down the grassy hill. It bounced off a bump in the slope and disappeared. We stared at the bump.

I realized that the sky was darkening and the rocks and hills were falling into grey shadow. ‘We have to hurry now. We need to go down and look at the allotment.’

Annie staggered towards me, put her arm through mine and leaned on me as we walked over the grass to the track that led back to the village.

‘You don’t have to come,’ I told her. ‘You probably should have gone to the crematorium with your family. I feel bad that we distracted you.’

‘No. This is a better way of settling things and I’m glad I’m here. Come on.’

We stumbled down the hill, slipping sometimes on the mud. Annie planted the brandy bottle in a bush and walked away waving to it. ‘Bye-bye, little friend.’

‘You’d better pull yourself together. This isn’t going to be easy. If you’re not up to it, we’ll walk you home first and you can get some rest.’

‘Stop worrying about me. I’m fine. We’ll need spades,’ she said, ‘and a pickaxe Where will we find them?’

‘There must be plenty of tools on the allotment site. We’ll break into one of the sheds if we have to.’

‘Owen had a spade and a fork. And rakes. All that stuff. And a hoe, no doubt, whatever they’re for. But we’ll only need the pickaxe and spades, I should think.’

And we descended, following the same route but feeling different. We were closer to finding the answer and this made the short journey clearer, more detailed. I noticed every house name from Dale Cottage to Lower Heights, the red, green and blue front doors, the distance people parked from the kerb. When we reached the back-streets that led to the allotment site, we linked arms for a while, walked side by side, our strides as one.

‘I wish I hadn’t drunk so much.’ Annie was in the middle, supported by John and me. ‘The fresh air and chips have helped a bit but not enough. It’s getting a bit dark now, for my liking.’

‘I’m not keen on the dark either,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry about danger.’ John patted Annie on the shoulder. ‘I’m sober.’

‘Yes,’ said Annie, ‘but you’re a convicted murderer.’

We slipped from the main road into an unlit tenfoot, let go of each other and proceeded in single file. Annie was now at the front, John in the middle, and I was at the rear. I watched John’s silhouette as he bounced silently along.

‘Are you?’ I tried to sound casual but my voice was tight.

‘She’s exaggerating.’

We passed the backs of gardens, stepped around puddles and pushed aside thin, prickly branches that poked out between fences.

‘What did you do?’

‘I planned to kill someone. It never happened.’

‘Because the police caught him first.’

‘Were you going to do it?’

‘Yes. The gate’s locked.’ John rattled the padlock, wiped his wet hand on his sleeve. ‘We’ll have to jump over it. Can you two manage that in your skirts?’

We didn’t answer him. Of course we could. The gate was chest-high but with metal bars across so it would be no harder than climbing a ladder. I’m not sure that Annie was listening. She followed John and me over the gate. We jumped, one by one, into the mud below. I had never been here before. I knew there were allotments, of course, and had seen them from the street, but I was surprised by the size of the place, the sense of life and order among the rows of sheds, the greenhouses, the squares and lines in the land.

‘Owen’s patch is down there. When he got the allotment he put up his own shed,’ Annie said. ‘But not in the place where the old one was. He laid a concrete foundation at the other end of the plot and put the new shed there. It’s only tiny. There was no need for concrete at all. Not for such a small shed. What do you think, John?’

John was leaning against the gate. His face drooped and his skin was grey-green. ‘Let’s just tell the police. I don’t see what else we can do now. I don’t want to see some young girl’s skeleton. Who’s got their mobile with them?’

‘We can’t do that. They won’t help.’ I told them of my visit to the police station earlier in the day. ‘We need some evidence first. We need to find something.’

‘I don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel good at all.’

‘Then why have you come with us?’

John shook his head. ‘Never mind. Let’s get on with it.’

We squelched along the main path to Owen’s shed. It wasn’t locked. A torch lay on the floor just inside the door. I switched it on and shone it around the wooden walls. There was nothing apart from tools, and an old blue mug by the window. We found a cobwebbed pickaxe and John lifted it outside, gave it a cautious swing. I was pleased to see that he was still committed to the plan. We took out a spade, too, then went to neighbouring sheds to find a couple more, and another torch.

John and Annie pulled the shed down. I couldn’t watch. It was almost an attack on Owen himself – though they did not appear to mind – and I wanted to hide away until it was done. John and Annie seemed perfectly calm. They didn’t gasp or cry out when wood hit the ground. They spoke occasionally:
This bit here. Try again but harder.
Once the shed was in pieces and kicked out of the way, I joined them to hack up the foundations. The concrete was not thick. Owen must have laid it in a hurry. It was brittle, uneven and cracked easily when John swung the pickaxe. Annie and I lifted the pieces out of the way, made piles of concrete next to the planks.

‘Let’s not talk any more,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s not say a single word until we know, one way or the other. We need to be able to think all our thoughts as we do this.’

So we dug in darkness, in the spitting rain, and in silence. It took some time to forget ourselves and each other but we fell into a rhythm and worked carefully. The soil was lumpy and damp. Small stones clinked, every now and then, against our spades. As the hole deepened, a wall grew around us. I thought that we might never get out, that something would come up from the earth, make the walls fall in and bury us alive. Every so often, I tilted my head back and took a long gasp of fresh air. All the time, Julia’s face – blurred, grey – danced circles inside my head, somewhere near my eyes. Sometimes, when I became afraid that my spade would touch and damage her, I worked with my fingers, pulling with tenderness at a piece of stone, dusting soil away, loosening small pebbles and feeling the texture of the earth.

John scooped a large heap of soil onto his spade and chucked it over his shoulder.

‘Go carefully,’ I said. ‘She might be in pieces.’

John froze, leaning over the hole, then sank his spade into the ground and began to lift the earth in small, delicate movements as if he were skimming hot soup with a spoon.

Julia, crying and crying. She wouldn’t stop. Tears sluiced down her face, drenching every bit of skin. That winter the snow was heavy. The school heating had packed up, or perhaps there was a strike and fuel hadn’t got through. It may have been 1979, the Winter of Discontent. We’d arrived at school in the morning and were sent home before assembly. We ran, skidding on the ice to see how far we could get in one slide, Julia, me and one or two others. I don’t think Owen or Kath was there, just girls whose faces and names are vague now. Julia slipped on the ice and crashed to the pavement. Her bag flew out onto the road and a biology textbook slid all the way to the other side. We laughed at first, since she did not seem badly hurt. Julia was never a cry-baby. It was the kind of fall we all knew, so we laughed. But Julia would not get up. She pulled herself onto her knees then leaned forward and cried. It must have been the shock of the fall but she did not stop crying. We looked at each other, uncomfortable, not understanding what was so badly wrong. We had the day off school, didn’t we? A fall on the pavement seemed a small price to pay. We picked up her bag and sat with her until the tears had stopped and her sobs were dry echoes of the ones before.

‘We should have stayed at school,’ she said. ‘What right do they have to fuck up our day because of some radiators?’

I don’t know why she cried so hard. Perhaps it was nothing. We were only eleven or twelve and would cry or laugh at anything. I remember things about her family now, the rumours of alcoholism, of parents who weren’t interested. Sometimes I knocked on her door at the weekends and I remember the smell from the hall. I couldn’t identify it at the time and probably didn’t try. All my friends’ houses smelled different, unique, things you couldn’t put your finger on, mysterious combinations of pets, food, cleaning fluids, cigarette smoke. But later when I spent time in hostels, when I got to know Bernadette, I found myself inside the smell of Julia’s house again. Old alcohol, alcohol sweated, excreted, exhaled, spilled, left for days in old cups, soaked into carpets.

Sometimes her mother flopped through the hall in her shrimp-coloured candlewick dressing-gown, said hello to me, then disappeared into the back of the house. The dressing-gown was all I remembered. Julia was so independent, making her own clothes, able to cook her meals, that she didn’t seem to need parents. Years on, I couldn’t help guessing why Julia cried that day. The mild shock of tumbling on the ice might have caused it, but perhaps the reason was that she couldn’t stand to go home.

I had no idea whether I was anywhere near the truth but I could still hear her sobs as I dug deeper.

‘The soil.’ John’s voice, half whispered, half choked. ‘It smells so clean. It’s beautiful, but there’s nothing here to find.’