The Facts of Life and Death Read online

  Most of the time.

  But this weekend she’d taken pants-wearing to a whole new level.

  She’d caught him off-guard while he was watching Formula 1 at her flat. Cuddled up to him on the sofa just as the red lights went out and said, ‘Why don’t we get married?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Hamilton was on pole but Vettel darted up the inside and the two of them went into the first turn a bare inch from each other at 180mph. Bloody brilliant.

  ‘Why don’t we get married?’ she’d said again.

  Calvin had had to think fast. If he’d said no – or even hesitated – there’d have been a row or a terrible silence, and he’d have had to leave her flat and drive to his flat, which would have meant missing twenty critical laps. Thirty if he got stuck behind a tractor.

  So he’d said, ‘Good idea,’ and hoped that would be noncommittal enough to take the pressure off until the end of the race at the very least.

  Instead Shirley had gone into an uncharacteristic frenzy of squealing and kissing his ear and calling her mother and each of her sisters in turn, then her mother again.

  Apparently he’d proposed.

  Calvin had felt a bit uneasy at first, but by lap thirty-two he was getting used to the idea. Why not marry Shirley? He might as well. They’d been going out for three years and they got along fine. He loved her, he supposed, although he had nothing much to gauge it by.

  Shirley was big boned, but she was clean, self-financing and happy to sleep with him, all of which Calvin liked in a woman. They never rowed because he always gave in, and whatever it was she wanted to do usually turned out to be pleasant enough. They went out three times a week to the pub or the pictures, and they had sex once a week, either in bed or on his leather sofa – but never on her corduroy one, because it was harder to get clean.

  Anyway, by the time Vettel took the chequered flag, Calvin had decided that marriage would probably just be more of the same but without all the hassle on Valentine’s Day. Last year he’d bought Shirley a cheese grater and they hadn’t had sex for a fortnight – even after he’d shown her the receipt! It wasn’t any old cheese grater – it was one endorsed by her favourite TV chef and had cost a ridiculous sum for a piece of metal with holes in it.

  Marriage had suddenly seemed like the simpler option, and Calvin almost wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  ‘You’ve gone past it,’ said DCI King.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’ve gone past it,’ she said, tapping the window. ‘It’s back there.’

  Calvin said, ‘Sorry, Ma’am,’ and started looking for a place to do a U-turn.

  Mrs Hatton lived in a run-down terrace with a cracked-concrete front garden. Calvin reckoned she couldn’t be more than fifty, but she looked seventy. She wore a long porridge-coloured cardigan and maroon carpet slippers. One of her big toes was showing through at the end.

  He made the tea. There was no milk but he pressed on bravely. Tea was vital to the investigation. People told you things over a cup of tea that they wouldn’t under torture.

  The tiny kitchen smelled of drains, and the mugs were chipped and charity-shop random. RGB Building Supplies, the Little Mermaid and a Smurf. Obviously he would have the RGB mug, but he dithered over the allocation of the other two. Neither seemed appropriate to either a senior investigating officer or a bereaved mother.

  He put them all on a tray to let Fate decide.

  ‘She was crying,’ said Mrs Hatton flatly, as Calvin came in with the mugs. ‘She kept saying goodbye and I love you.’

  ‘And this was on the phone?’ said DCI King.

  Mrs Hatton nodded and took the Smurf.

  ‘Was Frannie alone when she called you?’

  ‘There was a man’s voice.’

  Kelly Bradley and Katie Squire popped into Calvin’s head. It was inevitable. Most police work in these little country towns was as uncomplicated as Calvin had hoped it would be – and often revolved around the three Ds – drink, drugs and debt. So two women forced to strip naked and phone home was a bit different and was sure to stick in the mind – even his mind, which could be like a Teflon butterfly unless it was about sport.

  DCI King reached over the Little Mermaid and took his RGB mug. ‘Was it Mark?’ she asked.

  Mark Spade was Frannie’s boyfriend. They already had him in custody and were making him cry. Mostly because he couldn’t get his next fix.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Hatton. ‘The reception was very bad. And I’m a bit deaf.’

  ‘You couldn’t see anyone?’

  ‘It was on the phone.’

  ‘You don’t have a smartphone?’ said Calvin.

  ‘What’s that?’

  DCI King raised her eyebrows at him. Calvin looked around the dingy front room with its dirty carpet, its glued-together china ornaments and its smell of wet dog, and realized how silly the question had been. Mrs Hatton only just had a television set – a big old thing in a wooden case, like something out of the ark. Like an ark.

  He should probably just shut up.

  ‘Could I possibly see your phone, Mrs Hatton?’

  Mrs Hatton handed King the oldest of Nokias and King handed it to Calvin.

  ‘Find her call, will you?’

  Calvin had never seen a phone as big as this one; it was like a brick in a plastic case. It had an aerial. He ran through the received-calls menu, but Mrs Hatton apparently didn’t know how to assign names to each contact.

  With some fiddling, and with a break for Mrs Hatton to find her glasses – which were around her neck on a chain all along – Calvin identified Frannie’s number.

  ‘There are two calls here from her,’ he said. ‘Right after each other.’

  ‘I didn’t get another call. Didn’t answer it, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’ said King.

  The grey-faced woman shrugged at the wall over the mantelpiece, where a square of clean wallpaper spoke of an absent painting. Or maybe a mirror.

  ‘Did Frannie say anything else?’ King asked.

  ‘She said he was going to kill her.’

  DCI tilted her head and said, ‘Pardon me?’

  Mrs Hatton cleared her throat. ‘She said he was going to kill her.’

  There was a pregnant silence before King asked, ‘Did you call the police?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Hatton, and sighed as though she’d forgotten to pick up washing powder at the shops.

  Calvin felt cold. Frannie Hatton had called her mother and said she was about to be murdered, and her mother hadn’t called the police. Hadn’t even picked up the phone to her second call. And had only mentioned it now as an afterthought! Calvin didn’t have kids of his own – didn’t really want kids of his own – but even to him that sounded just . . . wrong.

  He looked around the room with new eyes. What had to happen that a young girl who’d started out right here in this little house had ended up dead in a lay-by – her last desperate plea ignored by her own mother? Did Mrs Hatton have a personality disorder? A habit of her own? A boyfriend who hadn’t been able to keep his dirty hands to himself?

  So many forks in the road where things had gone wrong when they should have gone right.

  Calvin sighed inwardly. They’d probably never know. Only Frannie knew and Frannie was dead, and the only question to be answered about her now was who had killed her.

  There was no excuse – could be no excuse – for Mrs Hatton’s inaction. Calvin felt that anger deep in his core.

  DCI King cleared her throat and modulated her tone to take all the judgement out of it. Calvin recognized what she was doing and admired her. Along with the tea thing, it was one of the most useful things he’d learned on the force. He used it all the time.

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police, Mrs Hatton? When she said this man was going to kill her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They both knew she must know, and neither of them spoke in the long tea-filled silence that followed.

  Finally Mr
s Hatton went on, ‘She’d say anything, you see? To get money out of me. To get clean, she always said, but I knew it was for drugs. Even if she meant it, I knew she wouldn’t do it. And even if she did it, I knew it wouldn’t last.’

  The anger left Calvin Bridge and instead he felt naive. What had seemed unjustifiable was obvious. What had seemed monstrous was mundane. The ghastly rollercoaster of addiction. Hopes raised a little and dashed a lot. Again and again and again, until all the hope was gone and all that was left in its place were broken hearts and suspicious minds.

  ‘Had you given Frannie money in the past?’ DCI King asked Mrs Hatton cautiously.

  ‘Of course!’ she said with sudden fire. ‘I’m her mother. I gave her everything I had!’ She gestured roughly at the room. It looked as if someone had moved out and this was all they’d left behind.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said King. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  But the outburst had exhausted Mrs Hatton’s tiny reserve of energy. She flapped the apology away, then rested her hand on the head of the faded little terrier on the sofa beside her.

  ‘Makes no difference,’ she said. ‘She’d only have stolen it.’

  Missing, presumed run off with her smackhead boyfriend, had been the local consensus about the disappearance of Frannie Hatton, but now that she was dead, people had nothing but good things to say about her.

  Poor girl.

  Pretty little thing.

  Wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  ‘Her was a right skinny maid,’ said Shiny Steele the next time the Gunslingers met. ‘But her had a proper pair on her regardless.’

  ‘What a waste,’ said Scratch, speaking for them all.

  Shiny drank at the Patch & Parrot, and Razor Riddle claimed to have known Frannie Hatton ‘for years’. Both of them – bald and thick respectively – had been bought drinks all evening on the strength of it.

  ‘Her’d shake ’em in yer face for a good tip,’ Shiny added. Then he sighed like he was missing an old dog, and all the Gunslingers felt the loss of Frannie Hatton just that bit more personally. If they’d been in the Patch & Parrot, she might have shaken her proper pair in their faces. Now that would never happen, and they called for another round to drown this new sorrow.

  Then another.

  ‘To Fannie,’ slurred Razor, slopping his latest cider into the air, and there was an immediate outcry.

  ‘Frannie, not Fannie, yur wazzack!’

  ‘Thought you an’ her was like this!’

  ‘Owe me a bloody pint, you do, Razor!’

  ‘No, boys,’ said Hick Trick, holding up a hand for quiet. ‘I’m with Razor on this.’ And when they all looked at him in bewilderment he raised his pint and said, ‘To Fannie!’

  The men whooped with laughter and echoed his toast, and Daisy mooed enthusiastically until Jim Maxwell came over and told them all to keep it down or they’d be out. He was nice enough about it, because he knew which side his economic bread was buttered, but he’d barred them for a week after the Pussy Willows fight, so they knew he’d do it again, and let their laughter tail off into a series of snorts and exaggerated sighs.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Scratch in the new quiet. ‘It’s a shame.’ There were grunts of agreement all round.

  ‘Wouldn’t happen in the West,’ said Blacky, and even though they were in the West, they all knew he meant the wild one.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Chip Fryer. ‘A man who was thinking of doing something like that didn’t, ’cos he knew he’d be strung up.’

  There were enthusiastic nods all round. Lynching was a well-worn trail the Gunslingers rode down whenever a crime had particularly offended them. It didn’t have to be murder; often it was child abuse, sometimes it was the mugging of an old lady, and just two weeks back, they’d agreed that it should be imposed for whatever bastard had keyed Blacky’s car in the car park of the George.

  ‘Young girl murdered right under our noses,’ sighed Whippy Hocking, ‘and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  All the men muttered now, their anger warming them just the way their laughter had.

  ‘Short of a posse,’ said Scratch, to nods and grunts all round.

  ‘And a gun,’ said Whippy.

  His words hung there in the sudden silence of the bar. They were so self-evident that they didn’t even have to be agreed with out loud.

  Instead, the Gunslingers nodded sombrely into their glasses and looked almost as wistful for a gun as they had for Frannie Hatton’s boobs.

  The police made Donald Moon cry too. They searched his house three times that first week, they questioned him hard and often, and they only bought his story about stopping to pick up the Daily Mail when his terrified wife showed them the his ’n’ hers Day-Glo vests and pointy sticks.

  They did meticulous forensic sweeps of the lay-by and of the victim’s flat in Northam, and at a press conference they launched an appeal to find Frannie’s missing bag, which had contained various personal items and a week’s wages.

  The Gazette’s in-depth investigation revealed the contents of Frannie Hatton’s Facebook page, and they printed the only photo that did not feature an obscene gesture or an illegal substance. It was an old picture of Frannie as a blurry bridesmaid, in a dress so pink and sleeves so puffed that she looked like a gay quarterback.

  The same photo appeared on posters that the police put up in public places and on lamp posts, so that people who’d never known the victim almost felt as though they had, and started to refer to her as ‘Frannie’ instead of ‘that girl’.

  People left bouquets and little teddy bears in the lay-by, and the regulars at the Patch & Parrot, who felt guilty that none of them had ever offered her a ride home, started a collection on the bar to help her mother with the funeral expenses.

  All in all, dying was very improving for Frannie Hatton.

  18

  RUBY COULD TELL Daddy was in a good mood, just by the way he opened the front door.

  ‘That’s a twenty-quid fish!’ he said as he dropped the dogfish on the draining board.

  ‘It’s like a whale,’ she enthused. She’d seen bigger, but having Daddy in a good mood again changed everything: everything did seem better than it was before.

  The dogfish had bitten Daddy as he took it off the hook, but he didn’t even care. ‘Been bitten by worse!’ he said and put some salt on it so it wouldn’t go manky. Then they measured the fish with Ruby’s school ruler. Twenty-seven inches! A lot of that was tail, but even so. Then he let her feel its skin – smooth one way, rough the other – and touch its sharky little teeth with her finger until she shivered with dread, and they both laughed.

  She got a chair to kneel on so she could watch him gut the fish. The insides were such a dark red they were almost black. Daddy scooped them down the cut-off foot of one of Mummy’s old tights, all the way to the toe, then knotted the top and put it in the freezer. Ruby knew that the next time he went out on the Gore, he would dangle it in the water and, as it thawed, blood and juice would leak from it and attract more dogfish, and eels too.

  Daddy wrapped the rest of the fish in plastic and put it in the fridge. Then he started to wash down the drainer and the sink. Without looking at her, he said, ‘Can you keep a secret, Rubes?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said instantly, because she wanted to hear one.

  ‘Cross your heart?’

  She crossed her heart. ‘And hope to die,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  Daddy stood very still. He glanced towards the kitchen door as if someone might be there, spying on them. Ruby looked too, as the atmosphere thickened in the dingy little kitchen, and she drew closer to Daddy to hear the secret.

  When he spoke it was in a low voice, only just above a whisper.

  ‘The Gunslingers are getting up a posse.’

  That was all he needed to say. Ruby’s mouth fell open and she felt almost dizzy, as foreign-familiar images flooded her brain. A hot place, with a wide sky that smelled like summer. Cowboys firing their
guns in the air, legs flapping, spurs digging, manes flying; dust clouds and small boys swirling in their wake. A posse was fearless and fast. A posse was the law. When a bad man came to town, a posse hunted him down and made him pay. A posse never gave up. The thought of Daddy on a posse was completely thrilling.

  ‘We’re going to catch the man who killed that girl,’ Daddy went on in hushed tones.

  ‘What girl?’ said Ruby, matching his whisper.

  ‘That girl. Frannie something.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Ruby remembered vaguely; there was a poster on the shop door next to the one about the Leper Parade. ‘What will you do when you catch him?’

  ‘Well, we’re supposed to call the police.’ Daddy shrugged. ‘But who knows?’ He did the cowboy accent. ‘Blood’s running pretty high, Miss Ruby.’ He made a finger gun and drew a bead on her with narrowed eyes, then blew the tip.

  She stared at his fingertip, enthralled – as if she could actually see the smoke curling off it.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ she whispered. ‘On the posse.’

  ‘It’s not a game, Rubes. This is serious work. Man’s work.

  ‘I know.’

  Ruby frowned. She was the wrong sex – again.

  ‘But I could help you,’ she suggested. ‘I could look out for him.’

  Daddy wrung out the cloth. Bloody water squeezed out between his knuckles. ‘Mummy will be home soon.’

  Ruby could tell he was trying to change the subject and she was determined not to let him. ‘Please, Daddy? You can look one way and I’ll look the other way. Then we’re looking all the ways. I’m really good at looking for things. Even out of the very corners of my eyes. Watch this!’ To demonstrate, she looked away from Daddy and slid her eyes right to their very corners. ‘See?’ she said. ‘I can see you really well.’

  ‘I don’t know, Rubes …’ The water ran clear through the cloth now.

  Ruby rushed, ‘Please, Daddy – I want to go on the posse! I’ll be really, really good and quiet. I promise.’

  There was a chink of silence and Ruby held her breath.

  ‘You’ll get bored.’