Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

‘I’m so sorry about today, Rubes. Are you OK?’

Ruby twiddled her bed cover while the tree outside clawed at the window. ‘Why was Daddy so cross?’

Mummy sighed. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. Daddy’s had a hard time, you know? Losing a job is very difficult for a man, and sometimes they can get upset for no real reason.’

‘But why did he punch Granpa?’ said Ruby.

Mummy shook her head and bit her lip and started to cry big tears that tipped out of her eyes and down her cheeks in shiny rills.

She held out her arms and Ruby reached up and let herself be gathered up in them and pressed against her mother’s shoulder.

Mummy rocked her and Ruby let herself be rocked. ‘Everything’s going to be OK, Rubes,’ said Mummy. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’

Ruby didn’t think Mummy was lying.

But she also didn’t think it was true.

CALVIN TOOK LESS than five minutes knocking on doors to establish where Georgia Sharpe lived, but five minutes was long enough to get thoroughly soaked. He’d lived in North Devon all his life and he couldn’t remember a storm like it. The wind drove rain deep into his ear as he hunched his shoulders and ran up the narrow path to the cottage on the end of the row.

Everybody knew Georgia Sharpe, as he’d suspected. Mostly because she had a pet rabbit. ‘In the house!’ said more than one neighbour. Calvin understood. Around here, rabbits were pests and vermin, not cuddly pets that you paid to feed while they shat on your floor.

He knocked and got no answer and immediately ran round to the back door and knocked there too. He wasn’t messing about in this typhoon.

Calvin noticed the small pane of glass missing in the door and tried the handle. It was unlocked, and he stepped out of the wild elements and into the calm of a well-ordered kitchen. Only a scattering of what he assumed was rabbit food on the floor and a small but untidy pile of books and stationery on the counter interrupted his eye. And the smell of burned meat made him wrinkle his nose.

‘Hello?’

Just the way the word distributed itself through the air told Calvin that the house was empty.

He wouldn’t find Georgia Sharpe here.

Still, he couldn’t put that on any kind of official documentation, so he searched the house, just to rubber-stamp his instincts.

For some reason, the house creeped him out. There was no logic to it. There was nothing out of place, nothing disturbed, no nasty surprises. And yet he felt his hackles tingle on several occasions.

When he found the handbag on the chair in what he assumed was Georgia Sharpe’s bedroom, his heart sank. This wasn’t good. Calvin didn’t know much about women, but he did know that women and their handbags were like conjoined twins. If they had been separated, then anything might have happened.

After he found the handbag, he put on a pair of blue latex gloves and went through the house again – this time opening all the wardrobes.

Nothing.

Back down in the kitchen, he noticed the bag of Bugsy Supreme was upright next to the dustbin. If the rabbit had pulled the bag over to get at the food, it certainly hadn’t righted it. And where was the rabbit? There was a full litter tray in the utility room and a bowl filled with water near the back door, but no sign of the rabbit itself.

‘Here, Bugs!’ he called. ‘Here, Bunny!’

The bunny didn’t show itself.

Calvin sifted through the pile of random items on the counter. Three blue exercise books, a red card covered with gold stars with the handwritten heading For Good Attendance , and a pencil case in the shape of a banana with googly eyes. Inside the banana were two ballpoint pens, a pencil sharpener and the shoe from a Monopoly set. Georgia Sharpe was a teacher, but these were not the contents of a teacher’s bag, but a child’s.

It was puzzling. Something was definitely amiss. Calvin wished Kirsty King were here to work it out, but she wasn’t, so he’d have to do his best.

Calvin picked up the first of the exercise books and smiled. In the top-right corner of the cover, in sloping, uneven handwriting, were the words My Dairy. And then – underneath that – the book’s apparent owner: Ruby Trick.

He knew that name!

He wound back through his memory. He was young and he got there fast. Ruby Trick was the child he’d spoken to in her father’s car. In Instow, on the same night that Steffi Cole had made her last, traumatic phone call home.

Calvin’s neck prickled again and he laughed out loud. Ridiculous! Getting a chill from a child’s diary. There was no connection, only coincidence.

But his hackles wouldn’t let him off the hook so easily.

Feeling pretty stupid – and glad that nobody else was here to laugh at him – Calvin Bridge flicked through Ruby Trick’s diary.

He stopped near the end, and this time the ripple of unease raised every hair on his body.

My Daddy’s got a gun…

Calvin told himself not to be stupid. Not to overreact. This was a ten-year-old girl’s diary, not a treasure map in a pirate film. He needed to be objective. He needed to be cautious. He needed to be modern – because his ancient body was tingling and fluttering with warning.

He read the entry again, then put the diary down with a hand that shook a little. Fuck modern – this was important. This was something – even though he didn’t know what. Yet. Right now he could only see a jumble of fleeting images that skittered about in his head while he tried desperately to grab them and make them fit together.

Kirsty King tapping her teeth with the gall-stone scoop.

Jody Reeves sticking out her thumb for a short ride to death.

Lips moving through the slit in a black balaclava. Call your mother.

Mother-of-pearl stars in a chocolate sky.

Ruby Trick’s father at the boot of his car – squinting into the headlights.

My Daddy’s got a gun.

Frannie Hatton’s bruises.

Frannie Hatton’s bruises.

Frannie Hatton’s bruises.

Maybe they only needed one body, after all…

Calvin felt two pieces fit together like a puzzle, and reached for his phone.

When Kirsty King answered, he didn’t even say hello.

‘I know why he doesn’t shoot them!’ he shouted. ‘The gun’s not real!’

THE STORM CAME.

The forest around Limeburn had stood for five hundred years and seen few like it.

The wind and the rain combined to bring more water off the surrounding hills than ever before. Instead of raindrops falling on to leaves and weighing down the branches of the trees, they were immediately dashed from their resting place to the ground, where they gathered together and rushed downhill towards the sea.

The stream broke its mossy banks and flooded the road and the cobbles three inches deep. It filled the Bear Den.

In the clearing on the top of the cliff, the wind was even more punishing. Small things bent double to get out of its way.

Big things fared less well.

The giant oak that bore the swing was alone on the bluff. Unlike the forest behind it, where each tree sheltered its neighbour, this oak had stood on the cliff above Limeburn in splendid isolation for over two centuries – a lookout and a landmark – facing down nature.

But this night would be its last.

It swayed and it creaked and it strained under the assault that was a north wind coming straight off the ocean, sweeping all before it. The frayed rope whipped about until it swung so hard and so high that it got tangled in the branches. The oak started to moan, and then to squeal. If any human being had been crazy enough to be sitting on the nearby bench at the time, they would have felt the ground move beneath them as the mighty roots strained to hold on to Mother Earth. Rising and falling, rising and falling, as if the land itself were gasping for breath.