Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

Daddy saw her coming; knew what she was about. He snapped his bloody teeth inches from her face and roared, ‘Touch it and you’re dead!’

Ruby faltered. She’d promised. She’d promised not to touch the gun. Never. She stopped on all fours, mesmerized as Daddy rose slowly beside her – his arms shaking with effort as they straightened, his hips clearing the splinters, his knee starting to worm its way on to the edge of the broken boards, to lever himself out.

‘Ruby, run !’

Her mother’s cry galvanized her. But she didn’t run. Not first. First she snatched up the gun, and then she turned to get away.

She nearly made it.

Daddy’s fingers snapped shut round her ankle in an iron grip and he collapsed back into the hole in the floor – this time dragging Ruby with him.

‘BITCH!’ he screamed. ‘FUCKING BITCH!’

He was up to his armpits, with her leg in his fist.

Life slowed like syrup.

Ruby twisted on to her back, trying to get purchase on the floor. Her Mickey Mouse T-shirt rumpled and hitched, and her bottom scraped painfully towards her father as he sank into the hole – his elbows rising like chicken wings, his teeth gritted, his throat on fire, his hand locked around her bare ankle.

Sinking. Sinking.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Ruby’s heel tipped gently over the splintered edge of the hole. If she had tied her own laces, her shoe would have slipped off her foot. But because Mummy had tied them, she was following him. Following him down into the dark.

She started to cry.

‘Daddy,’ she sobbed. ‘Daddy, please let me go.’

John Trick said nothing, but a high noise started from inside him like a kettle whistling up to the boil. Jagged splinters dug into his arms and ribs like barbs, slowing his descent and staining the perimeter of the hole with blood.

Ruby’s foot twisted painfully as her ankle tore slowly over the piercing edge, and her knee lifted to keep her ankle from breaking.

‘Daddy! You’re hurting me!’

His mouth opened just enough so Ruby could see his bloody teeth. ‘I’m not your Daddy,’ he said. ‘I’m not your Daddy.’

Then Mummy was there. Mummy smashed the china dog into his hands and arms until it shattered. Then she got Ruby under the arms and pulled.

The slide stopped.

‘Let her go!’ Mummy shouted. ‘Let her go!’

But Daddy didn’t let Ruby go.

Instead he started to climb up her leg.

Ruby shrieked. It wasn’t the pain of being stretched between them; it wasn’t the agony of the twisted foot or of the splinters, or of her father’s nails digging into her soft flesh…

It was the horror of the thing that used to be her Daddy crawling up her wounded leg. Up her calf, her knee, her thigh.

And when it had used her to pull itself out of the hole in the floor, then it would kill her.

The gun was heavy in Ruby’s right hand. It didn’t feel like a toy – it felt real. It felt real when she raised it, and real when she pointed it with both shaking hands, and real when she squeezed the trigger so hard she thought her fingers would break.

The noise and the shock of the recoil knocked her backwards into her mother’s arms and flattened them both.

Ruby opened her eyes and for a moment she stared at the sagging ceiling. Then she scrabbled backwards across the room, slapping hysterically at her own leg, as if her father’s hand was still there.

It wasn’t.

He wasn’t.

All there was was an empty black hole in the floor, in the place where she’d once kissed Adam Braund.

THE SEA HAD taken the worst of Limeburn, but it left other things in its place.

First of those were hundreds of dead rats. So many that even the Labradoodles got tired of tossing them in the air, and the council had to send a bulldozer to scoop them all up.

Then there was the sand and mud and kelp and splintered wood and debris, knee-deep in every house, and the giant oak in the square that took four men nearly two weeks to cut up and haul away, until only the rope from the swing was left rotting on the cobbles.

Finally, there were the bodies.

Bodies that John Trick had hidden in the dark, stinking limekiln, and that the sea had found and returned to their families.

Miss Sharpe had not gone far after keeping her promise to help Ruby Trick. After the tide went out, she was found wedged behind the garden wall of The Retreat, her not-pretty face further uglied by unhealed, concentric burns that the pathologist later matched to the stove in her kitchen.

Old Mrs Vanstone looked out of her window the morning after the flood to see Jody Reeves hiding near the Bear Den. Her face had been eaten by rats, but she was still wearing those stupid shoes.

And when the stream had subsided once more between its own banks, Steffi Cole was found jammed under the little stone bridge, with what Professor Mike Crew later said was ‘half the Instow dunes’ in her lungs.

The sea never returned John Trick to Limeburn – or to any other place, as far as anybody knew – but the police came down the hill in waves. They ebbed and flowed around The Retreat for days, but – apart from the bullet they took from Pussy Willows’ dead eye – only one piece of physical evidence linking John Trick to the murders ever came to light.

Fittingly, it was Calvin Bridge who found it as they searched The Retreat. It was in a twist of toilet paper, hidden among a dead man’s underwear.

When he unfurled the paper and saw Frannie Hatton’s nose ring, Calvin felt an unexpected surge of emotion. He kept his back to PC Cunningham and DC Peters as sudden tears threatened to make him a laughing stock.

They were tears for Frannie Hatton, whose own beaten-down mother had ignored her last phone call, and they were also for Shirley, because he’d had to hurt her to preserve his own happiness. But most of all they were from sheer bloody relief that this case could now end, and he could be released from the shackles of serial ignorance and get back into uniform. Drink, drugs and debt awaited him and he would embrace them with new affection. After the past two months, constant ironing seemed a small price to pay.

Calvin half-laughed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. All this from finding a little silver ring.

‘Got something?’ said DC Peters.

Calvin Bridge turned to show him but, before he could speak, there was a loud rumble, the floor shook – and the whole front wall of The Retreat fell into the garden.

After that, the crumbling, sea-softened house was cordoned off and nobody ever went inside it again.

Only children, of course.

And trees.

ALISON AND RUBY Trick left Limeburn, and never went back. They didn’t go to stay with Granpa and Nanna though – not even for a night. They stayed at the Red Lion on the curved sea wall at the foot of Clovelly until Mummy sold her earrings and necklace, and Tiffany brooch, and then they moved into their very own little cottage halfway up the hill.

Ruby loved it. She only had to look out of her bedroom window to see little grey and brown donkeys pulling sledges up the street, loaded with tourists’ suitcases, and Mummy promised next summer they’d have window boxes filled with red geraniums.

The bruises on Ruby’s legs faded from black to purple to brown, and finally to banana yellow. One morning, she examined her legs in bed and couldn’t see a single mark. It was one of several improvements. Her chest still ached now and then, but she got used to reading in a chair, and walking up and down the hill twice a day to stroke the donkeys in their big green paddock chased away the last of her puppy fat.