Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

For a while the police kept coming to see them to ask them questions about Daddy and the posses. It took Ruby a little while to let go of her loyalty, but eventually she told them almost everything.

Almost.

One time a policeman asked about a gun and Ruby said, What gun? just like Mummy had told her to, and that worked, because they didn’t ask again.

So she never told them how on the morning after the storm – when the sea had finally finished with Limeburn – Mummy had lifted up the pedlar’s flagstone, and Ruby had put the gun underneath it.

Then they’d picked their way down the Peppercombe path – she in her jumper and bruised, bare legs, Mummy in muddy pyjamas and diamonds – and Mummy had told the police all that had happened, half talking, half crying.

The only bit she’d left out was the gun.

That was their little secret.

A month or so after they moved into their new home – just as the sun was making its sheepish return to North Devon – there was a knock on the door and it was Adam. He’d walked all the way from Limeburn.

It was chilly, but it was bright and dry, so he and Ruby played with Harvey for a bit, then they went up the hill to the visitor centre and bought ice creams, and ate them together next to the donkey paddock. Ruby told Adam all their names – Sarah and Eli and Peter and Jasper and all the rest. ‘You can ride them and groom them and everything,’ she told him. Then – in case he doubted such wonders – she added, ‘I do it every time I get my pocket money.’

Adam told her about their house falling down, and the huge hole that was left in the cliff where the mighty oak used to be.

None of it mattered to Ruby now. It was as if Adam was talking about another place she’d only heard about.

‘I’m cold,’ she said, and Adam gave her his hoodie. It smelled just the same as before, and made her feel just as happy.

They didn’t talk about Limeburn again until Adam was getting ready to walk the four miles home.

Then he asked, ‘Are you ever coming back?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Are you?’

‘It’s a long way,’ said Adam. ‘It took me ages to walk here.’

Ruby nodded, but she felt sad. Adam was the one thing she missed about Limeburn.

She turned away and leaned over the fence. She put her palm against Eli’s broad forehead with its Catherine wheel of grey hair in the middle. His heavy head relaxed and his eyelids drooped, as she rubbed him there like a magic lamp.

Adam climbed on to the fence beside her.

For a little while he just watched her.

Then he also reached out, and stroked the donkey’s long, fluffy ears and said, ‘Maybe I’ll get a bicycle.’

Ruby tried her best never to think of John Trick, because whenever she did, it was of his bloody teeth bared as he hissed in her face, I’m not your Daddy.

Eventually, she hoped that that was true.

She did think a lot about Miss Sharpe and the little horseshoe on her charm bracelet. Without it, she would never have just known that Daddy was a killer. She might still have believed that he would come home and take care of them.

She might even have waited with Mummy for him to do just that…

She thought about Steffi Cole too – giving her five pounds before she was murdered, just because they both loved ponies. And about Frannie Hatton, taking her nose ring out and dropping it in the car-door pocket – hoping it might help somebody else, even though she knew that she was beyond help.

And it had helped, thought Ruby. It had helped her. They had all helped her in their own ways – living and dead – just the way Mummy had always helped her. She could see that now.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, Ruby Trick started to think that ending up as a woman might not be so terrible after all.

Every day, she felt a little bit better, a little bit safer. A little bit more grown up.

But at night…

At night the Gut swarmed with dark sharks, and the Gore loomed, black and shiny, out of the deep green sea.

At night she woke in terror from blood-soaked dreams.

At night Ruby Trick wondered where the Devil was now.

I wrote this book during a difficult year, and would not have been able to do so without the support and kindness of Jane Gregory, Bill Scott-Kerr and Larry Finlay. Many thanks, too, to Claire Ward, Kate Samano and Stephanie Glencross for their skill and hard work, and in particular to my editor, Sarah Adams, whose enthusiasm and insight gave me hope.

Belinda Bauergrew up in England and South Africa. She has worked as a journalist and screenwriter and her script The Locker Room earned her the Carl Foreman/Bafta Award for Young British Screenwriters. With her first novel, Blacklands , Belinda won the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year. In 2013 she won the CWA Dagger in the Library for her entire body of work. With her fourth novel, Rubbernecker , she was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Belinda lives in Wales.

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First published in Great Britain

in 2014 by Bantam Press

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Belinda Bauer 2014

Belinda Bauer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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