Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

‘Particularly your psychological insights.’

‘I know about phallic symbols, anyway. The more sexually frustrated you are, the bigger the symbols you see everywhere.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

They drove on for a while, heading towards the A6, which ran right through the heart of Derbyshire and the Peak District.

‘Those air shafts,’ said Murfin. ‘How deep do they go?’

‘Two hundred feet,’ said Fry.

‘Right.’

Diane Fry had brought Emma Renshaw’s diary with her, and found she couldn’t leave it alone.

‘What do you think these initials mean, Gavin?’ she said. ‘LDBAT.’

‘I’ve no idea. The Renshaws said they didn’t know. Debbie Stark didn’t know. And Khadi Whatsit didn’t know.’

‘So they said.’

‘You don’t believe anything that anybody says, do you?’ said Murfin.

Fry turned over a page, then turned over some more. ‘She’s repeated the same initials day after day.’

‘Perhaps they were something to do with the lectures she had to go to. Like a reminder.’

‘But why the same every day?’

‘ I don’t know.’

‘And another thing,’ said Fry. ‘Emma wrote in her diary all the time. So how come her parents found it in her room at Bearwood? Why didn’t Emma take it with her when she went home for the Easter holiday? Surely she didn’t just forget it?’

‘Well, from what I’ve seen of Withens,’ said Murfin, ‘it was probably because she knew nothing could happen there that would be worth writing down.’

‘Maybe.’

Fry stopped turning pages. A memory was coming back to her of another diary, one not unlike this. It had been a teenage girl’s diary, though the girl had been a few years younger than Emma Renshaw. That girl had been living with foster parents in a semi-detached house in Warley. She had been an unhappy girl.

Suddenly, the letters made sense. It was almost as if Emma had spoken the words to her. There was no room for doubt in Fry’s mind.

‘Life Didn’t Begin Again Today,’ she said.

Murfin stared at her. ‘What did you say?’

‘LDBAT. It means Life Didn’t Begin Again Today.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I just do, OK?’

‘But—’

‘Gavin, trust me for once, will you? She’s written it in her diary day after day. She didn’t need to spell it out, because she knew exactly what the letters stood for. It’s on page after page. It becomes a kind of mantra. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today.’

‘OK, OK. I hear what you’re saying. I suppose it’s as likely as anything.’

‘Yes, it is. A bit immature, perhaps. But that’s the impression I have of Emma — too immature to be safe when she was away from home for the first time. She was brought up in Withens. Living in the Black Country must have come as a shock.’

‘OK, so what did she mean by it?’

‘Something didn’t happen that she wanted to. A man, I’d guess.’

‘It usually is,’ said Murfin. ‘One of the boys? Neil Granger? Not Alex Dearden?’

‘Somebody she got a bit obsessed with, but who wasn’t interested in her. It could have been one of her lecturers at the art school.’

‘You could be on to something there, Diane. They’re a funny lot, artists.’

‘Emma might have found one of them rather more interesting than the people she knew back in Withens anyway.’

‘I’ll grant you that.’

‘Job for you tomorrow morning then, Gavin. Phone the art school again and get a list of all the staff who would have had contact with Emma. Some of them were spoken to at the time, but we’ll need a complete list. Their ages would be useful, too. Then you can contact Debbie Stark again and go through the list with her. She was on the same course.’

‘Waste of time, she is,’ said Murfin.

‘See if you can’t jog her memory a bit.’

‘I just hope there aren’t too many. It could take weeks.’

‘That’s the way it goes, Gavin. But a couple of weeks won’t make any difference now.’

‘It will to my ulcers.’

‘I didn’t know you had ulcers, Gavin.’

‘I haven’t. But I’m expecting them any day, like.’

They were on the A6, and only a few minutes from Edendale now. Fry gazed at the White Peak scenery going past the windows with mixed feelings. She didn’t know where home was any more. But maybe she never had.

She turned the pages of Emma’s diary again.

‘She ought to have used his initials,’ she said. ‘If she liked initials, she should have referred to him that way. Or at least the initial of his first name. That’s what I would have done.’

‘I never kept a diary,’ said Murfin. ‘It seems a bit sad to me.’

‘It would have helped a lot,’ said Fry. ‘But I can’t see anywhere she’s done that.’

‘Maybe she didn’t feel she had to. She knew who she was talking about, so why should she bother with initials?’

‘But when she first met him—’

Murfin made the final turn into the Eden Valley and began the long descent towards Edendale.

‘That diary,’ he said. ‘When does it start?’

‘January, of course.’

‘I just wondered. My lad has a diary for school, but it starts in September. They call it an academic year diary.’

Fry stared at him. ‘Gavin — you’re a genius.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘If this is a member of staff we’re looking for, Emma would have met him in her first term at the art school — the previous October. Even if it was a student, the same applies.’ She slapped the diary. ‘We’ve only got the last four months here. We need the diary before this one.’

‘If she had one.’

‘Oh, she’ll have had one all right.’

LDBAT. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today. The more she looked at it, the more Fry was sure. Emma Renshaw had written it day after day, a sure sign of an obsession.

But on a Thursday two years ago, Emma’s diary entries had stopped completely. Life didn’t begin again that day, either. But had life ended, instead?

‘That’s another thing you can do, Gavin. Get on to the Renshaws and ask for a previous diary.’

‘Great. The rewards of genius, eh?’

Fry opened her file and looked at the photographs of Emma Renshaw for a long time. In particular, she studied the ones in which Emma was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt or shorts, displaying bare limbs and healthy skin. In one picture, she was posing in a bikini top against a background of sand and sunlit water, with her arms and shoulders an uncomfortable shade of pink. In every photograph, Emma was smiling and happy, a healthy teenager with the rest of her life before her.

Fry found a sentence running through her head. It was something really stupid that she’d heard on a BBC Radio 4 programme a few months ago. It might even have been You and Yours . The discussion had been about direct marketing, the posh expression for junk mail, and how it could be stopped — or ‘suppressed’, as one of the studio guests had insisted on putting it. The presenter had expressed astonishment that every year hundreds of thousands of people who’d died were still being targeted by firms sending them junk mail. The guest had made a statement that had given Fry a little shudder of apprehension. She had said ominously: ‘There are ways of suppressing people who’ve died.’

Fry wondered whether there was a direct-marketing technique she could use in the case of the Renshaws. Was there really a way of suppressing someone who’d died? Was there a way of putting away the ghost of Emma Renshaw?

Now, when she looked at the photographs, Fry began to see something different. Something that the photographer hadn’t captured on film. She had seen the blood in the poppies and the mould in the grass. Now she saw the bones under the skin of the girl.