Ross Welford - The Kid Who Came From Space

Next to me on the pub’s worn sofa, Mam gripped my hand so hard that it hurt, but I said nothing.

The police sergeant said, ‘Mrs Tait, I’d like to take Ethan back to the path where Tammy’s bike was found. Do you have someone here with you?’

‘I’ll stay with her,’ said Gran. ‘More tea, Mel?’ she asked. ‘Or would you prefer something a little stronger?’

Mam nodded.

Outside, I got into the police car. A few minutes later, and we were bumping along the road that I had cycled along earlier. A group of people were standing by the overgrown entrance to the path, and the sergeant got out of the car and walked towards them.

‘Thank you, everybody. Kindly move away. We are securing this area for evidence. Please do not touch anything.’

‘Too late for that, sarge,’ said the policeman. He pointed to a man with a short white beard and a green camouflage jacket who was holding on to Tammy’s bike.

‘Please put that down, sir. We may need to collect fingerprints or other evidence.’

The man put it down roughly and it clattered on the ground.

I wanted to say, ‘Hey, be careful’, but people were already firing questions at the sergeant.

‘Any news, officer?’

‘Are there more police arriving?’

‘Will there be a search of the area?’

The sergeant tried her best to ignore them politely, and the two officers led me down the dark path, each of them holding a torch to light the way. But before we made it down to the little beach, a loud and angry snarling sound made us stop in our tracks. Then we heard the rustling undergrowth, and footsteps running towards us, and another bark.

‘Sheba! Sheba!’ came an angry voice from ahead of us, but it was too late and the dog stopped in front of us, growling.

I shrank back behind the policeman, but he was shrinking back as well.

The sergeant stood her ground and shouted into the darkness, ‘Call your dog off! This is the police!’

From the shadows a man appeared: the same man who had been holding Tammy’s bicycle, yelling, ‘Sheba! Come! Sheba! Sheba! She-baaa! Come ! ’

Eventually, the dog stopped growling and turned and joined the man. We all seemed to breathe out at the same time.

‘Sorry about that,’ said the man. ‘She’s a bit—’

The sergeant interrupted him. ‘Will you put that dog on a lead, please, sir?’ she said sharply. When the man hesitated, she added, ‘Now, please.’

It was a big German Shepherd, with a scar on its face and a patchy tail, and it sat while the man attached a length of string around its collar. I knew the man, sort of. Geoff something-or-other. He’s the security guard at the observatory on the top moor. He comes into the pub sometimes with another man who is his son.

‘Any news about the lass?’ said Geoff. ‘We came down here to look for ’er.’

We had emerged on to the little beach, where Geoff’s son was standing smoking a cigarette. I was still keeping a wary eye on the dog, who was pulling on her string lead.

‘No, sir,’ said the younger officer. ‘And this is now a secure area. We’ll have to ask you to leave and not to touch anything.’ He took out his notepad. ‘May I ask your names, please?’

The man who had been smoking threw his cigarette butt into the water, where it landed with a little hiss. He exhaled a plume of smoke and said, ‘Why do you need our names?’

The sergeant looked at him quizzically. ‘Just routine, sir. Is there a problem?’

Geoff shot his son a glance and said, ‘No problem at all, officer. We’re happy to help. My name is Geoffrey Mackay. G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y. Stop it, Sheba! This is also Geoffrey Mackay, Junior …’

He carried on giving his details and I moved away a few metres along the shore towards a rickety wooden jetty that extended a few metres over the water. That’s when I saw it, lying upside down on the black shingle, half submerged by the water.

The loose label from the present I had wrapped. On it was written: Miss Sheila Osborne .

This next bit is super sad. I’m just saying that to warn you because there is almost nothing worse than reading about someone else’s agony.

Dad, Mam, Gran and I were in total terror about Tammy that night as Christmas Eve tipped over into Christmas Day and all of the usual celebrations stopped. I don’t think anybody slept much. By 2am more police had arrived from Hexham.

By the time it was light, which was about eight o’clock, a huge group of people had gathered in the car park of the Stargazer, and were being coordinated by a police inspector in uniform and a man from Northumberland National Park Mountain Rescue, who had turned up with twelve volunteers. They had all come out to help on a Christmas Day morning.

There was a Mountain Rescue Land Rover full of equipment. The two Geoffs were there as well, and Sheba was snarling at three well-behaved Mountain Rescue collies in high-vis jackets.

At one point, the permanent hubbub of the bar room died down completely and there was a silence, eventually broken by the pealing of the little village church’s solitary bell summoning people to celebrate Christmas morning. I thought about the vicar, Father Nick, looking out over the empty pews and wondering why nobody had turned up. (In fact, I saw him later. He had taken his vicar gear off and cancelled services in three other churches that he goes to just so he could join the search.)

The morning and the afternoon passed in a confused mash-up that combined periods of hope and activity. In the mid-morning we all spread out on the top moor and trudged through the snow with whistles and torches. Iggy joined us, and Gran in her winter running gear, and Cora; in fact, I think almost everyone in the village was involved in one way or another. They were kind: they didn’t intrude when Mam was crying, and told me, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll find her.’ The TV in the bar was turned off because virtually every channel was showing jolly Christmas stuff and nobody felt like it.

The weather up on the moors had worsened overnight. It had started to snow again, and everybody knew that that was not a good thing. If Tammy had somehow wandered off then she was not well equipped for a freezing night in the Northumbrian hills, even with her new puffer jacket.

That, however, was not the worst of our fears. There were worse options that nobody wanted to say out loud in case saying them out loud would somehow make them come true.

That afternoon, when we would normally be watching a funny film and eating sweets, I sat with Mam in the bar with its Christmas decorations and switched-off tree lights which suddenly looked like the saddest, most pointless things the world. We looked out of the pub window, which Tammy and I had sprayed with fake snow a couple of weeks earlier, and we watched as the people who run the sailing school on the other side of the reservoir pulled into the driveway with a small boat on a trailer with an outboard engine.

We knew what that meant. We knew it meant there was a possibility that Tammy had entered the water and not come out again. Drowned, in other words. Nobody needed to say anything, but when Mam collapsed in sobs, I did too, while Gran sat beside us and stared straight ahead, shaking her head sadly.

‘There’s shepherds’ huts up on the moors, you know,’ said Gran eventually. ‘They’re a bit further from where we searched. Perhaps Tammy …’

‘The Natrass boys have been up there already on their quad bikes,’ said Mam, flatly.