Saturday 9th December 2023
Alice
‘It isn’t just about the sign, though.’ Alice can see she’s losing the police. She can’t seem to get across the significance of what’s happened, what it means, how it makes her feel. Putting up a pub sign seems like reverse vandalism, she realises, as the detective looks at her dubiously.
‘Has something else happened?’ he asks. DC Colella, he said his name was. He has short, spiky brown hair and a suntan that looks out of place in this village in the middle of winter.
Alice pulls herself up tall again. They’re back in the church – the nearest empty building now that everyone has moved over to the pub – with the photo of Robbie watching over them. She keeps glancing at it. Sometimes it gives her courage; sometimes it only brings her fears back to the surface.
‘Something appeared in the pub wall,’ she says, her voice echoing in the big near-empty space, which still smells strongly of lilies. ‘Initials … Robbie’s, and Leo’s. They … they weren’t there before.’
The two men frown at each other. Ben has barely looked at Alice since they came in here. He constantly dodges her gaze, as if avoiding eye contact will stop her mentioning their conversation at her house.
‘Initials?’ DC Colella asks. ‘I’m not sure I—’
‘My son’s, and the person who killed him!’ Alice can hardly keep herself from shouting. Why don’t they get it? Why doesn’t anybody? ‘And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all this is happening now that Leo is out of prison.’
‘Leo Dean is missing,’ Colella says pointedly.
‘I know that.’
‘So, it’s unlikely he had anything to with any initials in the wall or a pub sign being fixed.’
‘It wasn’t fixed!’ She presses her hands against her cheeks. ‘It had been taken down for a reason. It had been thrown away. Nobody wanted to see that raven ever again …’ She takes a deep breath, lowering her hands. ‘What I mean is, whoever did it knew what they were doing. It was a taunt. And so were the initials—’
‘Do you know where Leo Dean is?’
‘No!’ She feels the conversation slipping through her fingers. ‘Of course I don’t. But his mum …’
‘Chrissy Dean,’ Colella says, turning a page of his notebook. ‘Tell us about your relationship with her.’
Alice sits back against the pew. The church is cold, growing seemingly colder, and she shivers and holds her own elbows. ‘Maybe she did this,’ she says. ‘She was here earlier, before the memorial, trying to get in. Maybe she’s the troll. And maybe she knows where her son is.’
The detective raises his eyebrows. Ben’s radio buzzes and he jumps a little, murmurs into it, then flicks a switch on the top and slides it back into his belt.
‘Chrissy Dean has been receiving abusive messages herself,’ DC Colella says.
Alice looks away. She knew this would come up again, yet she’s squirming.
‘The email you sent her, on “behalf” of the pub committee, was pretty unequivocal.’
Her eyes snap back to him. ‘I was only informing her what we’d decided. It was essential to bar him from the pub. Anyone would think so.’
She’s shocked when he pulls out his phone and starts reading her words back at her: ‘… Your son, Leo Dean, is strictly prohibited from entering Cromley’s pub … Violence will not be tolerated … Strong action will be taken … We also ask, on behalf of the village, that you consider the effect of your continued residency …’
He leaves a pause long enough for Alice to shrink down in the pew. Did Chrissy give them the email, or did they pull it off the server? She feels as if her privacy’s been violated, even though she put those words in writing, signed them with her own name.
‘Pretty similar in theme to the more threatening notes that were left at her house,’ Colella remarks.
‘It’s totally different,’ Alice insists, panic grabbing at her throat.
‘You and Chrissy are having a kind of feud – is that fair to say?’
Feud. It sounds both over-dramatic and over-trivialised. Shakespearian and playground-level. It doesn’t encapsulate the depth of the damage, the hurt; the length and complexity of the history.
‘Her son killed mine,’ Alice breathes. ‘And she could’ve left me – all of us – to grieve in peace, but she didn’t. She stayed around, and then she chose to bring him back here, and now these things are happening—’
‘But he isn’t back here.’
‘I know,’ Alice says yet again, grinding her teeth. ‘But her intention – their intention—’
‘Did you ever visit Leo Dean in prison?’
Alice stills. An image crystalises in her head: the tall metal gates, the comforting coils of barbed wire. She sees herself sitting in her car, windscreen steamed up, a storm of nerves and doubt in her belly.
‘I … I was going to,’ she says softly. ‘I even put myself on the list, a while ago … and was pretty surprised when Leo approved it. But I couldn’t go through with it. I don’t know why I wanted to in the first place.’
A sour taste has come into her mouth. She never went past the gates. Maybe she didn’t trust herself.
‘Did you have a good relationship with Leo and his mother before what happened?’
It’s hard to explain the feeling she has when people ask this. It’s like being reminded of loving someone – blindly and completely – before they betrayed you. Like having made a misjudgement that shapes your whole life, and wearing its scars on your skin for everybody to see.
‘We were close. Chrissy and I … Leo and Robbie …’ Her words slow as if her mechanisms are breaking down. ‘And Leo and I …’ Her stomach tenses over this final admission. Nadia once tried to suggest, in a therapy session, that Alice was not just mourning Robbie; she was grieving for Leo too. But Alice couldn’t follow her down that road.
‘And your brother, Peter …’
Alice’s head jerks up. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ben’s do the same, as if they’re two puppets on the same string.
‘Was he close to them, too?’ Colella asks.
‘He was close to Robbie. He was his uncle.’ She says this as though it’s obvious, while knowing it doesn’t begin to describe how much Robbie idolised Peter, how much Peter doted on him.
‘How did Peter feel about Chrissy and Leo … how does he feel about them?’
‘He …’ Alice has the almost-physical sensation of walking into a trap, and she slows her words down again, as though this might stop it from happening. ‘He … was friendly with both of them, before.’ She decides not to say it any more insistently than that. Leo once looked up to Peter almost as much as Robbie did, but there doesn’t seem any point getting into it. ‘And now … well, he feels the same as me. Same as all of us here.’
‘He has problems with alcohol – is that correct?’
‘Who told you that?’ Alice asks sharply, wondering if it was Chrissy. She notices Ben scratching awkwardly at his beard. Maybe Peter’s problem is common knowledge among the people he used to work with. The idea makes her feel protective; their respect was everything to him, at one time.
‘We’re just trying to get a picture of the village and what’s been happening,’ DC Colella says, swerving the question.
‘He’s had problems in the past.’ Alice flicks her eyes towards Robbie’s photo, feeling guilty talking about his beloved uncle in any negative terms. ‘But he’s in recovery.’
Ben’s phone rings, then, and he looks almost relieved to be able to stand up and move away to answer it. Alice watches as he turns to face a wall, speaking in a low voice.
The detective stays focused on her. ‘We’re going to be conducting some more formal interviews with people from the village. Would you be willing to make an official statement?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. I just don’t know whether I—’
‘And have your fingerprints taken?’
‘My fingerprints?’
She looks down, instinctively, at her hands. How long have they been shaking for? Can the detective see it, too?
‘Will that be a problem?’
‘No, I—’
They’re interrupted by Ben hurrying back over. For a moment, Alice thinks he’s intervened deliberately, until she sees the genuine urgency in his face. ‘Detective … sorry, but … something else has come up.’
‘What is it?’ Colella asks, standing up from the pew.
Ben shows him a page of his notebook. Colella glances at Alice and then gestures for Ben to move away again, walking close beside him and speaking into his ear. Alice watches them whispering in a huddle, DC Colella pulling out his own mobile. Their twitchy movements, the new alertness in their eyes.
She turns her hands palm up and looks at her fingertips. Not red-stained, of course, but she imagines them black-stained after having her prints taken, and bites her lip until it hurts.
Just one note. That was all she wrote, all she sent. A moment of pure anger, her finger hovering over the ‘destruct’ button of Chrissy’s life, aiming for where she knew she could hurt her. A sense of power, of leverage, that still consoles her sometimes now, like a weapon in storage.
One note that, as far as she could tell, was not among the ones the police had photos of. So where is it? And who has been sending the others?