THE SCREAMING STARTED early that night, only a few minutes after “News at Ten” had started, instead of nearer midnight. Sue Chalmers swore.
“Don’t let it get to you,” Dan said, chucking the Evening Standard on the floor by his chair. “Block it out.”
“How can I? Night after bloody night. They have to yell like that to make it sound as if they’re having fun, when they’re really feeling sick as dogs from all the booze and just as unsure and lonely and wondering why they don’t enjoy the stuff everyone else does as we were when we were in our teens. I’d like to ram their stupid little heads against the nearest wall and bash some sense into them.”
Dan pulled his long body out of his chair, brushing his hand casually against her hair as he passed on his way out. She was so tense the pressure on her scalp seemed like an assault instead of the comfort she knew it was supposed to be.
“I know,” she said through her teeth. “They’re only young. And you hate it when I’m so vehement. But it gets to me.”
“Tea?”
“Why not?” She leaned back and turned her head so she could smile over the back of the chair. “Sorry.”
The newsreader was talking about the Middle East and Sue hated herself for getting so wound up about a bit of irritating noise when there were people out there living in hell. Dying, too. A dose of that kind of reality would sort out the shrieking, drunken teenagers and make them see what really mattered.
When silence fell five minutes later, it was like warmed oil oozing into an aching ear. Sue felt able to concentrate on the news again. Dan came back with the tea. This time, his hand on her head felt right, kind. She leaned closer to him.
Ten minutes after that footsteps sounded on the narrow pavement outside. They were even more familiar than the partying teenagers’ screeches: Maggie Tulloch from three houses down was on her way home from another long stint in the probation office. Tonight her feet were dragging more than usual. She must have had a frustrating day. Sue liked her, and admired the way she went on and on trying to make her clients behave like human beings instead of filthy, thieving thugs.
Maggie heard Sue’s television as she walked past the windows of number twenty-three, knowing she had only a minute and a half more of freedom. You shouldn’t use your job as an excuse to stay out late, she thought, then took some reassurance from the knowledge that her work mattered.
If only one of the miserable, infuriating, self-indulgent, drug-addled ex-cons she had to deal with refrained from hurting someone else because of her efforts, then her addiction to work would be justified. The trouble was, none of them had refrained yet, and she’d been doing the job for thirteen years.
She stopped on her own front door step and had to force herself to get out her key and stuff it in the keyhole. The television was on in her house too, but unlikely to be showing anything as real or useful as the news. Leaning sideways to listen, she caught Celia Johnson’s clipped and tragic voice, saying: “It can’t last. This misery can’t last.”
Oh can’t it? Maggie crunched her key in the lock and turned it.
“Hi, Mum!” she said aloud as she dumped her briefcase by the cold radiator and swung off her thin linen jacket to hang it over the end of the bannisters.
“You’re late, darling.”
I wish you wouldn’t call me darling, she thought, when everything else you say shows how much you hate me.
“Your supper’s probably ruined, although I did turn the oven down a couple of hours ago. It’s chicken.”
“No worries.” Maggie walked towards the kitchen, repeating Celia Johnson’s thought: it can’t last; this misery can’t last.
How sensible it had seemed when her father had died only months after her husband had decided that married life and a toddler were not for him after all. She’d needed help; her mother, pension-less, work-less and utterly lost, had needed somewhere to live and something to do. Thirteen years ago.
The toddler was now fifteen, nearly sixteen. And Maggie’s mother was not lost or uncertain any longer. Absolutely certain, in fact, about everything that was wrong with her daughter and the way she was bringing up Gemma, and not at all surprised Michael had decided to leave because who could possibly want to spend his life with someone who wouldn’t eat what she was given, who dressed so badly, who swore so much, who was so work-obsessed she was the most boring person on earth, who was so …
Don’t do it, Maggie said to herself. Don’t let her get to you. These are old battles and they can only be fought by two people. Refuse to fight back and she’ll stop. One day she’ll stop.
She listened again, then felt her neck muscles relaxing. For once there wasn’t any thudding angry music from Gemma’s room, distracting her from the work she had to do if she was to get anywhere near a decent university. Maggie looked at the kitchen clock. Ten fifteen. That meant fifteen minutes to eat whatever was edible from the oven and calm down, then nip up to talk to Gemma and make sure she was feeling okay about tomorrow’s exam, then a long hot bath and bed.
An open bottle of Australian Shiraz stood by the cooker. She slopped some into a huge old rummer. It had been one of the few wedding presents Michael hadn’t taken with him. Then she took herself to task, found a second rummer, polished it carefully, filled it with wine and carried both through to the sitting room.
“Oh, darling, is that for me?” Her mother glanced away from the screen for a second. “Isn’t it rather a lot?”
“You don’t need to drink it all if it’s too much,” Maggie said, lowering herself on to the sofa and letting her eyes close for a second. She took a deep swallow. “Mmm. My drug of choice!”
“Don’t be like that, darling. You’re nowhere near addicted, even if you do drink ra-ather more than you should.”
“Thanks, Mum.” Maggie looked at Celia Johnson being intensely unhappy on the screen and wondered whether the choice of film was meant as a reproach. She knew her mother was lonely, and maybe it wasn’t her fault that she wouldn’t even try to make friends or find herself any kind of occupation except watching DVDs of old films. “How was your day?”
“Tiresome.” She flashed a long-suffering smile at Maggie, who smiled back and felt her jaw muscles crack. “You know the gas man was supposed to deal with the boiler.”
“I remember. Didn’t he come?”
“Of course not, and then there weren’t any pomegranates left in the supermarket, so I couldn’t do Gemma’s favourite dish, which I’d promised her as a pre-exam treat.”
“She’ll understand.” Maggie drank again. “And you’ve obviously managed her brilliantly tonight, getting her to work without that awful music taking half her attention away from her books.”
“Oh, she’s not in tonight, darling. She needed a treat to relax her before tomorrow, so I gave her a little something to augment your mingy allowance and said she could go and see that friend of hers, who lives so near. Gillie, isn’t it?”
Maggie put down her glass as though she didn’t trust herself not to throw its contents all over her mother.
“You did what? On the night before an exam? Mum, how could you? You know how hard it’s been to make Gemma take her work seriously. For God’s sake!”
And then her mother laughed, with a pitying, condescending kind of amusement that turned all kinds of ancient levers in Maggie’s brain.
“Funny how things change, darling. I can see you now, standing with your arms akimbo, thirty years ago, explaining to me precisely why I was the cruellest woman in the world when I forbade you to see your best friend on a school night.”
Maggie turned on her heel and headed for the kitchen. Even dried-out charred chicken would help stifle all the words she couldn’t say, musn’t say.
I’m not a cruel woman, she told herself. Anyone would find this hard. It can’t last.
She switched off the oven, opened the door and looked at the blackened stumpy chicken legs. There were four, which meant Gemma hadn’t eaten before she left. The ration was always one drumstick and one thigh each. Her teeth were more than sharp enough to rip the hardened flesh from the bones of two of the joints, then she ran the cold tap until the water was icy, washing first her hands and then her face.
When she went back to the sitting room, she was calm enough to say: “I know I was a tiresome adolescent, but you can’t hold it against me forever. You know why I want Gemma to stay here on school nights. Encouraging her to rebel may give you satisfaction, but it’s damaging all her chances.”
“Don’t make such a fuss, darling. She’ll be back any minute now. She promised to leave Gillie’s by ten.”
“What?” Maggie reached for the phone, feeling the ground lurch beneath her feet. She knew the number as well as she knew her own, but for a few awful seconds she couldn’t make her fingers work. At last she heard the ringing, on and on, then the voicemail cut in:
“Hi, it’s Gemma,” came the light cheery voice. “I’m having much too good a time to answer, so leave a message and I’ll ring you back. Bye.”
“Gemma, it’s Mum. Phone me.” It was at least three years since Gemma had last addressed her as Mum, but she wasn’t going to call herself Maggie to her own daughter.
She found the number of Gillie’s house and rang it. Diana, Gillie’s mother, answered almost at once.
“It’s Maggie,” she said, without any kind of greeting. “Is Gemma there? I need to talk to her.”
“Oh, hi, Mags. No, she isn’t. She left, what? Must be at least twenty minutes ago. She’d promised your mother she’d be home by ten. Isn’t she back yet?”
“No.” The floor wasn’t moving any more, but waves of heat and cold were washing through Maggie and she felt more unsafe than ever. “It shouldn’t have taken her more than six minutes at the very most. Did she leave on her own?”
“Of course, not. I wouldn’t have let her. Jed was with her. You know, Jed Springthorpe, the most responsible boy in the whole school. She’ll be all right with him. Honestly, Maggie. Don’t fret. They’ve probably just stopped off for an illicit drink. Or a fag or two. I know they’re not supposed to smoke, but I bet they do.”
Maggie muttered something vaguely polite, then cut the connection to phone Gemma’s mobile again. Again she got the jaunty message.
“I’m going to look for her.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Mum, don’t be silly. With your knees, I’ll be quicker on my own. And someone needs to be here in case she gets back.”
Maggie thought there was no point bothering with a jacket. The air was warm enough. Even the pavements still held some of the day’s heat. Thank God it was light still. Somehow this would seem even worse in the dark. And Gemma was nearly sixteen. Lots of people started work at sixteen. In her day, people of that age were travelling the world on their own. Maybe they still were. This panic was absurd.
But she couldn’t keep it down. Something had happened. Gemma never turned off her phone. And she never left it to ring so long the voicemail cut in. She was far, far too keen to have any kind of contact with anyone.
She and Jed could have chosen any of four different routes from Gillie’s house on the other side of the main road. The most direct would have taken them past the local supermarket, but there were no enticing attractions to make them linger there. It shut early on Mondays, so they wouldn’t even have been tempted to drop in to buy drink. But two of the other streets had pubs, and the third an expensive wine bar. Normally that would have been out of their reach financially, but tonight they had the money Maggie’s mother had handed over.
Maggie pushed open the door of the first pub to be assaulted by heavy, pounding music, and excited yelling conversations. She almost fainted with relief when she saw the bright blonde straight hair of a tall slim girl by the bar.
“Gemma!” she shouted across the shrieky crowd. “Gemma!”
Three girls looked round. None of them was her daughter. The girl at the bar turned her head lazily, perhaps wondering at the unexpectedly adult voice, and revealed herself to be a total stranger.
Maggie was out again an instant later, running now towards the other pub. She had no more luck there. Outside again, she sent Gemma a text:
“RUOK? Pls phone.”
Then she waited, leaning against the wall outside the pub, among a bunch of curious smokers, staring down at the small screen, begging for an answer. Nothing came. She phoned again. Again she heard the message.
“Jed,” she said aloud, trying to think of the quickest way of getting his number. Her mind wasn’t working properly. Gillie, obviously. But she hadn’t brought that number with her either.
She began to run again, heading for home by the most direct route, needing to get to her address book as fast as possible. Her useless feet caught in every loose paving stone, until she gave up and kicked off her shoes, bending down to scoop them under one arm. As she righted herself, she pressed the speed dial for Gemma’s number, and ran on, her shoeless feet keeping a much better grip on the paving stones.
Her tights ripped in moments, but that didn’t matter, and once her right foot hit something soft, disgusting. Even that didn’t make her pause. She ran on until a stitch savaged her midriff and forced her to stop just at the entrance to the supermarket carpark.
She’d forgotten the disabling pain; it was so long since she’d moved faster than a brisk walk. Gasping, fighting to get past the spasm, hugging herself, she looked at the long low buildings of the supermarket and thought how odd they seemed with no lights on and no cars lined up in front. Rubbish was strewn all round the recycling bins and the lid of the paper and cardboard one was propped open.
A ringing sound forced itself into her mind, and she looked down at the little phone she was carrying, sticky now from the sweat on her hand. The sound wasn’t coming from there; all she could hear as she held it was a faint buzz, but the rhythm of buzz and ring was the same.
When she put her finger on the off button the ringing stopped, along with the buzz. She pressed the speed dial button for Gemma’s phone again and the ringing started up. The sound was coming from somewhere near the recycling bins.
“She dropped her phone,” Maggie said, holding her right hand over her heart, as though to hold down its leaping and banging. “That’s all that’s happened. She’s not answering because she lost her phone. She’s probably safe home by now and they’re laughing at my neuroses again.”
Miraculously the stitch had gone, and the breathlessness with it. She felt fit and well and marginally more sensible.
She followed the ringing sound as she searched for the phone. If she could restore it to Gemma, it might help their continuing war, show how she understood that endless phoning was important, and texting and friends and doing everything except revision.
Another sound punctuated the ringing. A tiny gasping voice. “Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Please. Oh, please. Mum.”
Maggie felt as if something had gone wrong with time, as though it was stretching out towards eternity. Her thoughts were racing, but each step took aeons to achieve.
Each recycling-bin lid she lifted seemed to weigh several tons. That agonizing voice went on and on and the phone kept ringing. She reached the glass recycling-bin and fought with the lid.
“Mum. Mum. Mum. Please come. Please. Mum.”
This was the one. The voice was louder here.
“Gemma, darling, I’m here. Don’t worry. I’m here.”
The light was much dimmer now. It must have been nearly eleven. But Maggie could see down into the blackness of the bin, to where her daughter was lying in a foetal curl.
Gemma’s head was a mass of dark-red stickness, the laboriously straightened, gleaming blonde hair matted now with blood. Light from the street lamps caught edges of broken glass and showed cuts all up and down the bent bare legs.
Maggie leaned down to touch her daughter’s skin, but her arms were too short to reach deep enough into the bin. She punched 999 into her phone, all the time saying Gemma’s name, pouring out words of reassurance that meant absolutely nothing, because there was no reassurance to be had here.
“Police,” she said into the phone when they answered. “Police and ambulance.”
“What’s your address?”
She told them where she was and what she’d found, not saying it was her own daughter.
A patrol car drew up only two minutes later, and two uniformed officers got out, putting on their caps as they strolled towards her. Maggie couldn’t speak now, just gestured towards the bin and stood back to let them see.
“Christ!” said one, pulling at his phone.
“I’ve already asked for an ambulance,” Maggie said, surprised to find that her voice still worked. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”
She couldn’t understand why the two officers looked at each other in such a weird way.
“We’ll hurry up the ambulance,” said the woman. “Come and sit in the car and tell me how you found this girl.”
“What?” Maggie stared at the officer’s pleasant pink ignorant face. “What d’you mean, sit in the car? I’m not leaving her.”
Later, hours and hours later in the hospital, she was sitting down, waiting. She’d told the police everything she knew. She’d phoned her mother to report and spent what felt like hours reassuring her. No, no, of course it wasn’t your fault. Of course you were doing what you thought was right. It was generous of you to give her money.
And then she’d come back here to wait, sitting on the edge of the hard plastic chair, not even noticing it was cutting off the blood supply in her legs until the pins and needles started actively to hurt.
A white-coated girl, woman, was walking towards Maggie now. The stethoscope banged her chest lightly with every step. Her expression was serious. Maggie ground the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, and waited again.
“She hasn’t been raped,” said the doctor. “That’s one thing.”
“And the rest? How bad is it?”
“All head injuries are serious. She’s taken quite a kicking. I’d say there were at least two of them. Scans show she’s been bleeding into the brain, but we don’t yet know the full extent of any damage.”
“And the prognosis?”
The doctor’s face froze into blank, stubborn politeness, and something inside Maggie – some last vestige of hope – died.
“Darling! Darling, wake up!”
Maggie opened her gummy eyes. Moving her neck was agony. She’d fallen asleep with her head at an atrocious angle against the wall.
“I’ve brought you some coffee. Come on. It’s a new day. You need to be strong now.”
“Have they said anything?”
Her mother bit her lip. “Not yet. I got here about an hour ago, and they said they wouldn’t know anything for a while. But the police are coming. They’re going to want to talk to you, and I thought you’d like a chance to have some coffee, and maybe a wash even.”
Maggie was picking hard crunchy grits out of the corners of her eyes. She took her fingers away and looked at her mother, whose own eyes were covered with a film of tears.
“Come on, Maggie darling. There’s a cloakroom at the end of the passage. Shall I take you?”
A tiny smile was all she could produce, but she could see it registering, which made it easier to speak without snapping.
“I can probably manage. But thank you, Mum.”
Her mother’s hand encircled her wrist for a second, then let her go. “I’ll be here with the coffee,” she said. “And I brought a sandwich too in case you’re hungry, but it doesn’t matter if you’re not. You don’t have to eat it.”
Tears were pouring down Maggie’s face as she headed for the loos.
The police officer who was waiting beside her mother looked much more senior than the two who’d come last night. He was wearing a suit made of some thinnish grey material and a white shirt, with a dark-blue tie.
“Mrs Tulloch?” he said, shaking her hand. “I’m very sorry about what’s happened to your daughter. Do you feel up to talking?”
“If it’ll help,” said Maggie.
Her throat felt as though someone had stuffed it with wire wool they’d then pulled slowly up and down all night. And all her joints were stiff and painful.
“Didn’t anyone see anything?” she said. “Or hear it? I know the supermarket shuts early on Mondays, but there are usually people in the streets at that time. And there are houses all round. You can’t be kicked like that and make no noise. Someone must have heard something. The marks on her body make the doctors think there were two of them at it.”
Which means it wasn’t Jed, she suddenly thought, with real gratitude. Jed. Why didn’t I think of him before?
“Has anyone found the boy?” she said aloud.
“Boy?” said the inspector. “What boy?”
And so she told him about Jed, who was supposed to have been so responsibly escorting Gemma home by ten o’clock.
“Have you got a phone number?”
“No. But I can get it for you.”
“Or a surname?”
Her brain had shut down again as guilt poured through it. What if Jed had been in one of the other bins, bleeding all night, bleeding out maybe? Dying? And she hadn’t said anything.
“Gerald Springthorpe,” said her mother.
“Was he – I mean, is he Gemma’s boyfriend?”
“No. Just a friend. They’re all at school together, so he’s probably sitting in the exam room now.”
Maggie noticed that her mother was talking absolutely normally, sensibly, without any carping or martyring herself. She was in charge, and in some weird way it helped.
“We’ll talk to him later. Can you tell me …?”
His voice seemed to be coming from further and further away. Maggie’s temperature control had gone again. Shivering, boiling, she felt the floor tilting upwards and then nothing.
They’d found Jed by the time Gemma was pronounced dead three hours later, and one of the DI’s juniors was relaying his story to Maggie. Listening to it helped to hold her in the present, but it couldn’t stop the tears that came out of her eyes in great gouts. More fluid than she’d ever have believed a body could hold. She didn’t even try to stop them, or dry her face.
“He says they were together all the way to the Bull, then a mate of his called out and wanted them to come in for a drink,” the police officer told her. “He says Gemma refused, said her nan would kill her if she was late home again. He said OK, he’d take her to the door, then come back to join his mate in the pub, but Gemma asked him if he thought she was a baby.”
“So he let her go,” Maggie said, thinking what tiny things had made this huge unalterable disaster: her own insistence on not being out late on school nights; Gemma’s pride; Jed’s friend hanging around the pub at just the wrong moment.
“It wasn’t his fault, Mrs Tulloch. Really it wasn’t.”
“Didn’t he hear anything?” Maggie said. “It was only a street way. She must have screamed.”
Then she thought about the noise she’d heard in the pub. Jed had probably been inside then. If she’d known, if he’d recognized her, would there have been time to find and save Gemma?
Maggie bent over her knees, fighting to keep the howl inside her body.
“With all that music no one could’ve heard anything from outside,” the officer said, then echoed her thoughts: “You’d know that I expect. I mean, you were in there yourself. We’ve got you on the CCTV, calling her name. Jed and his mate were there, too. The film proves his story.”
“So no one knows who did it?”
“Not yet. I’m sorry, Mrs Tulloch. We’re doing everything we can. We’ve taken every possible kind of sample. The labs will …”
Maggie stopped listening. What did it matter anyway? Gemma was dead. It could’ve been anyone – one of her own clients, even, hanging about, bored, grabbing a passing girl to rob her of her phone and whatever pathetic little amount of money she had.
Had she fought back? Was that why they’d kicked her to death. Or were they crack-crazed thugs, getting off on her terror and their power?
“What about the secret cameras by the bins?” said her mother.
Maggie raised her sodden face and saw the officer looking sceptical.
“What secret cameras?” he said.
“The council put them there by the bins only a few weeks ago. One or two of the sluttier neighbours were flytipping nearly every day. Dumping their smelly rubbish in the recycling bins. So we got the council to put the cameras there. They should’ve had film in and been running. They must show what happened.”
“It’ll haunt me until I die,” Sue Chalmers said to Dan that night. “They were only thin scraggy boys who did it. Twelve-year-olds. You and I could’ve fought them off, stopped them killing her, if we’d known. But how could we know?”
“It’s not our fault. I phoned the cops when we heard the screaming but it took them more than half an hour to come.”
“You did what?”
“Like you, I thought it was just kids making a racket, enjoying themselves, so I rang the local nick to complain, instead of 999. By the time they got round to investigating, poor Maggie Tulloch had already found Gemma. But at least they’ve got the boys now, and the evidence to prove it was them. They’ll definitely go down for it.”
“I don’t suppose that’ll help Maggie, though. D’you think I ought to go round and see her?”
“No. You’d be intruding on that awful grief. And she’s got her mother with her, after all.”