Death Wore White

Jillie Baker‐Sibley could hear the traffic in the sea mist but she couldn’t see the pus‐yellow headlights until they were thirty yards away; the cars whispering past, the drivers bent forward, trying to see something where there was nothing. Fossdyke, the ancient Roman bank which kept the sea back off the land, stretched out into fog ahead of her, like a drawbridge over an unseen gorge.

She was getting colder, her arms held awkwardly at her sides, her jaw aching with the effort of not shivering. Any warmth she’d gathered overnight was bleeding away. She’d slept in the shed at the bottom of Clara’s garden, wrapped up in a picnic blanket, with a paraffin lamp on. Her friend had got her soup in a flask and a microwaved stick of garlic bread.

At dawn she’d crept out and left a note.

Thanks. Don’t tell them. I’ll write.

J. x

She picked up her first lift on the coast road, round Lynn, and west towards the Midlands. The mist had cleared for an hour and she’d seen the horizon. To the north, reclaimed land ran to the shore of the Wash, a patchwork of mathematical fields dusted with snow, a power station the only feature, catching the sunlight like

The icy wind had made the legs of her jeans flap. ‘Fuck it,’ she’d said to herself, wishing she hadn’t forgotten how to cry. In her pocket she clutched a key, but its power to still her rising panic was fading. Alone, stranded, she felt an almost overwhelming urge to scream.

She’d got a lift, finally, from a truck to Sutton Bridge where the old mechanical swing bridge loomed, a giant’s Meccano set crossing the grey waters of the Welland. The mist closed in again beyond the town, curling over the thirty‐foot‐high bank like dry ice. Grey cottages built on the wide dyke came and went, but they saw no one. Villages dripped in the damp cloud which had fallen on the world.

Then another truck: Luxembourg plates, a single silver container. She’d answered the driver’s questions.

Where was she heading? The M1.

Was this the right way? It was the right way. Shouldn’t she be in school? She was sixteen.

Where would she go when she got to the M1 – north or south? To the airport.

Did she have a ticket? Did her parents know?

She said she needed to get out at the next roundabout. He said that it would be best to go to a police station, they could check she was OK. She said she’d tell them he’d tried to rape her, in a lay‐by, that he’d used his weight to lie on top of her, that you couldn’t hear her screams because of the traffic thundering by. He didn’t see her cut a thin line along her cheekbone with a fingernail.

They drove to a service station in silence and she got out at the exit. Standing on the grass verge she’d spat on his windscreen. That made her feel better, in charge, powerful. Empowered. She liked that word.

He’d pulled away and she’d watched the tail lights fade in the mist, the world around her a shifting jigsaw of grey and white.

The car that picked her up was a black Jag.

It went past once. Then she heard it brake. She didn’t notice it going back the other way, or hear it pulling an unseen U‐turn. When it coasted out of the gloom the second time its tyres crunched in the kerb on broken glass and she recognized the umbrella furled on the back seat.

She took a step back, looking around as if trying to find a way off the bank. But the field below was a milk‐white pool of mist, weaving its way between wooden posts.

The passenger side window came down electronically. She shook her head, but then she got in.