Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007

Going Back by Ann Cleeves

Art by Allen Davis

Winner of the 2006 Duncan Lawrie Dagger for her novel Raven Black (Macmillan), Ann Cleeves works with libraries developing services for readers. The Dagger judges said of her winning book: “Superb sense of place. A depiction of an enclosed community with modern and entrenched values constantly competing. A thrilling read.” Her new book: Hidden Depths.

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Susan had thought she would recognise the place immediately. The pictures in her head were solid and precise. She revisited them regularly, saw them like photos. The grey line of houses surrounded by grey hills. The school playground only separated from fields by a low stone wall, so the wind blowing across it chapped their lips and turned their fingers blue. The tubular steel climbing frame where she’d hung from her knees, her skirt falling over her upper body and the three girls in the corner of the yard sniggering and pointing, shouting at the boys to look. We can see your knickers! We can see your knickers! The chimney-shaped stove in the junior classroom, which the caretaker filled with coke and which belched out sulphur-tasting fumes. Her mother’s mouth crimped in disapproval.

But everything was different. The village had become a fashionable place to live, within easy commuting distance of Leeds. You could tell that rich people lived here. The school had been converted into a picture from a glossy magazine. Through plate-glass windows you could see a pale wood mezzanine floor and exposed beams. Susan wondered if there was any chance of seeing inside, of smelling the wood and touching the heavy fabric of the curtains. Changes to the School House, where she’d lived, were more modest, but the lines of the severe square box had been softened by a conservatory and hanging baskets. In her memory she saw the house through drizzle and fog. Her mother’s resentment at being forced to live there had imposed its own microclimate. Today there was the pale, lemon sunshine of early spring.

And she was back. A fiftieth birthday present to herself. What did they call it? Exorcising ghosts.

So she stood for a moment trying to find her bearings. She sensed Tom’s impatience, but this was her time. Let him wait. She stared fiercely down the road, then closed her eyes and laid the pattern of houses over the landscape of her memory.

“They’ve widened the lane,” she said. “The verge was deeper then.”

He kept quiet. He knew it was important not to say the wrong thing.

When they’d moved here from Leeds, her mother had called it a cultural desert. It had been her father’s first headship and he’d had no real choice in the matter. He hadn’t fitted in at his previous school and had been told by the director of education to apply. He had no vocation for teaching. In the war he’d been happy, had hoped the fighting would go on forever. Afterwards, what could he do? The government needed teachers and would pay him to train.

Her mother had met him when he was a mature student and had rather liked the idea of marrying a teacher. It was a respectable profession. Perhaps she pictured him in a gown taking assembly in an oak-panelled hall. Susan thought she couldn’t have been aware then of the reality — the poor pay, the grubby children who wet their pants and carried nits. Her father didn’t have the academic qualification to teach in a grammar school. He was reduced to drilling the times tables into the heads of bored seven-year-olds, to supervising the half-dressed prancing to Music and Movement on the wireless. It was no job, he said, for a grown man.

And this, he had to admit, was no real headship. There were only thirty children, fifteen infants and fifteen juniors. He took the juniors in one classroom and Miss Pritchard took the infants in the other. Susan’s mother never liked Miss Pritchard, who was plump, comfortable, and vacuous. She liked nothing about the village at all. All she could think of was moving back to the city.

The house was always cold. Even in summer the damp in the walls and the floor seeped into your bones. The wind blew over the Pennines and under the doors. Susan remembered the building in black and white, like the fuzzy pictures on the television in the corner of the front room. Her parents sat every evening in silence watching television, surrounded by their utility furniture, the few good pieces of china her mother had inherited from a well-off aunt, an inscribed tankard which had been given to her father when he left his last school. And always, sometimes even drowning out the voices on the TV, there was the sound of the sheep on the hill. Like a baby crying in the distance.

Susan had escaped outside, to ride her bike down the lane and play on the climbing frame in the schoolyard. Always on her own. Nobody wanted to be friends with the teacher’s lass. They were frightened she’d tell on them. She saw them sometimes, the other girls, Heather and Diane and Marilyn, sitting on the pavement outside the council houses down the hill, their heads together over some game. She never went to join them. She knew she wouldn’t be welcome and besides, her mother didn’t like her mixing. But she watched them. She always knew what they were up to.

She had been so strong then, so easy in her body. She’d walked miles across the hills. There’d been handstands against the wall, reckless slides across ice on the playground, cartwheels. Her mother hadn’t approved. If she saw her daughter on the climbing frame she’d rap on the kitchen window to call her into the house.

“What’s the matter?” Susan knew how to play the innocent. She’d had to learn.

“Behaving like that. Showing your underwear to that boy.” The boy was Eddie Black, a slow, gentle fifteen-year-old who lived in the cottage next to the school. He spent much of his time in the garden, in a wire mesh aviary, caring for his birds.

Susan wondered why that was so wrong. Why was that different from doing Music and Movement in front of her father? Or his coming into her bedroom when she was dressing? But she said nothing. She knew it was impossible to argue with her mother when her mouth was stretched in that thin-lipped way. When the sherry bottle was uncorked on the kitchen table and the first glass was already empty.

One evening stuck in her memory. It had been just before Easter and her mother had gone into Leeds to a concert. The Messiah. She’d driven herself in the black Morris Minor. An adventure, but an ordeal. She’d never enjoyed driving. When she returned she was a different woman. Susan thought, if she’d bumped into her in the street, she wouldn’t have recognised her, the colour in her cheeks, the way she stood. It was like coming back to the village today and not recognising it. Susan had sat on the stairs wrapped up in the candlewick dressing gown listening to her mother’s voice.

“Let’s move, Philip. Please can we move back? A fresh start.”

She hadn’t heard her father’s answer, but the next day nothing had changed and the move was never mentioned again. She couldn’t tell if anything was different between them.

And me? Susan wondered. What was I feeling in this house I don’t know anymore? Nothing. I crept around on the edge of their lives, frozen and silent, trying above all not to make things worse. In school it was the same. Making myself invisible so they wouldn’t poke and pinch and jeer. I only felt alive when I was outside, when I was running or climbing. Or watching.

“Well?” Tom asked, breaking into her memories.

“The gate into the field’s in the same place.”

It could even be the same gate. It was green with lichen and sagging on its hinges. The same sound of wind and sheep. The quarry had finished working even before her day. Now only a tractor would go through occasionally. This was rough grazing and took little work.

“We used to have Sports Day in that field, the flat bit near the gate. The quarry’s up the hill.”

She said used to but as far as she could remember it had only happened once. Her father must have made some arrangement with the farmer. They’d all trooped out through the open gate. No uniform sports kit. It wasn’t that sort of school. She was the only one with an Airtex shirt and navy blue shorts. Heather wore a cotton dress, very short. The fashion. She was in her last year of juniors and already had breasts, which bounced as she ran. Not that she’d put much effort into the running. It had been a simpering show. She’d looked around her making sure they were all watching. But Susan had won the race. She’d crossed the line even before the boys. That’ll show them, she’d thought. Flying across the field, she’d felt triumphant. This small world was hers. Let the other girls say what they liked. And of course they’d had plenty to say. Real girls didn’t run. Not like that.

Now, middle-aged, she felt the first twinges of arthritis in her shoulders and her knees. She was overweight and unfit. All her movements were tentative. She’d never have that freedom again. The confidence to balance, arms outstretched, on the top bar of the farm gate. That sense of running over the uneven grass. She caught her breath to prevent a wail of loss and regret.

Soon after Sports Day, Heather Mather had gone missing. At first everyone thought she’d run away, hitched a lift into Leeds or sneaked onto the Secondary Modern bus. She was a flighty thing. “Too old for her years,” said Mrs. Tillotson, the widow who took the Sunday school and played the out-of-tune organ in the church. A policeman came to the school and talked to them all in turn, looking very big and clumsy sitting on one of the children’s chairs, his bum hanging over each side. They hadn’t laughed at him. They knew he was trying to be friendly. Her father had stood at the front of the class, watching and frowning. Even if Susan had wanted to tell the policeman what she knew about Heather Mather and where she was, it would be quite impossible with her father listening in.

Then, when Heather didn’t return, the word in the village was that Eddie Black had taken her. Eddie lived with his mother and though he’d left school, he didn’t work. Susan knew Eddie hadn’t taken Heather. He wouldn’t know how to hurt her. He was painfully careful when he held his birds, and once when Susan had tripped and fallen, grazing her knee so it bled, he had cried. But everyone in the village said he’d taken her. One night someone threw a rock through Mrs. Black’s bedroom window. The next morning Eddie woke up to find that two of his birds were dead. Their necks had been twisted. He stood in his garden and looked round him, bewildered, his mouth slightly open, as if he couldn’t really understand what had happened.

Heather never turned up and her body was never found. The police wanted to charge Eddie with her murder, but decided that they had insufficient evidence. Even in those days, more was needed than neighbourhood gossip and a gut feeling that the boy was odd. They needed a body.

Beside her, Tom coughed. He didn’t want this to last all day. He wanted to be home in Durham before it got dark. He knew it was important, but he was a great one for routine. He liked to get his dinner on time. Susan untied the frayed baler twine which attached the gate to the post, lifted it on its hinges over the long grass, and they walked through.

“This way,” she said. “Mind, though, it’s a bit of a walk.”

Heather Mather had boyfriends nobody knew anything about. Not a real boyfriend. Not a lad her own age to have a giggle with, holding hands on the way down from the hill. Games of doctors and nurses in the shed at the bottom of the garden, brief forbidden kisses and flushed red faces. The other girls played games like that, but not Heather. She was too old for her years, as Mrs. Tillotson had said, and when she thought no one was looking she had a watchful, wary look. Sometimes Susan thought if she hadn’t been the teacher’s daughter, they might have been friends. Heather’s boyfriends were older. They were men, not boys. She got into their cars and drove off with them and when she got back she lied about where she’d been. Even to Marilyn and Diane.

Uncle Alec took me to the pictures in town.

And Uncle Alec lied about it, too.

It were a good film, weren’t it, love?

His arm around her, protective, as they stood on the short strip of pavement, the only pavement in the village, outside her house. Alec Mather, her dad’s brother, who worked as gamekeeper on the big estate, who was tall and strong and carried a gun. Who had a dog that would do anything Alec told it, that would go through fire for him, everyone said, but that snarled and bared its teeth at anyone else. Susan tried for a moment to remember the name of the dog. Why wouldn’t it come to her, when everything else was so clear? Soon she gave up. She had other, more disturbing memories.

It hadn’t been Alec’s car Heather had climbed into, her skirt riding up so she nearly showed her knickers, the first time Susan had watched her. It could have been one of Alec’s friends who was driving. He was about the same age, dark hair greased back, a tattoo on the back of his hand. And later, when he dropped Heather back in the lane down to the church, Alec was there to meet them. When Heather wasn’t looking (though Susan was, hiding at the top of a high stone wall which surrounded the churchyard) the stranger handed him a five-pound note. Alec slipped it quickly into the pocket of his jacket. The wall was nearly three feet thick, covered with ivy and overhung with branches. Susan could remember the smell of the ivy even now, as they walked across the field, up the hill towards the quarry. This was the first of several encounters she witnessed over the months. Sometimes the men were strangers and sometimes she recognised them. Money usually changed hands.

Would she have described this to the friendly policeman when he came to the classroom to ask about Heather if her father hadn’t been there, listening in? Perhaps she would. Then everything would have been different. Her whole life. She wouldn’t be here walking up the hill with Tom on an April afternoon.

After that day she watched Heather more closely. She listened to the women talking after church. Heather’s father had gone away to work. He’d got a job as a cook in the merchant navy. Alec spent a lot of time with the family to keep an eye on things. It only made sense.

And one afternoon Susan watched Heather climb into her father’s car, the teacher’s car. It was soon after Sports Day, at the start of the school holidays, one of those rare hot, still days. In the house there had still been a chill caused by the rotting walls and her parents’ antagonism. Her father said he had an NUT meeting in Leeds and her mother wanted a lift into town. He’d told her it wasn’t possible. He’d promised a lift to colleagues from the villages on the way. There wouldn’t be room in the Morris for Sylvia, too. She’d sulked, fetched the sherry from the sideboard, which she only did at lunchtime when she was severely provoked. Outside it was airless. Susan felt the sun burning her bare arms and legs, beating up from the tarmac of the playground. She went to her nest on the churchyard wall not to watch but to find some shade.

She saw Heather first. She was on her own. No Alec. No Marilyn and Diane. She walked slowly down the lane, her head bent, looking down at her sandals. In September she’d move on to the big school and already Susan could sense that gulf between them. It was very quiet. There was a wood pigeon calling from the trees behind the church and the distant, inevitable sheep. Then a car engine and the Morris Minor, squat and shiny as a beetle, drove slowly past. It stopped just beyond Heather. She didn’t change her pace or look up, but when she reached the passenger door, she opened it and got in. Despite the sun reflected from the car’s bonnet, which made her screw up her eyes, Susan was frozen. She wanted to shout out. Hello. Heather. Look at me. Come and play. Anything to stop her climbing into the car. But the words wouldn’t come. The car pulled slowly away, backed into the church entrance to turn, then drove off.

Alec was there when it returned. He was leaning against the wall, turning his face to the sun, so close to Susan that she could almost have reached out and touched his hair. The dog was with him, lying on the road, its tongue out, panting. Her father was alone in the car. The window was open and she could see his face, very red. He was furious.

“You cheated me,” he said. It was a hiss, not a whisper. Alec hadn’t moved from the wall and if her father had spoken more softly he wouldn’t have been heard. Susan thought he sounded a bit like one of the little boys in the infants’ class, complaining about a stolen toy. It’s not fair. That was what her father meant, even if he didn’t say it.

“She came with you, didn’t she?” Still Alec leaned against the wall, his arms folded against his chest, that smile on his face.

“But she wouldn’t even let me…”

“That were down to you, weren’t it? She’s only a slip of a thing.”

“For Christ’s sake, man.”

“Anyway, that were the deal. Ten pounds. No going back now. Any road, it’s already spent. Where is she?”

“Up on the hill. Near the quarry. We went for a walk. I thought…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Aye, well, I reckon she’ll come down in her own time. I’ll have a word. Make her see sense. You can fix up to take her out later, if you like.”

Her father didn’t reply. He didn’t mention the money again, though money was always tight in their house. It was one of the things her parents fought about. He wound up the window and drove off. She wondered where he went. Not to the union meeting. He wouldn’t have had time to get to Leeds and back. Later, though, when it was dark outside and they were watching the television, he talked about the resolutions they’d discussed at the meeting and the men he’d met. Susan would have been entirely taken in if she hadn’t known he was lying. She wondered how many times he’d lied to them before. It was as if everything was a game and nothing was real anymore.

Heather didn’t go home that night. That was the day she disappeared.

Susan thought she couldn’t have been the only person in the village to know about Heather’s men friends and how Alec organised it all. They must have seen the strangers’ cars, realised there were nights when the gamekeeper had cash to spend in the pub. But nobody spoke. When the police asked questions the villagers talked about shy Eddie Black. Otherwise they kept their mouths firmly shut. Alec’s dog had a mad eye and Alec had a fierce temper, even when he was smiling. They didn’t want to know what had really happened to Heather.

Susan knew. When her father had driven off and Alec had sauntered back to the village, towards the house he shared with Heather’s mum, she’d scrambled down from the wall, pulling away the ivy in her haste. Despite the heat she’d gone to the hill, running all the way. She hadn’t opened the gate into the quarry field that day, she’d climbed it. Then, she’d been young and strong. From halfway up the hill, she’d seen Heather lying flat on her back at the edge of the old workings. At first she’d thought she was asleep, but as she approached, scattering the sheep in her path, she’d realised that the girl’s eyes were open and there were tears on her cheeks.

Heather heard her coming. She must have done. By then Susan was out of breath, panting, and there’d be the sound of her footsteps and the sheep loping off. But she didn’t sit up until the very last minute.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Who were you expecting?” Susan demanded. “Alec? My dad?”

“Your father? He’s pathetic.”

That was what they always called her. It was the jeer that followed her around the playground. You’re pathetic, you are. Shouted in turn by Marilyn, Diane, and Heather. It was the word that made her fight back.

“Not as pathetic as your dad. Moving out and letting Alec take up with your mam. Not as pathetic as you, going off with all those men, just because he tells you.”

She was shocked by her own courage. She’d never stood up to one of them before. Heather was stunned too. She got to her feet but didn’t say anything. Susan thought she might run down the hill and home. But she didn’t. She just stared.

At last Heather spoke. “If you say anything at school, I’ll tell them about your father. I’ll tell them he made me go off with him.”

“I wouldn’t tell them!” Susan moved forward. “I never would.” In her head she had a picture of the two of them, sitting on the pavement outside the council houses, friends brought together by the shared secret. Besides, who would she tell?

Heather must have seen the step towards her as a threat. She backed away, lost her footing, slipped. Susan might have been able to save her. She was strong. And there was a moment when she almost did it. When she almost reached out and grabbed the girl’s arm. If she saved Heather’s life, wouldn’t she have to be her friend? But she decided not to. She wanted to see what it would look like. What Heather would look like rolling down the steep bank until she reached the overhang and fell into nothing. What sound she would make when she hit the stones below. It was as if all the watching had been leading up to this moment. And it was all very satisfactory, very satisfying. There was the expression of panic when Heather scrabbled to save herself and realised it was useless, the moment of flight, the dull thud. And then her undignified resting place amongst the rubble of quarry waste, her skirt around her waist, her legs spread out. Susan would have liked to leave her there for everyone to see.

But that wouldn’t do. Someone might have seen Susan get over the gate into the field. Then there’d be questions she didn’t want to answer. And Susan wanted to get closer to the body. She was curious now to see what it looked like. She peered down over the lip of the cliff to the face of the quarry where the stone had been hacked away. It was a difficult climb, but not impossible for her, not so very different from scrambling down from the churchyard wall. Only in scale. At the bottom she took a minute to catch her breath. She stood over Heather, who didn’t really look like Heather at all now. Then she rolled her close into the cliff face and piled her body with the loose rocks which lined the quarry bottom. That was more exhausting than the climb back. When she reached the top the sun was very low. She took one last look down the cliff. Because of the angle it was hard to see where Heather was lying and even if you could see the place it would look as if there’d been a small rock fall.

When she got in her mother told her off for being so filthy. When are you going to start acting like a girl? Her father talked about the union meeting. They watched television. There was shepherd’s pie for tea.

The policeman came into school to ask his questions and later she wished she’d told him what had happened. She could have explained that it was an accident. She could have said she’d panicked. They’d have had to accept that. They’d have given her help. But perhaps by then it was already too late. The trouble was, she’d enjoyed it. The moment when Heather fell had been so exciting. It had the thrill and the power of running across the field on Sports Day, of crossing the line first. It had caused sparks in her brain. She’d wanted to recreate that buzzing sensation. She’d thought of nothing else. That was why she’d killed Eddie’s birds. But birds aren’t like people. It wasn’t the same.

Tom wasn’t much more fit than she was and it took them longer than she’d expected to walk up the hill to the disused quarry. Since her time they’d put up a fence and a couple of notices saying it was unsafe. It wasn’t as deep as she’d remembered.

“That’s where she is,” she said. “Under that pile of rubble at the bottom of the cliff. That’s where you’ll find Heather Mather.”

“So,” he said. “The scene of your first crime.”

“Oh no.” She was offended. “Heather was an accident. Not like the others.”

She liked Tom. He was her named officer at the prison. She’d refused to speak to the detectives and the psychiatrists who’d tried to persuade her to tell them where Heather Mather was. Her first victim, as they called her. The first of four before she was caught. All pretty girls who simpered and pouted and made up to older men.

Tom spoke into his radio and she could already see the police officers who’d been waiting in the van coming through the gate. She let him take her arm and steer her down the hill. He’d be ready for his dinner.