But perhaps it was Annie who was making Banks unhappy? He had never seemed quite certain of their relationship whenever Jenny had questioned him. She had assumed that was mostly due to his innate evasiveness when it came to personal and emotional matters – like most men – but perhaps he was genuinely confused.
Not that she could do anything. She remembered how disappointed she had felt last year when he had accepted her dinner invitation and failed to turn up, or even phone. Jenny had sat there in her most seductive silky outfit, duck à l’orange in the oven, ready to take a risk again, and waited and waited. At last he had phoned. He’d been called to a hostage situation. Well, it was definitely a good excuse, but it didn’t do much to dispel her sense of disappointment and loss. Since then, they had been more circumspect with each other, neither willing to risk making an arrangement in case it got screwed up, but still she fretted about Banks and still, she admitted to herself, she wanted him.
The flat, desolate landscape went on and on. How on earth could anybody live in such a remote and backward spot? Jenny wondered. She saw the sign pointing east – ALDERTHORPE 1/2 MILE – and set off down the narrow unpaved track hoping to hell there was no one coming the other way. Still, the landscape was so open – hardly a tree in sight – that she could easily see someone coming from a long way away.
The half-mile seemed to go on forever, as short distances often do on country roads. Then she saw a huddle of houses ahead, and she could smell the sea through her open window, though she couldn’t see it yet. When she found herself turning left on to a paved street with bungalows on one side and rows of redbrick terrace houses on the other, she realized this must be Alderthorpe. She saw a small post office-cum-general store with a rack of newspapers fluttering in the breeze, a greengrocer’s and a butcher’s, a squat gospel hall and a mean-looking pub called the Lord Nelson, and that was it.
Jenny pulled up behind a blue Citroën outside the post office and when she got out of the car she thought she could see curtains twitching over the road, feel curious eyes on her back as she opened the post-office door. No one comes here, she imagined the people thinking. What could she possibly want? Jenny felt as if she had walked into one of those lost-village stories, the place that time forgot, and she had the illogical sense that by walking into it she was lost too, and all memory of her in the real world was gone. Silly fool, she told herself, but she shivered, and it wasn’t cold.
The bell pinged above her head, and she found herself in the kind of shop that she guessed had ceased to exist even before she was born, where jars of barley sugar rubbed shoulders with shoelaces and patent medicines on high shelves, and birthday cards stood on a rack next to the half-inch nails and tins of evaporated milk. It smelled both musty and fruity – pear drops, Jenny thought – and the light that filtered in from the street was dim and cast strips of shadow on the sales counter. There was a small post-office wicket, and the woman standing there in a threadbare brown coat turned and stared at Jenny when she entered. The postmistress herself peered around her customer and adjusted her glasses. They had clearly been having a good natter and were none too thrilled at being interrupted.
“Can I help you?” the postmistress asked.
“I wondered if you could tell me where the old Murray and Godwin houses are,” Jenny asked.
“Why would you be wanting to know that?”
“It’s to do with a job I’m doing.”
“Newspaper reporter, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, no. I’m a forensic psychologist.”
This stopped the woman in her tracks. “It’s Spurn Lane you want. Just over the street and down the lane to the sea. Last two semis. You can’t miss them. Nobody’s lived there for years.”
“Do you know if any of the children still live around here?”
“I’ve not seen hide nor hair of any of ’em since it happened.”
“What about the teacher, Maureen Nesbitt?”
“Lives in Easington. There’s no school here.”
“Thank you very much.”
As she left, she heard the customer whisper, “Forensic psychologist? Whatever’s that when it’s at home?”
“Sightseer,” muttered the postmistress. “Ghoul, just like all the rest. Anyway, you were saying about Mary Wallace’s husband…”
Jenny wondered how they would react when the media descended en masse, which they surely would do before long. It’s not often a place such as Alderthorpe sees fame more than once in a lifetime.
She crossed the High Street, still feeling as if she were being watched, and found the unpaved lane that led east to the North Sea. Though there was a chill in the wind, the cloudless sky was such a bright piercing blue that she put on her sunglasses, remembering with a flutter of anger the day she bought them on Santa Monica Pier, with Randy, the two-timing bastard.
There were about five or six bungalows on each side of Spurn Lane near the High Street, but about fifty yards along, there was only rough ground. Jenny could see two dirty brick semis another fifty yards beyond that. They were certainly isolated from the village, which itself was isolated enough to begin with. She imagined that once the reporters and the television cameras had gone ten years ago, the silence and loneliness and sense of grief must have been devastating for the community, the questions and accusations screaming out loud in the air. Even the residents around The Hill, part of a suburb of a large, modern city, would be struggling to understand what had happened there for years, and many of the residents would need counseling. Jenny could only imagine what Alderthorpe folk probably thought of counseling.
As she approached the houses, she became more and more aware of the salt smell of the sea breeze and realized that it was out there, only yards away beyond the low dunes and marram grass. Villages along this coast had disappeared into the sea, Jenny had read; the sandy coastline was always shifting, and maybe in ten or twenty years’ time Alderthorpe would have vanished underwater, too. It was a spooky thought.
The houses were beyond repair. The roofs had caved in and the broken windows and doors were boarded up. Here and there, people had spray-painted graffiti: ROT IN HELL, BRING BACK HANGING and the simple, touching, KATHLEEN: WE WILL NOT FORGET. Jenny found herself oddly moved as she stood there playing the voyeur.
The gardens were overgrown with weeds and shrubs, but she could make her way through the tangled undergrowth closer to the buildings. There wasn’t much to see, and the doors had been so securely boarded up that she couldn’t get inside even if she wanted to. In there, she told herself, Lucy Payne and six other children had been terrorized, raped, humiliated, tormented and tortured for God knew how many years before the death of one of them – Kathleen Murray – led the authorities to the door. Now the place was just a silent ruin. Jenny felt like a bit of a fraud standing there, the way she had in the cellar of The Hill. What could she possibly do or say to make sense of the horrors that had occurred here? Her science, like all the rest, was inadequate.
Even so, she stood there for some time, then she walked around the buildings, noting that the back gardens were even more overgrown than the front. An empty clothesline hung suspended between two rusty poles in one of the gardens.
As she was leaving, Jenny almost tripped over something in the undergrowth. At first she thought it was a root, but when she bent down and pulled aside the leaves and twigs, she saw a small teddy bear. It looked so disheveled it could have been out there for years, could even have belonged to one of the Alderthorpe Seven, though Jenny doubted it. The police or the social services would have taken everything like that away, so it had probably been left as a sort of tribute later by a local child. When she picked it up it felt soggy, and a beetle crawled out from a rip in its back on to her hand. Jenny let out a sharp gasp, dropped the teddy bear and headed quickly back to the village. She had intended to knock on a few doors and ask about the Godwins and the Murrays, but Alderthorpe had spooked her so much that she decided instead to head for Easington to talk to Maureen Nesbitt.