Cold Blood by Jane Heafield (great books to read txt) 📕

Janine looked puzzled, then amused. ‘You mean ten years ago?’ She laughed and pushed the coin away, but he shifted it right back towards her.

‘She felt bad about it. Please take it. You’re going to hear her name a lot over the coming days. I just don’t want people to… please just take it.’

He left her looking a little shocked. Missing young girl, quadruple murder, and now shoplifting. Welcome to Lampton.

43

All the village centre shops had shut early and few people were around. Of that scattering, most were police, but Bennet also saw journalists and tourists. Locals were by far the minority. The police had parked a large white van near the green, with a stall next to it, and this was where most of the activity took place. The stall had a police officer behind it and it was loaded with personal panic alarms, which a sign claimed were free to all residents. Two teenaged females were being shown how the alarms worked, while other folk queued or talked to other officers or the reporters.

If the free alarms didn’t make it obvious the police were worried that a madman was still about, nobody could fail to get that message from a display stand near the van:

HELP US HELP YOU. LOOK AT YOUR FRIENDS, AT YOUR NEIGHBOURS. DO YOU KNOW OF ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN UNCOMMONLY ABSENT RECENTLY, OR ACTING STRANGE? HAVE YOU SEEN ANYONE WITH BLOOD ON THEIR CLOTHING? REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS IN CONFIDENCE TO THE POLICE.

Bravo. No pussyfooting around this time. A young girl had gone missing, and ten years later a film crew documenting the crime had been murdered. Only a fool would connect both events by coincidence, or believe that the same criminal had snatched a girl, left town, and then returned to murder a team that might expose him. Bennet had overheard detectives at the Arrow saying the very same thing he thought, and which that sign effectively announced: Lampton was home to a vicious killer. A decade ago, mass-autohypnosis had convinced these folk their little enclave was safe and secure despite a child-snatching. No magic trick would bury the truth this time. Councillor Turner was going to have his work cut out sweeping this one under the carpet.

Bennet found a space amongst the police and media vehicles to park. Nobody saw him exit and run down an alley beside the library.

The first time he’d visited Lampton, on his third date with Lorraine, she had shown him the village centre and led him round the back of the library, where there was a small garden and the town’s only actual well. The well hadn’t been active in years and now was nothing but a circular rock wall with a rusty grate. But it provided a handy step for Bennet to climb into one of the two winter-naked small ash trees. A curved bough created a handy seat and there, hidden by thick green leaves, Lorraine had sat on his lap, and they’d done the sweet nothings thing new couples practised.

But there was one thing couples did that they hadn’t: carved their names, at least in entirety. Lorraine had scoured hers into the wood, above a heart, but the old proprietor of the library, on a cigarette break, had ordered them down and out before Liam could immortalise his own name. They had planned to return and finish the job another day, but it never happened.

Now, over three thousand days later, Bennet stared at a blank space beneath that heart shape, and prepared to slice his name into the bark with his car key. But he couldn’t do it. En route here, the idea had appealed as a reminder of their history, of their creation of Joe, and a way to honour Lorraine’s death. But now, sitting here, it seemed silly. She was dead, and they hadn’t been a couple for a decade, and she had had a new family, and what kind of grown man did that anyway?

He moved on. A path out of the garden snaked its way to the village hall, which had been built as a free church school a century and a half ago. There was a small graveyard behind it. Here he found the mossy, cracked grave of a man called Dunn, part of the Durham Light Infantry in the Great War. Lampton had ceased burying people here decades ago, but the families of those already in the ground had objected to the removal of any remains. They got their wish; however, as the village transformed around the boneyard and the surviving kin left or died, the dead were abandoned.

The gravestone he sought was down on the ground, flat, hidden from a distance by unloved, long grass. Liam was annoyed that nobody had picked it up in the fifteen or so years since it had fallen. Now, he dug his fingers beneath and pulled and pushed and lifted it. He got it upright in the rent it had opened when toppling, and stamped grassy soil down to lodge it in place. A stiff breeze might undo his work, but intent and action were what mattered to him.

‘Lorraine is deeply sorry, Mr Dunn,’ he told the air.

As a teenager larking about, Lorraine and a friend had stumbled into the gravestone and sent it crashing to the earth. When she’d shared the story with Bennet, he had suggested they right her wrong, but their promise to never materialised. Now, with the task completed, he felt a sense of finality.

The people of Lampton had mostly forgotten him, but he didn’t want that for Lorraine, who’d been born and bred in this corner of the planet, and then hounded out of it, and then slaughtered by one or more of its citizens. And because she’d been part of that reviled film crew, no one would care. He knew he couldn’t make the village folk honour her death, but he could make sure she got, if not respect, then zero disrespect. Amends