Читать книгу Cut to the Bone - Roz Watkins - Страница 18

Meg – Present day

Tuesday

I woke early and flicked on the bedside light, trying to remember how much wine I’d had the night before. At least I was calculating glasses rather than bottles, which was promising. I’d stayed up late talking to Hannah about Gran. Not a sensible move in the circumstances.

Violet was still missing. With each hour, the chances of finding her alive notched down. I crawled out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown, headed downstairs and stuck the kettle on. Hamlet emerged from a cardboard box by the door and stretched a front leg at me. He gave a supportive and rousing commentary while I sorted him out a breakfast of fine fillets of horribly slaughtered animal.

While Hamlet tucked in with enviable guilt-free gusto, I plonked myself down at the table and opened my laptop. Dawn was shining through my grubby kitchen window and suffusing the room with golden pink light, the summer continuing to hold a hot, dry finger up to climate change deniers.

If Violet’s birth mother was this woman Bex Smith, who turned out to be alive after all, could Violet be with her? But why not contact her family or friends? It seemed inconceivable that someone so connected wouldn’t get in touch with anyone.

I wanted to get a feel for Violet. Who she’d been before she became a case. A few years ago, missing people were like shadows. All the information about them came from others. Hearsay. We didn’t see them talking and, unless they wrote diaries, we never heard from them directly. This had all changed. The murdered and the missing were amongst us still, with their blogs and vlogs and social media presence. Violet had taken this to a new level. There was so much online, you could practically resurrect a virtual version of her, like an episode of Black Mirror. And since everyone interacted online anyway, it would be almost as if she’d never gone, although she might not be making any new bikini videos.

I went to the Great Meat Debate website and clicked through to one of Violet’s YouTube videos. She was cooking chops, wearing the trademark skimpy swimwear and the pelican brooch on a slim silver chain around her neck. Flat stomach, cellulite-free thighs. The evening sunshine cast a rose glow on her lightly tanned skin. I wondered what it would feel like to look like that. She probably took it for granted, like I did my uncanny ability to pass exams. I prayed to the imaginary friend I kept in my head for these purposes – please let her still be smooth-skinned and beautiful, not seething with maggots in a vat of pig guts.

Violet flashed a bright smile at the camera and chucked a sausage on the barbecue. She might not be contributing greatly to the sum of human knowledge, but she’d notched up several million views.

I clicked on another video, dated a week later. It was just as well we’d had a good summer – Violet was cooking again, in another bikini. Burgers this time. Music blared in the background and Violet danced along as she tended the barbecue. Halfway through, she reached for a vest-top and slipped it on over her bikini. It was bright pink, with the caption, This Sexy Bod was Built by Meat. The comments under the video were mainly enthusiastic, if on the sleazy side. Lower down the thread was the aggression. The assertions that she was a stuck-up bitch. The suggestions that she should try having her throat slit in an abattoir.

Other contributors to the Great Meat Debate website received less attention. Anna had recorded earnest videos about how it wasn’t meat as such that was an environmental disaster but the quantities consumed and the way it was currently produced, in low-welfare systems where animals were fed grain instead of grass and straw and other foods which didn’t compete with humans. Gary had a few videos in which he showed off his muscles, Daniel explained the design of the abattoir, and Kirsty Nightingale, Tony Nightingale’s daughter, talked rather provocatively about the high carbon footprint of free-range farming methods.

I went through everything carefully. Gary did indeed make snide jokes about weedy vegans, and there was a spirited debate in the comments, in which the words game changers cropped up with some frequency. Kirsty also came in for plenty of criticism. Anna’s videos and posts were thoughtful, scientific and detailed, and nobody commented on them, which pretty much summed up the internet.

Daniel talked about the curved walkways and rubber matting in the abattoir with great passion. Having read the comments – If anyone ever slits your throat, let’s hope they do it on rubber matting – I understood his nervousness.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. Was this really about meat? Bad stuff was usually more personal, the culprit a family member or boyfriend. Or the person herself. I of all people knew that.

But recently, tempers had been rising. People were angry. About appalling animal welfare in farms and abattoirs. About carpets of pig manure from intensively kept pigs being spread over the countryside (it being particularly tragic when an animal’s waste products saw more daylight than it did). About rainforests being incinerated to provide grazing for cattle. People were asking questions. Why should your desire to eat meat every day jeopardise my child’s right to a planet that’s not an uninhabitable fireball? Meat producers had become fair game. Could one of those angry activists have decided to make an example of Violet Armstrong?

I sighed. My money would still be on a boyfriend or family member. I navigated through to Violet’s personal website and clicked on a video that looked different from the rest. Violet was fully clothed. She spoke to the camera like a professional. ‘In the village of Gritton in the Peak District, there have been strange sightings over the last thirty years. Of a mysterious girl …’

That was weird. I wondered if this was the Pale Child that both Anna and Daniel had been so unwilling to talk about. I took a swig of tea and switched to full screen. Violet carried on speaking: ‘The child is thin and light-skinned, and dressed in white, Victorian clothes. Locals call her the Pale Child.’ Violet leaned closer to the camera and lowered her voice: ‘Stories of strange, silent children are common in urban myths and creepypasta. This one is supposedly the ghost of a murdered child who lived in the beautiful manor house that was drowned under Ladybower Reservoir. People in this village don’t like to talk of the child, and are scared of her. The rumour goes that if she sees your face, you’ll die.’

How strange. I wrapped my dressing gown tighter around me, even though it wasn’t cold.

I moved the cursor to the most recent video, dated three days ago, and clicked to play. Violet looked less composed this time. Strands of dark hair fell over her face and she was wearing no make-up. ‘I talked before about the Pale Child,’ she said. ‘And … well, I think I saw her.’

So it was true: Violet had seen the Pale Child. I crossed my legs and leaned closer to the screen. Violet’s voice was quiet, and husky as if she had a cold or had been shouting. ‘On the moor in Gritton. A girl, thin and pale with blonde hair, wearing old-fashioned clothes and a creepy Victorian-doll mask. She turned as I was watching and I think she saw my face. By the time I got out my phone to take a photo, she’d gone.’

In the video, Violet reached for a glass of water and took a sip. Her voice was less resolute than her words. She flicked her eyes down as she spoke. ‘You’re probably wondering if I’m worried now. Worried I’m going to die because of the Pale Child. Well, I’m not. I’m glad I saw the girl. And I’m going to find out who she is. Because I don’t believe in ghosts.’

I sat back and studied the last frame of the video: a close-up of Violet’s face. I played the video again, pausing it now and then to look closely at her. I stared into her eyes. Behind the professional veneer, she was scared.

I nipped upstairs to shower and dress, then remembered the phone call from Dad. It felt like a drunken dream, but I knew it had been real. He wanted to visit today, of all days. I stuck my head into the spare room. Dad had always been the tidy one – trailing round after me, Mum and Carrie, tutting and putting cereal boxes in cupboards, books on shelves. When Carrie got ill, she’d had a free pass. Cancer trumps having to tidy up. Cancer trumps everything. So his full irritation had been unleashed on me and Mum. The prospect of him staying in this room didn’t bear thinking about.

At least I’d changed the sheets, and there was a path to the side of the bed. I frantically piled the books into higher towers, thus freeing more floor space, albeit at the risk of Dad becoming entombed in the night. While I worked, I thought about Violet and the Pale Child. Obviously the child wasn’t a ghost, but who was she? Was she the reason for all the fences? The sign about Village of the Damned?

The vacuum cleaner enjoyed a largely untroubled life in the corner of the spare room. I plugged it in and shoved it halfheartedly over the areas of carpet not covered by books. It made quite an impact – one advantage of cleaning on an annual basis was that you could see the difference. I reminded myself that I was in my thirties and if I wanted to live in a house with books piled on the floor and cobwebs hanging from the beams, that was my decision. It wasn’t that I enjoyed living under layers of dust, surrounded by spiders, but getting the hoover out had never been a priority in my life. Besides, spiders had the right to a peaceful existence.

I folded two towels and placed them on the bed, chucked a hotel shampoo bottle on top, and decided that would do. My eyes were drawn to a pile of framed photographs stacked in the corner. Photographs I’d not felt able to display. I fished one out and wiped the dust from it. Carrie and me on a beach, before she got ill. She was about eleven, squinting into the sun, blonde hair blowing into her eyes. I must have been around seven, although the way I was clutching a red bucket made me look younger. The colours were distorted, as if it was another world where greens were more yellow and reds more purple. I took the photograph and placed it gently on the bedside table. If Dad couldn’t cope with it, he could always put it away again.

A noise drifted up the stairs. The cat flap in the kitchen banging open. I left the spare room, resisting the urge to flick my eyes to the ceiling, and headed downstairs. Hamlet came beetling through to the hallway, his little legs a blur. I gave him a cuddle and had a quick look around with the eyes of a parental visitor. Not great.

I picked up a flyer for a pizza place that didn’t even deliver to my address, hearing Mum’s voice in my head. You need to stop trying to impress him. She certainly wasn’t trying to impress him with her recent antics. I felt a sharp stab of worry about her. I should visit but had no time. Nothing was more important right now than getting to work and finding Violet. If we didn’t find her today, we could virtually rule out finding her alive.