Itch!, page 15
Josie stared from one to the other, back and forth, dumbfounded.
Just when she thought her dad was really making an effort, too.
She was certain that Lena had not simply turned up in Ellwood out of the blue. Dad’s offer to make dinner, so unexpected, so strange yet welcome, could now be seen for what it was: a ploy, a prearranged tactic cooked up between her ex and her father.
And for what?
So the pair of them could rewrite history?
‘If you didn’t want me living here anymore,’ Josie said bitterly, no longer bothering to fight the tears, ‘you should have just said.’
‘Now, come on,’ her father responded, but Josie didn’t need to hear any more. She had never felt so betrayed.
She turned smartly on her heel, clattered back down the stairs, and left the apartment. It was fully dark now, but the snow added a reflective glow that meant she could find her way more easily than she otherwise might.
Josie had only one place left to go. She jogged the whole way, convinced the pair would be chasing her. She only stopped when her stomach cramped violently on the other side of the cut-through.
Moaning, Josie clutched her belly and bent over double. She heaved, retched, and vomited up a writhing mass of maggots. Staring down at the thrashing, steaming mess on the earth between her feet, she noticed other things amongst the half-digested vegetables and rice that had been last night’s dinner – thin, white, squirming insects that resembled worms but were much longer, with dozens of legs attached to the segmented bodies. There were ants, too, of course, and a spider, legs braced tightly about itself. As she watched, snowflakes drifting down gently around her, chest heaving, spit dribbling freely from her lower lip, the spider unfurled each leg and staggered out of the stinking puddle, crawling off across the melted snow and into the woods. One of the white centipedes uncoiled itself and followed suit.
Josie couldn’t take anymore. She went back to the one place, the one person she felt she could rely on.
She ran back to Angela.
Chapter 29
‘He did what?’
Angela’s outrage was validating. Josie had begun to doubt herself as she’d neared the pub. By the time she’d pushed through the throng of locals leaning against the bar and fallen, snot and tears plastered all over her face, into the landlord’s arms, she assumed she’d be accused of overreacting. She had begun to question whether the incident with the brick had happened the way she’d remembered. Head injuries were tricky, she’d been told, her memory might not be the most reliable. It had been unreliable even before the brick had made a dent in her forehead. Since her mother died, recollections of her youth were patchy, lacking in colour or detail. She was always getting into trouble for misplacing things, or getting lost, or not paying full attention, or forgetting people’s names. Lena had deemed her flighty, or, on unkinder days, a dimwit. You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on was a favourite gripe.
Was it possible that Josie had gotten it wrong? That perhaps the brick had been accidental, or . . . or . . .
But Angela’s face told her quite the opposite.
‘The fucking gall!’ the older woman said, using a thumb to wipe tears off Josie’s cheeks. This simple act of kindness almost sent Josie into a fresh weeping fit.
She let Angela pat her face completely dry with the sleeve of her cardigan, staring up into her eyes the whole time. Their proximity and the tenderness passing between them suddenly felt charged. Josie shuddered.
‘He knew about the restraining order. The attack. He was with me in the hospital. I can’t understand why he did it. He said . . . he said it was all a misunderstanding.’
Angela’s face was red with anger. She rolled up her cardigan sleeves, one of them now soggy, exposing tattoos on both her forearms – Celtic knots, with a green man motif nestled among the looping lines on the left arm.
‘I swear, that man gets worse with each passing year! That’s what happens when you spend too long on your own, you get bitter, and—’
The pub door swung open. A tall shadow filled the doorway.
The locals turned, peering over their shoulder at the stranger letting all the cold in.
‘Shut the bloody door then!’ someone cried.
‘In or out, make your mind up!’
‘Yeah, piss or get off the pot!’
The figure moved through, letting the heavy oak door swing shut behind her. Josie glimpsed snow briefly flurrying around the single working streetlamp outside.
Lena.
She’d followed Josie to the pub.
That, or Josie’s dad had told her where his daughter would be.
Angela took one look at Josie’s terrified face and bristled.
‘Out!’ the landlord roared at the stranger, one finger pointing the way like a signpost. ‘There’s an order out against you! You’re not allowed within miles of her, and you know it!’
Fifty metres, Josie thought, but said nothing. She was just happy there was a bar and a wall of human bodies between her and her ex.
Lena didn’t comply. She stood facing the bar, that odd, wounded expression back on her face.
‘Look,’ she said, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. No weapons, see? I’m unarmed.
Except Lena was always armed. She might look innocent, and Josie could see the effect she was having on the assembled locals, who all sat a little straighter on their barstools, assessing this stranger with model looks from out of town with great interest, but they didn’t know that Lena had an uncanny ability to turn any object, statement or happenstance, no matter how ordinary, into a weapon.
Josie had never had much interest in living that way.
Or in winning at life.
She just craved peace.
It was becoming apparent that this request was not realistic, so long as she stayed in Ellwood.
‘I just want to talk to her, that’s all.’
It wasn’t in Lena’s nature to back down, even when confronted with the force of nature in a cardigan that was Angela. Seeing this, the landlord moved to put Josie firmly behind her, out of the firing line. Finn the dog, hearing the anger in his mistress’s voice, heaved himself up from his fireside cushion, growling, and adopted a defensive stance – hackles up, legs straight, head down low.
Lena looked at the animal with a slight curl in her lip.
The landlord of the King’s Arms pub folded her arms and stared Lena down.
‘You had your chance,’ Angela said, matter of fact. ‘You threw a brick at her head and put her in a coma, remember?’
‘She threw a brick at our Josie?’ one of the locals exclaimed, snorting over his ale. ‘What’s the matter, couldn’t you find a man good enough to throw a brick at?’
The man in the neighbouring barstool slapped him upside the head. ‘Don’t be a prick,’ he said, sipping his beer. ‘You can’t say stuff like that, not in this day and age. You’re being . . . What’s the word? . . . Homophobic.’
‘Can you be homophobic towards women?’ the first man slurred.
Angela shot the pair a filthy look. ‘Of course you fucking can, you ignorant pigs,’ she snapped, and the men instantly bowed their heads over their pint glasses, mouths pressing shut. Nobody liked being told off by the only landlord in town. The threat of a ban was too serious, especially as the next pub was a good thirty-minute walk away. ‘Now shut up before I put you both out in the cold too.’
The men did as commanded.
‘As for you . . .’ Angela’s attention returned to Josie’s ex. ‘Out. You’re banned.’
‘Please,’ Lena persisted, calm, patient, as if she had every right to be there. ‘I just want to talk, that’s all. I never got a chance to explain, Josie. Everything happened so fast, and . . . you have no idea how hard things have been, since you left. How my life has changed. It’s hardly been a party. The things people say about me . . . I lost my job, I—’
Angela snatched a phone handset from where it was mounted on the wall behind the bar. ‘You’ve got thirty seconds before I call the police.’
‘I just want to say—’
‘How about you start with “I’m sorry”? Seems Josie is owed an apology or two.’
Hate glittered in Lena’s eyes. ‘I mean, of course I’m sorry, I never meant to—’
‘Twenty seconds.’
‘Listen, this has all been blown massively out of proportion, I—’
‘Fifteen.’
Lena was getting rattled, Josie could tell. It was not often people refused to fall for her charms.
‘There’s really no need for so much hostility, I—’
‘Ten.’
‘Can you stop fucking counting, please?’
‘Five.’
‘For fuck’s sake! Josie, listen, I—’
Angela whistled one short, sharp tone.
Finn’s growl intensified, in both pitch and force.
The massive hound took another step across the pub floor, hackles up, teeth bared.
‘Out,’ Angela said, implacable. The pub grew deathly silent.
Lena stared at the dog and backed up. Lowered her hands.
‘Fine,’ she said, lifting her chin high, as if leaving was her own idea. ‘But you’re making a big mistake. Both of you.’ Her voice was laden with threat.
There it is. There’s the real Lena.
Josie knew that tone far too well. It meant unfinished business. It meant Lena doubling down on her intentions. She had things to say, and she was going to make sure Josie heard them whether she liked it or not, restraining order be damned.
Finn kept coming. His growls got louder.
Lena shot one last, long look at Josie, then exited the pub silently.
‘Good boy,’ Angela crooned, as the door slammed shut. She threw Finn a biscuit.
Josie let out a shaky breath. Lena was gone.
For now.
The next day, Lena sent flowers to the pub, where Josie had spent the night on Angela’s insistence.
Josie threw them in the bin.
Chapter 30
A deep sadness followed. Josie had thought she was over her heartbreak, but seeing Lena in the flesh reopened old wounds that never healed. This, with all the other things she’d seen – masks, ants, corpses, cabinets filled with poison, biro sketches, slashed tree bark – had Josie sinking into a pit of chaotic rumination, where obsessive thoughts and feelings warred for attention in her head every passing moment, but nothing coherent ever really made it through.
Angela tried to distract Josie from her unhappiness by roping her into decorating the King’s Arms in preparation for Christmas.
‘A bit early,’ she said, dumping a basket full of tinsel and baubles on the bar one morning while Josie sipped her usual flat white. ‘The locals will probably crucify me, but let them. It’s still snowing, and I think we could use a bit of festive cheer around here, don’t you?’
The women worked for hours, making garlands from holly, ivy, and spruce, threading strings of dried fruit slices and cinnamon sticks, folding and hanging dozens of paper stars from the ceiling, arranging boughs of larch and pine and fir along each wooden beam, untangling yards of fairy lights, making space for the Christmas tree, sorting baubles, snaking tinsel around the beer pump handles, hanging bunches of mistletoe, and arranging poinsettias in pots on every table in the pub. When it was done, they lit the log burner and had a quiet drink before opening up for the evening, savouring the quietness and the simple beauty of twinkling lights, glittering baubles, bright berries and deep green foliage. It was like bringing the forest inside, without the mud and the mess.
Or the dead bodies, Josie thought, unable to help herself.
Itch, itch.
‘Feeling better?’ Angela asked kindly.
Though unused to displays of affection and generosity, Josie forced herself to reply.
‘I am,’ she said, and in a way, she was. It felt good to be taking part in an activity that was homely and mundane for a change. Something with no great consequence attached to it beyond promoting seasonal cheer. There was something about the way Angela sang to herself while they hooked baubles on to sprigs of fir arranged above the log burner that reminded Josie of her mother. Mum had always gone all out for Christmas. Her father had not been anywhere near as bothered after she died.
There was that one Christmas, though, remember?
Josie did. It made her better disposed towards Dad than when he did heinous things like inviting a woman who had tried to kill his daughter for a cosy sit-down dinner in her apartment.
‘You’re a bad liar, Josie,’ Angela replied, winking and patting her on the knee. The landlord’s fingers lingered a moment longer than they’d ever done before, but Josie didn’t mind.
The snow, which had come early that year, melted during a warmer snap where it rained for several days, non-stop. Josie used that time to sequester herself in one of the guest bedrooms, which Angela said was hers for as long as she needed it.
She didn’t move much from her bed during those days, wrapping herself in a thick duvet and poring over Laurel’s sketchbook and the cylinder Old Jacob had given her, which turned out to be a map. When Josie finally had time to unfurl it, holding down the edges with books so it didn’t spring back into place, she gasped. It wasn’t just a map. It was a history of six unsolved crimes, meticulously plotted.
Clearly, Old Jacob had been working on this macabre puzzle for years. The large and very detailed Ordnance Survey map of the Forest of Dean featured dozens of annotations in his neat handwriting, marking each site of interest with details pertaining to the dead girls.
First, Jacob had noted via a series of bright red triangles the precise locations where the bodies had been found over the years. Six in total. And he’d named them all, so Josie had a list, which she copied down into a separate notebook to keep them better organised in her head: Jane Doe One, Jane Doe Two, Alison Wright, Jane Bowl, Lucy McRobert, Daniella Penney. Laurel Howell made seven. Josie added that name to the map herself.
Old Jacob had written the ages of each woman too, next to their names. The oldest victim, Daniella Penney, was twenty-seven when she died. Josie had an uneasy feeling she’d probably been to school with one, if not several of these girls, but she would have to go and dig out her old class photographs to be sure. There were a few primary schools in the surrounding villages, but some events – like carol services at the church in Sling – drew together every school-age child in the area to boost the size of the choir. Josie was still trying to get her head around the fact that she’d met Laurel at a Devil’s March. Played with her. Been photographed with her, maybe. It was all too weird, too close. Josie didn’t want to be another piece in that particular puzzle, tessellated with the others. She could all too easily imagine an eighth triangle on the map with her name above it.
Next, Jacob had circled several locations where tourists tended to congregate. Puzzlewood. Clearwell Caves. Symonds Yat Rock. Point Quarry viewpoint. Coppett Hill. Mallards Pike. Eagle’s Nest viewpoint. Nagshead Nature Reserve. The Devil’s Pulpit. She didn’t know why the old man had highlighted them, but they were all places Josie had visited as a kid, either on rare family days out, or, more commonly, alone with her mother when she’d been alive. Nagshead Nature Reserve in particular had a lot of good memories attached to it. In the spring, the woodland there was carpeted with bluebells. Her mother had made that an annual pilgrimage.
From the last location, the Devil’s Pulpit, Old Jacob had highlighted the route of the Devil’s March. The Pulpit was the end point, from whence the queen was flung in a symbolic gesture meant to appease the Devil. In order to reach that point, the villagers of Ellwood followed an ancient, unvarying route that took three to four hours, depending how fast or slow a person walked. Their starting point was the King’s Arms, where they would gather to consume pies, beer and hot chocolate to traditional music. After the opening ceremony, the marchers would proceed through the Knoll, then follow the main roads from Sling, through Trow Green, skirting around the edge of St Briavels, then across Hewelsfield Common to rejoin the road on the other side. The march route then circled around the back of Beeches Farm Campsite, threaded through Lippets Grove Nature Reserve, and continued along a portion of the Offa’s Dyke path to its final destination, the natural stone pulpit overlooking the Wye Valley and the winding River Wye, with the ruins of Tintern Abbey directly below.
Josie looked at the route, marked in green, and then studied the locations of the bodies. They were arranged, she realised, in a pattern that resembled a large wave spreading from the original disturbance of the route of the March. Like a snake gliding across a pond, spreading ripples. It also roughly resembled the shape made by Sheela-na-gig when she was holding herself open.
Or maybe Josie was reading too much into it.
But Laurel had been found the day after the March – left in a spot the procession actually passed through. Was that significant?
And what about Emmet? And the ants?
Josie didn’t know if she was joining dots or making a mess.
The fact that Old Jacob was so interested in the deaths put Josie in a terrible quandary, too, one she needed time and space to work through before she went to DC Wilkes. If she went to Wilkes.
On the one hand, the old man had this map, and had taken an unusual level of care in documenting the murder victims – for that, Josie reminded herself, was what they all were. Murdered and dumped. Left like calling cards– but only when the killer deemed the time was right. Until then, the bodies were stored. And, assuming the others had been treated the same way as Laurel, moved to a number of locations within the Forest before their eventual discovery, although Jacob couldn’t have known that.
Regardless, it signalled a deep interest in the deaths on Old Jacob’s part that a suspicious person like Wilkes might think unnatural.
Then there was the fact that the old man had an antique medicine cabinet stocked with the very poisons identified in Laurel Howell’s toxicology report.
