The four thousand and eleventh day:
The gaunt, middle-aged woman was sitting alone in the gloom of her semi-detached home, sitting alone in the gloom shaking with tears, tears of sadness and tears of rage, tears of pain and tears of -
Horror -
Horror and pain, rage and sadness, raining down between her bone-white fingers, raining down between her bone-white fingers on to her broken knees, her broken knees on which was balanced -
The shoebox -
The shoebox she clutched between her bone-white fingers upon her broken knees, the shoebox damp with the tears of sadness and tears of rage, the tears of pain and tears of horror, the shoebox on which was written:
Susan Ridyard.
I looked away to the two photographs on top of the television, the one photograph of a little girl alone and smiling next to another photograph of that same little girl with her older brother and sister, the three children sat together in school uniforms -
Two girls and one boy -
That photograph of two girls and one boy which became just one girl and one boy in the photographs on the sideboard, the photographs in the hall, the photographs on the wall, the one girl and one boy growing -
Always growing but never smiling -
Never smiling because of the little girl they left behind on top of the TV, the little girl alone and smiling -
Never growing but always smiling -
Susan Ridyard -
The one they left behind:
Susan Louise Ridyard, ten, missing -
Last seen Monday 20 March 1972, 3.55 p.m.
Holy Trinity Junior & Infants, Rochdale.
I looked out of the window at the houses across the road, the neighbours at their curtains, the police cars and the ambulance, the rain hard against the double-glazing.
Beside me at the window, the doctor was fiddling with a bottle of pills, the pills that would sedate Mrs Ridyard, the pills that he desperately wanted to sedate her with so he could get away from this house, this horror -
This horror and that shoebox she clutched between her bone-white fingers, balanced upon her broken knees, that damp shoebox on which was written, written in a childish scrawclass="underline"
Susan Ridyard.
‘Anyone for a cup of tea?’ asked Mr Ridyard, bringing in a tray.
‘Thank you,’ I said, hate filling his wife’s eyes as she watched her husband pouring the milk and then the tea into their four best cups.
Derek Ridyard handed me a cup, then one to the doctor.
‘Love?’ he said, turning to his wife -
But before I could stand to stop her, before either the doctor or I could reach her, she had knocked the tea out of his hands with the shoebox, screaming -
‘How can you?’
Holding out the shoebox, crying -
‘This is your daughter! This is Susan!’
The doctor and I wrestling her back down on to the sofa, the husband dripping in hot scalding tea, the doctor forcing pills down her and calling for water, uniforms coming, police and ambulance, the shoebox out of her hands -
Out of her hands and into mine -
Mine holding the shoebox, the shoebox with its childish scrawl, its childish scrawl that through my fingers and into my face screamed, screamed up through a decade or more, screamed -
Screamed and cried with her mother:
Susan Ridyard.
In their bathroom, the cold tap was running and I was washing my hands -
‘I think about you all the time -
The people I had loved and those I had not; scattered or dead, unknown to me as to where or how they were -
‘Under the spreading chestnut tree -
The cold tap still running, still washing my hands -
‘In the tree, in her branches -
Washing and washing and washing my hands -
‘Where I sold you and you sold me -
The Owl -
‘I’ll see you in the tree -
Outside the bathroom I could still hear the woman’s muffled and terrible sobs, the shoebox here beside me on their pink and furry toilet mat, here amongst the smell of pine, piss and excrement -
‘In her branches.’
In their doorway, Mr Ridyard and I were looking up at the black clouds.
‘Do wonders for my allotment all that,’ he said.
‘Imagine so,’ I nodded as I held in my hands -
In my dirty hands -
His daughter’s little bones.
In their driveway, Mr Ridyard and I staring at the houses across the road.
‘Wonders,’ he shouted.
‘Yes,’ I whispered as I fell into the past -
Into the dark past -
The shadow of the Horns.
Chapter 11
Monday 23 May 1983 -
D-17:
‘If you put your money in a sock, Labour will nationalise socks, Mrs Thatcher tells Cardiff; Britain will have the most right-wing government in the Western World if the Conservatives are returned to power, says Mr Roy Jenkins…’
You switch off the radio and check the telephone and the door again.
Nothing.
You sit back down at your desk, the rain coming down your office window in grey walls of piss.
Not even ten o’clock.
Sally, the woman who works part-time Mondays and Thursdays, she’s off sick again because her youngest has the flu. That or she’s screwing Kevin or Carl or whoever it is this week. Doesn’t matter -
Four, five months later she’ll lose her job and you’ll lose the firm:
Divorce, Child Custody, Maintenance; the case-files going down as fast as the letters going out begging your clients to please, please settle their bills.
Fuck them -
Them and the depressing music and the grating jingles on the radio, the constant rain and the tepid wind, the mongrel dogs that bark all night and shit all day, the half-cooked food and the lukewarm teas, the shops full of things you don’t want on terms you can’t meet, the houses that are prisons and the prisons that are houses, the smell of paint to mask the smell of fear, the trains that never run on time to places that are all the same, the buses you are scared to catch and your car they always nick, the rubbish that blows in circles up and down the streets, the films in the dark and the walks in the park for a fumble and a fuck, a finger or a dick, the taste of beer to numb the fear, the television and the government, Sue Lawley and Maggie Thatcher, the Argies and the Falklands, the UDA and LUFC sprayed on your mother’s walls, the swastika and noose they hung above her door, the shit through her letterbox and the brick through her window, the anonymous calls and the dirty calls, the heavy breathing and the dial tone, the taunts of the children and the curses of their parents, the eyes filled with tears that sting not from the cold but the hurt, the lies they tell and the pain they bring, the loneliness and the ugliness, the stupidity and brutality, the endless and basal unkindness of every single person every single minute of every single hour of every single day of every single month of every single year of every single life -
You get up and switch the radio back on:
‘South Humberside Police are hoping that the ten-year anniversary of the disappearance of Christine Markham will jog someone’s memory to provide a clue in the search for the missing Scunthorpe girl who vanished on the day after her ninth birthday in May 1973. West Yorkshire Police meanwhile are continuing to question a local man about the disappearance of Morley schoolgirl Hazel Atkins twelve days…’
You turn the dial until you find a song:
The Best Years of Our Lives.