Death by a Mother's Hand (A Supernatural Suspense Story) Read online

  He has but a second to make a call - go after his colleague, the woman he's going to end up marrying, or the kids in the car. Two against one, but the two are light, and one is heavy. The scales don't balance. They weren't going to, so no sense wasting time.

  Jones is better at hitting the slope. He goes down slow, diagonally, and keeps his feet. Bowyer floats down the river, her face up sometimes, down others.

  When he catches her, finally, the light from their car is just a speck in the distance. The radio on his shoulder doesn't work. He puts his mouth over hers and saves her life.

  *

  5.

  May, 1989

  There will be an inquest, but later. Things like this, they take time, and when that time comes Darren Jones will testify before the coroner. But not this day.

  This day, Mr. Felts leaves his wife in the house, along with Barry Felts' sister, Sheene. Mr. Felts named their now-only child for his hero, Barry Sheene, Superbike Champion in the 1970's. He always preferred Barry, though he'd never tell him that anymore. It was the sort of thing Mr. Felts saved for those moments he and his son were alone in the dark.

  Mr. Felts gets in his recovery van with a big hook on the back and rust on the panels and round the wheel arches. He drives seven miles, deep into the fallows. It's early May. Trees are green, it's warm, and the field he finds has flowers around the edges and seven immaculate caravans in the trampled centre. There are horses that Felts thinks are called piebald, because they look skinny and underfed, but they're just neglected and piebald isn't what these horses are at all. If anything, they're just ponies. Not the kind of horses oil magnates race over tidy hedges.

  There are a few small kids, a couple of dogs. He's not interested in those.

  He's here on business.

  *

  6.

  Ma Mulrone is one of those old ladies people see in the street for maybe twenty years who always look old. Some people get to a certain age and seem to stop changing. For some, it's around sixty, then they sort of stick with their face, their wrinkles, their hair, for the next twenty years or so.

  Ma Mulrone has looked old for a very long time. She looked old before she came to English shores. No one living has seen her young and maybe she never was. Her memory is just fine, too, no matter her age. She's old, but far from infirm.

  She remembers every aspect of her life, perfectly, as though her mind is an archive, better than the British Library. Whatever goes in, stays in.

  She's remembers seeing the HMS Victory carry the pickled body of Horatio Nelson to the banks of the River Thames. 1805 when Nelson's body came in at the Nore. But she's older still, old when the last man hanged at Tyburn, even. 1783, then, and her not changed a whit.

  Some people don't change. They just settle into who they are, and figure there's no need to change it.

  She's Romany, Ma Mulrone. Some say she's the heart of the Romany, but she isn't, not anymore. She's the heart of her family now, her clan. She's a wanderer, still, but right now she's where she's supposed to be. She knows that like she knows herself. But she knows people, too, and places.

  She has tea, in a china cup, resting on a thin saucer on her bony lap. There's hardly anything of her, no fat, nothing wasted, and what's left is so old it's like tempered steel. People see it in her eyes. It's her that's tempered, she's the forge and steel, both.

  Her caravan is warm going on hot in the sun of the early summer. The cold doesn't worry her, never has, but she doesn't like it being overly hot in her caravan. It feels harder, to her, getting up and about when the heat's pounding down on the caravan. She's used to wooden caravans that she knew for long years before these hollow tin things, and it isn't comfortable. She remembers people dancing and singing in the sun and snow. She remembers mountains. She doesn't miss them, but one day...

  'One day...' she says.

  Then, she sighs, looking at her tea which is about to go cold.

  'I was enjoying that,' she says in her hard and harsh accent. 'Come in.'

  This last she says to one of her sons before he puts his grease-stained knuckles on her door. The caravan's white, and her boys and girls keep it clean, but it picks up the dirt and muck like children do.

  The door opens.

  'Ma...man here to see you.'

  'Mr. Felts,' she says, though she can't see him. She doesn't need to. Who else would it be? 'Come on. Tea's getting cold, now.'

  Mr. Felts has a flat cap, but he doesn't take it off as he comes in. Truth is, he doesn't know he's supposed to, and he's a vain man. He worries about his thinning hair. He doesn't wipe his shoes, either.

  Ma notices. She doesn't make a thing of it. Her son steps outside to leave them to it.

  'Mr. Felts...tea?'

  She doesn't offer him a biscuit or her good cups.

  Cunts don't get a biscuit, she thinks.

  But it's just the way it is. He's here, and he's supposed to be, and it all fits just like things should.

  *

  7.

  When Felts leaves, his cap is in his hands.

  'Ma,' says the man with black grease in his knuckles and his hair. He's got tattoos on those knuckles, a few missing teeth. The tattoos go all over. Ma knows what they are, and what they mean, too.

  'He after the copper?' asks Ma Mulrone's boy. 'The one killed his boy?'

  She nods.

  'Ma...ain't our business, is it?' He says 'ain't' more like 'in't', like the locals do, but Ma's boy is no more local than she is. He's not strictly her son, either. Her son died a long, long time ago. But he's blood, alright. 'Coppers? Mucky, Ma. It's mucky.'

  His accent is far stronger than Ma's. Others outside this clan, this brood, would struggle to understand him. It's a hard and fast mix of thick, traveller Irish, Romany, with a few words here and there of French. Sometimes he sounds like an Irishman imitating the French-Choctaw patois, or some kind of drunken South Pacific islander. There's truth in that. Isolated people develop in a kind of vacuum. He knows people outside this world with its own peculiar gravity that centres on Ma Mulrone, but it's that strange, personal language that few would get. Maybe a seasoned ear would understand some, but probably not.

  'Ain't tidy, Ma.'

  'Course it ain't, boy. But it's right. It's right. Coppers think travellers are all Mulrones. They ain't. Mulrones are Mulrones. We ain't travellers,' says Ma. 'I'm Romany, and you are, too. We're walkers, right? We know the ways.'

  'Right, Ma. Right.'

  'Ain't about the fella. You leave him be. He'll learn. This is women's business, and you mind you do what I say, right?'

  'Ma,' he says again.

  'And your sister? She think it's not our business?'

  'Ma,' he says, but nothing more. The man's head lowers, and his quiff droops over his eyes. That part at the front of his hair is so heavy with brake grease that it sticks up most of the time. He looks like an Elvis impersonator that's gone a long, long way from the rails.

  'Course it's our business,' she says. She doesn't need to raise her voice. She doesn't think she ever has, but she's like a knife and a knife works just as well quick or slow. 'Think this is all it is? Some kiddy-fucking hick with shit manners? Pfft. Men. Think they know something, don't know nothing.'

  'Ma?' Her boy's still reluctant, but it doesn't matter. He'll do what needs doing.

  'We'll get it done,' she says. Her boys will do the doing of it, but it's her that'll make it happen. 'S'what I do.'

  He nods once more, then pushes his wilted hair back from his forehead, like he's vain. Ma knows that's not the case though. Lord knows her boy's got little to be vain about, but he's loyal and she trusts him. Of course she trusts him. She's Mulrone and so are they. They're blood.

  'Okay, Ma.'

  'Good. Get it done,' she says.

  He empties her cold tea for her into the sink, brings back her cup and kisses her dry forehead before leaving. She takes a china teapot from under a thick cosy, pours out a fresh cup and smacks her lips when she drinks i
t.

  *

  8.

  Rachel Bowyer is in hospital through most of the spring. March through to May, she's in plaster. After the fall down the slope, and flipping and hitting grass and water, she managed a tally of a broken collarbone, a shattered wrist, and a dislocated knee with torn ligaments.

  Those things alone would be nothing like long enough to keep a woman in hospital for seventy-two days (she counted). But she broke her spine, too, and now she has a rod in there. A long, thick scar, angry and red still, runs up her lower back.

  Darren Jones thought he just wanted to fuck her, but as it turns out he was wrong. Every day since she got hurt, he comes here to the hospital. He helps her through crying and loneliness and that crushing depression that hits after heavy surgery. He walks with her in rehab, holds her hand when she's coming down in dosage from morphine, then codeine, all the way to rock-bottom where there's nothing left to sustain a person but willpower.

  The long and short of it is, he fell in love with her somewhere along the way, and she him.

  *

  9.

  For some people, things go right, for some, things are shit. It seems there are people in the world that are made of shining armour. Hurt and all the indignities that hit most don't even touch them.

  It's rare, maybe, but it happens. Just like some people have all the luck, some people are just born to be beaten down until there's nothing left.

  In the evening, fresh from seeing Ma Mulrone, Mr. Felts drinks and thinks plenty until one or so in the morning, and Sheene's only eleven, but it's old enough.

  Mrs. Felts waits a long time for her husband to come to bed.

  She lays on her back. Her eyes are wide open and seeing nothing but the yellow Artex on the ceiling. She can see the loops and whorls in the Artex, ridges and shallow shadows that fall upward. She can hear him, in their daughter's room.

  There's nothing wrong with her ears or eyes.

  When he slides into bed, her eyes are closed.

  Maybe she's weak, but she isn't stupid.

  And while some people have all the luck, some people don't. It's not personal, it's not even about luck. It's just balance. People try to organise life or make some kind of sense of it, but religion or learning or a diet of muesli and yoghurt or whiskey or heroin don't have any answers, because there's always chaos, somewhere.

  That's the great lie, she figures behind her closed eyelids. People think they're in control, but they ain't.

  She understands, like Ma Mulrone, that life doesn't know a thing about fair.

  *

  10.

  Darren Jones gets down on his knee right there in the May sun. It's the first time Rachel Bowyer has been out in the natural light for seventy-two days.

  'Rachel Bowyer,' says Jones to the crying woman he's madly in love with. 'I'm so in love with you. If you'll be my wife, I'll never leave your side. I want you until the day I die, love you more than you love morphine...'

  He wrote this down. He's got it in his pocket, but he knows if he looks at it he'll lose something in this moment. She laughs at his joke and it's working, but the truth is, she'd have said yes to a simple proposal. But this is nicer, better. She'll never remember what he said, but maybe for their tenth anniversary, he thinks, he'll give her the crumpled piece of paper in his pocket and she'll still be with him.

  '...I love you more than everything I have or ever will. I'm yours, and always will be...if you'll have me. Please say...'

  'Yes,' she says.

  *

  11.

  Across the way from the wide glass doors at the entrance to the hospital there's a muddied Land Rover, parked over two spaces in the car park.

  Darren Jones and his Fiancé head toward his car, her using just a single crutch, a metal one with a rest for her forearm that the hospital issued.

  The big car, almost a truck it's so big, coughs thick smoke.

  The driver looks like some kind of drunk Elvis on a thirty-year trawl of jails and whiskey bars. He crunches the gears and heaves on the heavy wheel, hard to turn with no power steering but he's not weak.

  He drives himself and the two dogs that sleep in the back of the Land Rover away from the bright, saccharin hospital, back to his home, which isn't ever a place. It's nothing but a thought, a concept, and one that's always more about people and family than the collection of caravans or the field they happen to sleep in.

  *

  12.

  June, 1989

  The usual way a woman falls pregnant was just fine for Rachel Bowyer. It wasn't how it happened, but she didn't know that, and she never would.

  The moment she crossed to that other path, the one where the Mulrones' trod, she was no longer destined to carry Darren Jones' child.

  The Mulrones didn't need to rape her. Not that way.

  Ma's boy could've just held her down and stuck a child in her, but it was wrong, and he knew it. They all did. They could've drugged her, and then done it. Yet to do that, put a fuck in a woman who didn't know it would have been wrong.

  But then 'wrong', when it comes down to it, is just the same as fair, just the same as right. The universe doesn't have any time for mortal concepts like fairness or right or wrong. It's not about that.

  What they did to Rachel Bowyer wasn't right, wasn't wrong. Not to a Mulrone.

  A dog doesn't care where his bone comes from. He doesn't feel guilt, and think about becoming a vegetarian. It's just a fucking bone.

  *

  13.

  Rachel Bowyer's a woman who's got her shit together, so when she gets the call to go for her smear at the local surgery, she books in without making a big fuss, and doesn't bother telling Darren, either.

  She doesn't like the idea of cold steel inside her, or the scraping she knows she's going to have to endure. But she's a woman, and it's the way things are. She's spent seventy-two days in hospital with a broken back and a steel rod inside her. She can handle it.

  There, the doctor's cold and impersonal. A woman doctor, for which Rachel's grateful. She doesn't really want a man doctor. Not for this.

  Rachel doesn't watch the doctor rooting around inside her. She asks for a screen, then puts her legs up on the bed, splayed, like a dead, upside down frog, so the doctor can do her test for cancerous cervical cells. She feels a hard, rough scrape, followed by a sense of wetness inside her that she figures might be a little blood.

  The doctor probably tries to be gentle, but she isn't, not really. It hurts and Rachel cries and the doctor gives her a half-hearted expression of solidarity, backed by a single square of tissue for Rachel to wipe her eyes on.

  'Sorry,' says the doctor.

  Rachel puts up with the scratchy, irritating feeling inside for a couple of days and puts Darren off for a day or two after that.

  He'll live, she figures.

  She relents after four days when she's feeling better and he's nearly dribbling from wanting to get laid every night and her pushing him back over his side of the bed, fending him off with a book like a shield.

  So she think it's at the end of those four days that she gets pregnant. It isn't, but it's a good memory to hold onto. He's desperate, almost rough, when he's usually gentle and slow, and she kind of likes the change in pace.

  Good one to get pregnant on, she thinks.

  But she's wrong, of course. She's already been pregnant four days, when the cold doctor pumped her full of semen from three Mulrone men, all stoically just doing their best to balance things out.

  *

  14.

  The doctor never tells anyone. Why would she? They left her family to her and at the end of it all, she knew she never wanted them to go away. She wants them, because without them there, she'll remember that her life, her money, her fine house and private schooling for her daughter are all built on nothing more than wet sand in a hard tide.

  In case she forgets that little fact while she grows old, she always has the memory of her husband's mutilated ear. Every day, for
the rest of her life, she holds the memory of stitching it together to stop the bleeding. It's that, the memory of his bloodied ear, cartilage pale and blood bright, that proves a more solid foundation in her life than all the money she earns trying to atone.

  'You're a doctor. You figure it out.' That's all the man says when he comes into her home in the early hours of the morning.

  She figures it out, and Rachel Bowyer ends her day pregnant.

  She returns home at the end of her business, crying off work sick even though doctors are never sick, to find her husband at the kitchen table holding a tea towel full of ice against his half-severed ear.

  The man, the intruder in her home and her life, his accent so strange she can barely understand him, says the same thing on the way out of her front door as he places a photograph of her daughter at the school gates beside their front door.

  'You're a doctor,' he says. 'You figure it out.'

  She figures that out, too. She's pretty smart.

  *

  15.

  Around two weeks later, Rachel doesn't want it again.

  'Think I'm due on,' she tells Darren. And she feels like she's due, though her periods have always been irregular. Her breasts are sore, she feels a little irritable, and his touch grates on her nerves, though usually it doesn't. Usually it's welcome.