Lost: Part 2

 

David Winter picked up his cigarette butt and turned to look at his new home. At the top of the sloping village green, a row of mottled stone cottages nestled into the shadow of the great grey church like feeding kittens. After three weeks, he still could not quite believe that he had moved to this place. This quiet place. A place of tradition and stasis and slow unending summer afternoons. A place of geranium plants on cottage windowsills, of washing snapping like flags in the breeze, of rattling milk carts and creaking mobile libraries. It was a place so unexceptional it was almost invisible. Travellers passing through the village would never remember doing so, as if the place had silently and inexplicably erased all of their memories the very second they left. Nothing exceptional happened in a place such as this. A place of such humdrum predictability. And yet, it was here, many years before, that something dark and unspeakable had occurred. An event so harrowing, the whole country would come to learn the name of this tiny northern village, and would never be able to forget it. This was the place from which the Coxon girls were taken. Lost forever. It was a horror that had stalked and tormented Winter the whole of his career. The sour taste of failure diffused through every breath he took.

And now retirement. The idea of it horrified him. All that empty time and space humming and crackling like a faulty fluorescent light. And just when he could legitimately step away from his memories of the two lost little girls, finally close the door on the case and learn to accept his failure, he found himself inexplicably moving towards them. He always said he was haunted by the Coxon girls, yet now it seemed they were the haunted ones and he was the spectre that would not let them rest. With each year that passed, Winter had felt he was surely moving towards some sort of resolution. He had to believe that justice would prevail, or at the very least that some sort of answer would present itself. The alternative was too bleak to contemplate. Faced with retirement, Winter had been forced to confront the notion that neither justice nor an explanation would come.  

Three months before retirement, Winter found himself driving past a cottage for sale just two miles from the old ice cream parlour which had been the Coxon girls’ home. The next day he arranged to view the property. The estate agent caught him gazing out of the sitting room window, ‘Lovely distant view of the sea, isn’t it?’ she said. She could not have known that Winter had barely registered the sea. In his mind, he was walking the streets of the colliery, remembering faces, names, addresses. He was reliving interviews in peeling police station rooms where the air thick with sweat, bad coffee and fear. He felt a beckoning, as if a higher presence had guided him that day to the cramped, dark cottage on the green. He had made an offer to the astonished estate agent on the spot. Why had he done that? Did he really think he could solve the case after all these years or was he simply punishing himself for his failure? Every morning now, when he opened his curtains, he was greeted with a view of the narrow, meandering colliery terraces and the unforgiving North Sea. He had not, could not examine his motivation too closely. He could only say that he viewed retirement as some sort of shipwreck. The only way he could contemplate surviving it was to have some purpose, to be of some use, to have something to hold on to.

Monuments to his failure stood mutely on his kitchen table: the sealed cardboard boxes labelled simply Coxon. They stood patiently, silently, waiting to be opened and poured over. Winter had spent the last months of his service copying every file and document he could find about the missing girls. He had smuggled them out of work nightly in his briefcase and added them to his box of old notebooks about the case. After he had moved to the cottage, he had unpacked boxes of plates and bowls, boxes of books and jumpers, boxes of canned goods and coffee cups. Three weeks in, he was pretty much settled, but the boxes on the kitchen table remained untouched. Each day he awoke with the intention of getting a sharp knife and slicing through the seals and starting his work. He would wake, dress and smoke a cigarette outside on the village green while he stared at the distant colliery streets. He would survey the scene of his failure like a deposed emperor viewing the sight of the battleground that brought about his downfall. But, each day the boxes remained unopened. Their accusing presence unsettled him. No matter where he was in the cottage, or what he was doing, they seemed to gather him in their chilly embrace. We are waiting, they seemed to whisper, in a voice as soft as wind-bent grass We are still waiting. 

In a parallel, less complicated life, a life where the Coxon girls left the Brownies two minutes earlier and had not crossed the path of a monster, Winter might be settling down to a gentle retirement with his wife in Spain. Or he might be meeting ridiculously jumpered friends on a blustery golf course. But Winter had no wife, and his only friends were work-colleagues and they (quite deliberately) had not been selected for their golfing ability. Winter’s was a life lived consciously alone. It had been a life lived for work. No wonder retirement brought to mind images of shipwrecks. Did that explain the cottage on the green and the boxes on the kitchen table? Was Winter clinging to them like a drowning man clings to a raft in churning, lonely waters?

Speeches at Winter’s leaving do were inevitably peppered with good-natured barbs at his expense. Winter the gloomy loner. Winter the loather of team-work and loser of paperwork. Winter the dinosaur, once fearsome but now doddery, toothless, nearing extinction. Winter the celebrity, the unwilling star of many true-crime books and newspaper articles. 

The night of his leaving party, Winter had sat at the bar and gazed into the amber clouds of his pint. He allowed the jovial insinuations and gentle teasing to wash over him. When Superintendent Smith took to the stage with his game-show swagger, in suit that cost more than Winter’s first house, he could take it no longer.

‘Inspector David Winter, our silent man of mystery, come up and make a speech. This is the end of an era. There are some here who have worked with you for thirty years and would like to hear you string at least one sentence before you leave. And, I have some goodies to present to you.’ Smith radiated his most boyish and endearing smile. It was the smile he usually reserved for the ‘ladies in the typing pool.’ Not that there had been a ‘typing pool’ at police headquarters since 1985. But for men like Smith, women in the police force would always be ‘ladies in the typing pool’, regardless of their rank or role. Winter wondered, had always wondered how his female colleagues tolerated Smith’s daily condescension, his halitosis smile as unctuous as rancid treacle. 

‘Come on now Winter. Put that pint down and step up here,’ the request was accompanied by a click of the fingers so sharp it brought to mind the crack of a whip. This was another of Smith’s more irritating habits. The habit of an entitled man who had been raised since boyhood with the complete assurance that he would always get what he wanted. ‘This is your moment, David.’

‘Cunting-wanker-fuckwit-arsehole-wanker-nob.’ Winter muttered into his pint. Only the landlady heard him. She sent a commiserating smile in Winter’s direction. She would not fancy making a speech in front of this raucous crowd or getting too close to the preening peacock on the stage either. Everyone was now on their feet cheering and clapping. Their faces appeared horribly blurred and distorted to Winter, their applause rattled like gunfire. The room was suddenly unspeakably hot. A trickle of sweat crept down his neck. His body began to tense as if every vein and sinew were stretched as tight as a violin string.

He stood and raised his hands placatingly, ‘Aye, well, I need a smoke first. Give us a minute. The good Superintendent here will no doubt keep you entertained for a while longer. He’s got lots of canny stories. Aye, and some of them we’ve only heard five or six times before. Occasionally, very occasionally mind, they are even true,’ With that, he picked up his packet of Silk Cut, saluted casually and ambled from the room. He allowed the door to slam behind him sealing in the jangling hubbub of the party like a tomb. Once outside, he breathed slowly and deeply. The dusk was falling gently and the air was still and cool. He began to walk. The farther away from the pub he walked, the more composed he felt. He kept walking. He walked the five miles back home without once looking back. Winter the failure, he thought, that was the anecdote no one at the party had the balls to tell. Winter the failure. To David Winter, that was the only story that mattered.

Two days after the party, his framed long-service certificate arrived in the post. He felt a fluttering pleasure as he wondered how long the polished prick Smith had waited on the stage for him to return. He stuffed the certificate in a drawer in the spare bedroom along with the flashy gold-plated watch. The bottle of single malt, he immediately put to better use. 

She was there again that morning, he’d noticed. The odd, lanky girl from the cottage next door. She was hard to miss with her sharp black bob and mustard yellow wellington boots. Today she watched him from the speckled shade of the rowan tree on the green. With the binoculars strung around her neck and her khaki shorts and wellies, she looked like a tiny but determined anthropologist. Every morning, as Winter enjoyed his first cigarette of the day, she was there. One day she had been sitting on the church wall, swinging her legs nonchalantly as she feigned interest in the racing clouds. The next she had been leaning against the bus stop, pretending to read the grubby timetable. Winter always spotted her immediately, no matter how hard she tried to remain hidden. He was, after all, an expert in the art of casual observation. He played along with the ruse though, maintaining an expression of vacant obliviousness. 

The girl was always alone, always; although often she chattered and gesticulated wildly as if entertaining an invisible companion. Sometimes she appeared to mime the movement of stroking a dog. She did this with such breath-taking tenderness and love that Winter felt quite moved, as if his tough old heart was becoming porous. One morning he had snorted with silent laughter as she threw sticks for her unseen dog and feigned exasperation when it failed to fetch them. Nell. She was called Nell. He had learnt that today when the old woman called her in for breakfast. When this happened, Winter had unthinkingly turned towards her and for a searing second their eyes had met. She lost her footing when she realised she had been spotted and Winter’s heart pierced with tenderness at the sight of her awkwardness. He looked away with feigned disinterest. Even when she scampered past him like a nervous colt, he kept his eyes coolly focused on the sea. Her aching need for invisibility resonated deeply within him. It was something he understood. It was something he respected.

Alone on the green, he watched as the milky veil of mist lifted to reveal a sea of rippling silk. He was suddenly aware of the richness and ripeness of autumn: its mellow golden beauty. He smiled as he thought of the spindly girl next door and her amateur attempts at surveillance. He felt his spirit unexpectedly soar, as if tethered to the rising sun. Tomorrow, he decided, his work must begin. It was time. He would walk through the village to the colliery and to the sea beyond. He would start with the main street and the jumble of small, mismatched shops that had always reminded him of his odd sock drawer. He would climb to the allotments on the hill which would be scented with wood-smoke and where blazing dahlias would clamour for sunlight in dusty furrows. He would sit on the steps of the church hall and imagine twenty-three little girls in Brownie uniforms fluttering out of its doors like startled sparrows. He would walk the headland’s jagged cliffs and watch the waves crashing over treacherous black rocks. Of all places in the colliery, he feared the sea the most, its greed, its cruelty, its blue darkness. These were the places embedded within Winter’s waking and dreaming consciousness. They were etched, carved to the bone with the crude brutality of a prison tattoo. The time had come to revisit them, he understood. And after he had walked the streets and reacquainted himself with its small, square houses and unending terraces, he would open the boxes on his kitchen table. The waiting, which had been ticking slowly inside him, was over. After all, long ago, in this most unexceptional of places, two little girls vanished like smoke into a cold November night. They were deserving of a little time and effort. They were deserving of so much more. They always would be.