‘Shit.’ He tugs at a bit of the stone. ‘This must have been hollow underneath. No wonder they cordoned it off.’
She tries to nod, but her head throbs. She feels exhausted and really, really cold. She starts to shiver.
‘Here.’
Wrigley pulls his hoodie off jerkily and gives it to her. Gratefully, she pulls it over her head.
‘Thanks.’
‘Now, give me that knife.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I’m going to try and use it to move this bit of paving.’
Flo hesitates then hands him the knife.
‘Why have you got a knife, anyway?’
‘I thought there might be an intruder here.’
‘Was there?’
He wedges the knife under the stone slab and wiggles it. She thinks about the burning girl, arms outstretched.
‘No.’
He shrugs. ‘I used to carry a knife.’
‘What?’
‘For protection.’
The stone gives a little. She bites back a wince.
‘From who?’
‘Just kids. At school.’
‘You carried a knife at school?’
‘It was stupid, I know. But you don’t know what it was like. The stuff that happened.’
The knife scrapes at the stone. It’s very close to her leg, but she’s sure she can feel the slab loosening.
‘Was this at your old school?’
He tenses. ‘Who told you about that?’
‘Rosie –’
‘Of course.’
‘She said you tried to kill a girl.’
‘That’s a lie.’
‘So you didn’t set the school on fire?’
A pause. The only sound is the grating of the knife on stone. He isn’t going to answer, she thinks.
He sighs and looks back at her. ‘No. I did try to burn down the school.’ A small, thin smile. ‘So, now you know. I’m a psycho.’
‘Why?’
‘Just born that way, I guess.’
‘No. I mean, why did you try to burn down the school?’
Their eyes meet. Such odd eyes, she thinks. That strange silvery green. Weirdly hypnotic.
‘Because I hated that place. I hated everything about it. The teachers, the other pupils. The smell. The rules. I hated the way they treated anyone who didn’t fit their mould. Schools say all sorts of stuff about how they deal with bullying. But they don’t. All they care about is the good, normal kids who boost their Ofsted results.
‘Once, this gang of kids surrounded me in the playing fields. They made me take my clothes off and crawl on my belly in the mud. Then they forced me to eat worms. When I made it back to the school, covered in mud and naked, you know what the teachers did? They laughed.’
‘Christ.’
‘Even when Mum went up to the school to complain, nothing really changed. There weren’t any good days. Not one. Just days they didn’t torture me quite so much.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I just cracked. I … I wanted to obliterate that place.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘I didn’t know she was in there.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘Someone called the fire brigade. They got her out. I felt terrible about it. I would never, ever hurt anyone.’
‘What about you?’
‘I got off lightly. My mum paid for some fancy psychologist. I got counselling, supervision. We moved and I changed schools. Not that things are much better here.’ He turns back to the stone. ‘Almost there.’
A chunk of the stone slab breaks away. Her leg is free. Painful, but free. She pulls it gingerly out. Her jeans are torn, and she can see a deep laceration and bruising through the ripped denim. She wiggles her foot. Hurts like hell. But it could have been worse.
‘Thank you,’ she says to Wrigley.
‘You should probably get that cleaned up.’
‘I should call my mum too.’
He looks around and picks up her phone from the floor. ‘Not sure it’ll work. Looks pretty badly smashed up.’
He hands it to her. Their fingers brush. It suddenly strikes her that they are sitting close. Really close. She swallows. Then she thinks about what Rosie said.
‘Wrigley – there’s something else …’
But he’s looking past her. ‘Shit. Have you seen this?’
He’s peering into the hole where her leg was stuck.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘This is really deep. You were lucky you didn’t fall all the way through.’
She turns stiffly and joins him. They stare down through the jagged hole in the floor. She can’t see much, but she can tell Wrigley is right. The hole is deep. Far deeper than it should be, surely? Unless there’s something underneath the church? Some kind of cellar?
‘Have you got a light on your phone?’ she asks.
Wrigley takes out his phone and shines it into the hole.
‘Holy crap!’
Flo gasps. ‘Is that –’
They look at each other and then back down, into the hole.
Coffins.
THIRTY-FOUR
I first saw Ruby when her aunt brought her to be baptized. She had just turned five. Chubby-cheeked and the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen. I didn’t know her back story, not then, but it gradually came out through other parishioners. The church community was tightly knit. People knew each other’s business. A bit like a small village.
Ruby’s mother had died from a drug overdose. No father around. Her mother’s sister had stepped in to foster her. Aunt Magdalene was a large, jovial woman who hadn’t been able to have children of her own. She lived with her friend, Demi, a thin black lady, as skinny as Magdalene was fulsome.
I didn’t know them particularly well. Prior to fostering Ruby, they had attended another church, but then decided to join my congregation. The two women brought Ruby to St Anne’s every Sunday for the family service and occasionally to the children’s art group on Thursday evenings.
Lena (as I grew to know her) was chatty, always smiling and laughing. Demi was quieter, more reserved. However, they seemed a devoted couple, even if, sometimes, I got the impression that a child had perhaps been more Lena’s desire than Demi’s. But still, I didn’t see any warning signs. Not at first. Or maybe I did, and I just tried to ignore them. Like we all do.
At the christening, I remember Lena saying she was relieved she had got it done. It seemed an odd choice of words, so I asked why.
‘Her mother was godless,’ she told me. ‘She would have let her child die and Ruby would have remained in purgatory.’
I had politely and gently said that God welcomes all children, even those who are not christened. She had looked at me strangely and said: ‘No, Reverend. They will forever wander the earth. I want my Ruby to go to heaven.’
I had dismissed it. I shouldn’t have done. I should have known that there is a fine line between being religious and religious fervour. But then, many of my congregation were far more ‘Old Testament’ than me. I tried as much as I could to update their views, to encourage them to think more about love and tolerance than hellfire and damnation, but their views didn’t mean that they were bad people.