Page 14 of The Tapes
Only one person saw Laura on the towpath that day. Alan Ilverston lives in a cottage that overlooks the canal. For large parts of the year, the trees at the back of his property are a vibrant green, teeming with life that obstructs any view of the water. On the day Laura passed, the branches were in the early stages of returning to their summer glory.
‘I keep trying to think whether I saw someone else behind or in front of her,’ he told me from the bench at the back of his house. He’s made a pot of lemon tea and we sit together, drinking from dinky china cups and saucers that he says only come out for visitors. ‘I think about Laura probably every day,’ he adds. ‘I wish I had a better answer, that my memory was clearer, or that I’d had some sort of camera back then. All I know is that I was in the kitchen doing the washing-up. The window overlooksthe back and I watched a woman in a green coat walk along the canal path. She must have noticed a flicker of movement, something like that, because she turned towards me and we sort of nodded to one another. You know, like you do when you catch a stranger’s eye. Just a way of saying “hello”. That was it. A second, two at the most. I didn’t know then I’d be the last person to ever see her.’
Laura’s body was found three days later in a drainage ditch at the side of a crumbling unremarkable country road that leads into town. The town had a problem with fly-tipping in the area, and a driver stopped, thinking her body was a dumped bin bag.
Except it wasn’t.
Laura March was forty-three years old. She was found with her throat slit and a single peacock-shaped earring in her ear. At that time, it was 1998 and the World Cup was beginning. David Beckham was about to be sent off and become a national figure of hate. But as football fans burned effigies, here, in Sedingham, the police had far bigger worries. Laura was the Earring Killer’s fourth victim in three years – and if there had ever been any doubt, there wasn’t any longer.
The town had a serial killer.
WEDNESDAY
SEVEN
I can never watch mystery shows on television.
It’s mainly because I’m always stuck wondering why nobody ever has a job. There’ll be these allegedly normal people going about their day, getting involved in scrapes, never once going to work. I wonder how they pay their rent or mortgage, how they can afford things; where all the free time comes from.
That’s the thing with death, with mysteries: life goes on. I’ve slept barely three hours, yet I’m behind a desk, trying not to yawn, pretending to focus on a computer monitor. It’s my father’s funeral in two days and I’ve been up most of the night listening to the ghost of my mother tell me how she found a jewellery box filled with earrings of murdered women.
All I want to do is look for that box.
After being awoken by Mum’s voice, I listened to the whole of that tape for the first time, then turned it over and listened to the second side. Of the ninety minutes, around an hour is my infant self, struggling with letters and numbers; fifteen to twenty is either blank or fuzz; and the rest is my mother talking about how she fears being murdered because she knows the identity of the Earring Killer.
If Mum names the person, it’s lost among the tape glitches.
It’s hard not to think on that, but I did fall asleep with the sound of my mother’s voice in the background for probably the first time in four decades.
I found a tape with her talking about a Sedingham summer fête. There were camels on the high street, and a dancing elephant – which reinforces, as always – that the 1980s were a very different time.
Another yawn. I’m the office manager of a landscaping company and, in the two hours I’ve been at work, I’ve deleted a few emails, had a conversation I’ve already forgotten, and three mugs of bad coffee.
I’m checking a work order against the inventory log, but the information isn’t going in. Usually, I could do this sort of thing on autopilot but the tiredness and the bright white strip lights are not a good combination.
As another yawn is fought away, the door opens and a pair of the gardeners come in. Dina’s one of the few women who work for the company, though she’s the most competent person by a long way. Owen’s not long out of college and likely has a crush on his older workmate, based on the way he constantly tries to look at her in a not-looking-at-her way.
‘Is the van booked in for its MOT?’ Dina asks, not one for small talk. I click between spreadsheets, trying to appear as if I’m awake until I find the correct page.
‘Friday,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not going to be here but there shouldn’t be any issues.’
‘You off on holiday?’ Owen tails off as it’s impossible to miss Dina’s very raised eyebrows.
‘It’s my dad’s funeral,’ I reply, trying not to be too harsh with it. Owen has the look of a person who wants the ground to swallow him up.
Part of being the office manager is essentially doing a bit of everything. I book jobs, assign teams, order supplies, plusarrange maintenance for the equipment and vehicles. Owen is saved by Dina taking over and asking what she should do with the paperwork. With that sorted, they turn to leave for the day’s tasks, before I remember that it was me who went through Owen’s CV when he applied for the job. He’s almost out the door when I call him back, asking if I can have a word. He tells Dina he’ll be right with her, then returns to the desk.
‘Sorry about the, um… funeral,’ he says, avoiding eye contact.
‘Can I check something with you?’ I say. ‘Is it right you do audio editing on the side?’
He brightens at this. ‘There’s a podcast studio in town. I help out on weekends and edit at home as a bit of a side hustle.’
‘Do you know much about cassette tapes?’ I ask.
He laughs, presumably considering this a joke before his features become more serious. ‘Oh, right… yeah. I mean, I know what they are. I’ve got a degree in multimedia production, and we covered tapes.’
He laughs again, though there’s an edge. He’s probably had a conversation or two with his parents about why he spent three years doing a degree in multimedia, only to end up at a landscaping company.
