In Chapter 4 of this exciting novel, Harv has now discovered the identity of her biological father, or at least she thinks she has. Her feelings in a turmoil, she leaves her parents’ house without saying goodbye and sets off to at least get a glimpse of the last place where her father was seen alive. The plot thickens. Enjoy this new chapter.

Chapter 4

I slumped back down against the box, thinking about him, about my mother. I was confused, overwhelmed by a vacuous, empty sensation like something fundamental was being sucked from me. My head felt like a polythene bag full of water, blood thumping in my ears, I was holding myself tight, my forehead fretted until my head ached.
I knew I had to get away before Angie came home and without Ken seeing the trouble in my face. There was no way I could face them and a worse thought was swilling horribly into my consciousness; that it could have been Angie who had stabbed him.
It was crazy, but it would explain why she had refused to tell me anything, when it was now so clear that she had known the truth all along. It was not possible that she could have had sex with a man who was murdered almost immediately after he had supposedly dropped her off and that she would somehow forget about it. The press cutting in my hand, and the ones which I knew must have appeared afterwards, informed me of this truth. It must have been all over the papers at the time, including pictures of him. This murder would have been the total talk of a small town like Scarborough. There was no way that she could have missed it.
From the diary entry, it seemed perfectly possible that nobody who Angie knew, either friends or parents, had seen them together. No one had seen them as they drove through town and she had waited in the car while he went into the B&B. They had gone to a pub, but not locally, and had sat where no one could see them. The rest of the time they had spent in his car, her arriving home so late that her parents would not have seen her return, possibly on foot, possibly covered in blood.
These thoughts seemed ridiculous and dramatic but why had Angie not gone to the police with information? If she had, it would have become part of our shared history, something she could not have kept hidden from me; a huge and horrible and very public legend in her life. She was a key witness, maybe the last person to see him alive and definitely the last if she had been the killer.
It was possible that they had got into a fight in his car on South Parade, he might have pulled a knife, tried to rape her and she had somehow turned the knife on him, stabbing him and stabbing him until she managed to run from the car and home under the cover of late night, empty streets.
Maybe she had fabricated the details in the diary, so if the police discovered that she had been with him that night, she could show them the diary where she had already cleverly written her own girlish alibi, a clean and safe version of events, just in case.
I pushed these thoughts away; Angie was too lightweight, too transparent to have held or maintained a lie of this magnitude. But murderers came in all different guises and as long as no one had seen them together, Angie would have been a piece of hay in a haystack so far as anyone identifying her as the killer went. As long as she had kept her head down and clear, acted normal and said nothing to anyone, it was perfectly feasible that she could have got away with it.
No one would suspect a seventeen-year-old girl. She had washed away the evidence and the passing of time would calm her and allay her fear of being caught.
Angie must have calculated that to have come forward, would have splashed her face all over the papers to identify her with Myra Hindley style mug shot, as the cheap girl who had fast sex with a stranger in the back of a car four hours after meeting him in a Spar shop and that four hours after leaving him, according to her story, he was brutally murdered. If guilty, she would have been branded by the press as some kind of black widow spider; seventeen years old and pregnant by the man she had executed immediately after their casual mating. She would have gone to prison and I would have been born there. How would they have branded me? It was unthinkable.
If Angie had killed him, I wondered how she would have behaved the next morning, or where she would have hidden her blood soaked clothing. I imagined her sitting at the breakfast table, Brian reading the paper while his daughter ate toast and cereal self consciously wondering whether what she had done was written all over her face. Whether what she had done had made the early edition, and any minute now, her father would push the paper across the table at her to show her what she already knew. After breakfast she would have gone to work, measured feet and chatted about the weather, with the colours of a hideous death still hanging like a fresh bruise in her aura and perhaps, a crescent of dried blood screaming her guilt from under a torn fingernail.
Innocent or guilty, those few weeks of Angie’s life must have been intolerable. I wondered how a seventeen year old had found the resource to cope in the face of what had unfolded two days after that final diary entry.
If Angie was the killer, then the horror of her crime would have been painfully internalised along with the terror of being caught, scared that she would trip herself up with the lies which would have sounded to her so thin and obvious as she sidled them cautiously from her tight mouth. Every morning and night, her fingers panicking through rattling newspapers which appealed for the information that only she could give. Angie, wide eyed and waiting for the knock at the door.
If she was innocent, then she would have probably been scared and bewildered, her initial hurt at his not calling exploding to a heart sink of horror as she read the front page splash in the local evening paper. Maybe she had heard about the murder as a flutter of delicious gossip on the street. I wondered how she had found out and how she had set her face at that moment to mask her inner turmoil and how she had then decided what to do. Four weeks later, or thereabout, she would have been sure that she was pregnant. But what was she? A scared victim or a murderous receptacle?
I was horrified by the thought of his body cooling with death while his still warm and vital sperm were squirming and fighting their way toward Angie’s seed; bloated and ready in her hot, fertile young belly. Tiny energetic specks of half-life seeking to create a whole, as his own force ebbed away. I wondered if it were possible that he had died at the very second that the remarkable fusion had made me alive. It chilled me.
It was a lie. “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
I had to get away, to get some perspective. I felt raw, my emotions seething at the surface. I couldn’t grieve for a man that I didn’t know but I could grieve for the lost possibility and I could make Angie pay in some way. I didn’t know how yet.
Fuck her and fuck her lies. My rage toward her felt tight and white. Something had broken that would never be mended. Her lies had undermined the very foundation of our relationship. I was no longer sure of who she was and what I believed about her.
I tore the two pages from the diary, folded them around the newspaper cutting and pushed them into my shirt pocket. I wiped my face roughly on the striped cloth and wrapped the diary back in it, then repacking her Pandora’s Box, as accurately as I could remember, I pushed it deep into a corner, obscuring it with the heavy carton of pigeon magazines.
Grabbing the carton of photographs, I closed up the loft and quickly packed my weekend things into my small bag. I could see Ken with two friends in the garden; he was holding a bird, spreading one wing to full span while the other men bent intently, gazing at the fan of feathers as he explained something to them.
I scribbled a quick note and left it on the kitchen table saying that Philip had called and that I had had to get back to York quickly. I said that I hadn’t wanted to disturb Ken as he was busy and then I hurried like a thief to the car, chucking my stuff like swag into the back seat.
I revved the engine a little too hard, my tyres spinning gravel and pulled into the road, terrified that Angie would be just turning into the street to see me leaving, my face a seething sneer of resentment and my eyes flashing too much white.
At the end of the road, and without a plan, I turned my car away from York and toward South Parade burning up the hill toward the tourist side of town, the little engine screaming in third gear. I wanted to see the scene of the crime, sit outside The Golden Sands and walk over the pavement where he had stumbled to see if I felt anything, maybe a shudder or a warm connection.
I drove into South Parade and was confronted by a skein of painted signs, which stood at the gate of nearly every property, both right and left. They stretched the length of the straight road with the air force blue sea in the distance, a tiny block of horizon, like a full stop.
I drove slowly, my head scanning to and fro, and there it was, about half way down on the right hand side; The Golden Sands, painted toffee and white and insinuating itself boldly and bay-fronted onto the street.
I found a parking space just beyond it and pulled in, switching off the engine and turning to stared up at the windows, trying to make myself feel something. It was everything a Bed and Breakfast should be; a glass porch with a ‘vacancies’ sign and a spider plant, a small breakfast table in the front window and a compact and healthy palm tree in the gravelled front garden.
I sat there for about ten minutes wondering if he might have parked his car in this exact spot and sat exactly where I was sitting now, his eyes seeing the same view that my eyes were now seeing. Was this where he had defended himself from the cutter, scrabbling and struggling for his life? I got out of the car and went to the door.
As I turned the brass doorknob, I could imagine his hand unable to find traction, blood and liquid fingers sliding on smooth metal. Red smears and droplets on gold.
The hallway was bright and clean; practical patterned carpet and textured cream and white wallpaper. I thought about the smeary handprints, the ‘traces of blood found in the entrance’, which would have drivelled along the walls and up the stairs. They might still be there, hidden under layers of old paper and paint.
A gilt half-circle table with a glass top held a couple of letters and a silk flower arrangement in shades of peach. There was a small desk, more like a lectern with a lower shelf and a small brass bell with a galleon handle standing on a laminated sign, which directed you to ‘Please Ring for Attention’. I picked it up and shook it; its silvery ringing was strident in the deathly quiet and I waited. A fire door swung open from what I guessed was probably the kitchen and a middle-aged woman came out wiping her hands on her apron and smiling a smile of welcome. Now, I didn’t know what to say. I was aware that I was gaping and probably appeared confused and weird. We stood like this, for a moment, each of us waiting for the other to begin. She was pink and breathing heavily.
“How can I help you?” she eventually asked, still smiling. She wiped a clean red hand across her dewy forehead, “Sorry, I’ve just been kneading bread. Takes it out of me these days”
“I wondered if you had any rooms available next week?” I lied.
“Next week, next week, now let me have a look. Is it a double or a single, arriving when and for how many nights?” She reached a booking diary from under the counter and flopped it open to the following week.
I thought quickly. He would probably have stayed in a single, “A single, for two nights from next Wednesday if that’s possible?”
“Yes, we have a couple of rooms, but they may fill up quite quickly at this time of year.”
“Is there any chance I could see one of the rooms?”
“Of course.” My heart was thumping as she reached under the desk again and pulled out some keys.
As we climbed the stairs I built my story, explaining that the room was actually for my parents who were coming to stay in Scarborough for a few days. I was lying with the confidence of a used car salesman now but in my desperation to get up here, I had tripped myself up.
“Won’t they be wanting a double then?” she asked, looking bemused by my inconsistency.
“Yes, how stupid of me, sorry, they probably will. Well, they definitely will. Yes”. I felt foolish, was aware that I had flushed, and consciously decided to offer no explanation.
I was desperate to see the single rooms but at this point I didn’t really care what I was shown; I just wanted to be upstairs in this house, to get an eyeful of as much as possible. I kept talking and the woman kept answering, but it was as if the words were coming from outside of me, like I was narrating the scene from offstage.
I was detached, my eyes scanning the décor like I was scrutinising the accommodation for cleanliness, the woman obviously thinking that I was acting peculiarly. I was looking for a sign; a speck of blood on a skirting, a smear on a door casing or an indelible stain seeping through wallpaper. If I had found one there, what would I have done – asked if I could scrape up this tiny DNA daddy on a flake of paint and keep it close to my heart in a matchbox? Suddenly I felt mad.
The woman opened the door into a street facing room with plain nets blowing at the open window. I stood, wondering now what the hell I was hoping to feel or connect with. It was probably not the actual room and might not even be the right house. The original Golden Sands could have disappeared in a change of ownership, the name re-emerging here in a completely different property.
“My parents stayed at the Golden Sands on their honeymoon, twenty four years ago, and they asked me to see if it was still here. That’s why they’re coming back, for their anniversary”. This was my best lie so far and I hoped it would lead me neatly to the question which would confirm whether this was the right house.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “I wonder which room they stayed in?”
“I’m not sure about the room but I think they said it was a Mrs Carr who was the landlady.” I tried to look convincingly vague.
“Yes, that’s right, she was the owner two before us; I think she went to live with her daughter in Sheffield when she sold up. That must be what…” she counted mentally,
”twenty years ago now, because we’ve been here nine and the people before us had it for about seven”.
I wanted to leave. Now I was here, the location confirmed, I felt nothing except sad. I asked for a business card and said that I would let her know about the reservation later in the day after I had spoken to my parents. Leaving the house, I felt a tugging and a pang of abandonment but I think that was because I felt obligated to feel something.

Stay tuned next week for the next installment of what is fast becoming a nailbiter. See you soon

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I am happy to present the second half of Chapter 3 of this riveting novel. In the first half of the chapter, Harv found Angie’s diary from when she was a teenage girl, and realizes that by reading it she may uncover the identity of her biological father, something which Angie has kept a secret from her for her entire life. Harv has always found this inexplicable and frustrating, and is determined to find out the truth. This is where events are irretrievably set in motion, and from here on out, there is no looking back. In the second half of this chapter, as Harv reads on, she makes a terrible discovery. Enjoy! And get ready to start biting your nails.

CHAPTER 3b

After this episode, the diary continued in much the same vein. I thumbed through quickly, seeing some empty pages, a sprinkling of capital HURRAH’s and the regular red asterisks.  There were some dull little write ups on nothing in particular and some containing more, deeply difficult to read descriptions of sexual forays, none of them any more sophisticated or satisfactory than the Gary Smythe affair.
Angie clearly hadn’t learned very fast. In fact it appeared that she hadn’t learned at all. She had ridden the exhilarating waves of teenage sex and carelessly given love, with a gung ho naivety, lining herself up again and again to be plunged into troughs of despair and disappointed tears.
I sat back and let the pages riffle through my fingers like a flick book and suddenly understood the significance of the red asterisks; each one flagged up a night when she had gone all the way, like notches on the headboard, keeping score. As I flicked through they flashed up with shocking regularity, about once a fortnight in fact.
It was like a competition. Had she and Sal and Janice just been going hell for leather to notch up the biggest number?  Did they all have a go with the same ones and compare and allocate points?  I felt sorry and a little sick.
I had been eighteen when I had lost my virginity and that had been to James, a serious boyfriend, and we’d waited for at least a month. Then for the next three years I’d only had sex with him. Now, here was my mother, going at it like it was a living, with all and sundry.
The first four months of the diary, she must have totalled what? I checked back, making a count of the asterisks, one, two, three, four, seven.  Seven – nearly one a fortnight.  I shook my head like a disappointed head mistress, appalled at the promising girl who has let the whole school down so badly.  It was no wonder that she had fallen pregnant with this level of reckless activity. For God’s sake, how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen?
I flipped back to the beginning, to see the year that the diary had been written, but could find no reference until I noticed two pages stuck together and reamed a fingernail around the gold edging, peeling them apart to reveal the year as 1974.
This was my apocalypse; a gasp escaped as if I had been shocked and an urgent plume of adrenaline fluttered its way from under my ribs to stroke at my heart with a hot, feathery rush.
If there had been a million red asterisks in the first six months of that diary, they would have paled into insignificance with the one that I thought might be twinkling on or around the top of pages dated mid June. I leafed slowly back through the diary turned Pandora’s Box; April, May, steeling myself for what I might find there, all the time knowing that the truth might be far more unsavoury than the fantasy, knowing that it might be better if I didn’t know the answer.
I had been born on Thursday March 6th 1975. Therefore, according to the conception calculator I had looked at on the internet, I had been conceived on or around the thirteenth of June 1974.   Apart from the fact that Angie was my mother, this was the only absolute regarding my conception; that, around the middle of June 1974, my mother had coupled with the man who was probably my father.  This date had secretly felt as significant to me in the absence of any other information, as a birthday.
Part of me hoped that this page of potentially huge implication would be blank and nothing would have changed.  The alternative might be the discovery that a goon like Gary Smythe had spawned me, with my mother’s revolting detail leaving me feeling like a seedy voyeur at my own grunting and youthfully enthusiastic fertilisation. I didn’t want to read that the residue of this disgusting mating had just been some ‘stuff’ which had been wiped off a moquette cushion in a dreary living room, that I was the bit that got away. If that was what I found there, I would have to live with that horrible truth and never be able to tell, and every time I saw Gary Smythe I would wonder if he knew, find myself looking for myself in him.  I would never go out in Scarborough again.
I began to turn the page, eyes half closed as if I could just feed myself a blurry half version of this enormous truth until I knew whether I liked it or not.
At the top of the page, blazing like a beacon was the red asterisk. Wednesday June 12, 1974.  The entry went on across the 13th and over to the 14th. There was a flattened cigarette packet, black and still shiny with a gold JPS insignia. On the white inside was written, ‘Angie, Easy Rider, get my dad’s special copy. I’m in it.’
The words were heavily underlined and there was a scribbly forward slanting signature that I couldn’t make out. I put my hand to my mouth and began tentatively to read.
‘It’s two a.m and I’ve just got home. Going to feel like shit tomorrow but I don’t care ‘cos I think I’m in love. AGAIN!!!  Had the weirdest night. Left work and stopped at the Spar to get some fags.  There was this bloke in there and he was absolutely gorgeous. He had on this shirt that made your eyes go funny and he smiled at me when I was buying my stuff at the counter then he smiled at me again when I left and said ‘bye’.  I looked awful. Had my shitty uniform on, but at least I’d rolled up the skirt a bit to make it shorter and tied the horrible shirt in a knot at the front. I hung around outside, waiting for him to come out. Pretended I’d lost something in the bottom of my bag. I really, really wanted to talk to him. Just as he came out, some Tampax fell out of my handbag. REALLY EMBARRASSED.  He was laughing and he came over and picked them up. He had a nice Newcastle accent and he smiled a lot. He said he was on his way to Hull and he had stopped off in Scarborough because he’d never been. He needed somewhere to stay. I started to give him directions to the B and B’s and all the time, he was staring at my mouth and his eyes were sort of twinkling. It made me feel excited and uncomfortable all at the same time. HE IS GORGEOUS. It was like he couldn’t take his eyes off me. It got me all confused and shy because he knew what he was doing. I kept saying ‘Stop it,’ and he kept saying ‘What?’ and smiling more at me. I felt like a little kid.  I said I’d show him where the places to stay were instead of telling him and he said he’d take me home after. We got into his car, it was better than dads and I took him through town. I was hoping that someone might see me in the car with him, but we didn’t see anyone.  Drove up to South Parade and he went into one and booked in, then we went for a drink out of town on the way to Whitby and had fish and chips at a pub. We sat behind a pillar so the barmaid couldn’t see me in case she wouldn’t serve me.  I phoned Mum and Dad and said I wouldn’t be in for tea. Told them I was with Janice. He’s really funny and into films and videos. I’ve never even seen a video machine.  Kept going on and on about Easy Rider. He says I need to see it.  Wrote it down on this fag packet so I’d remember the name of it. Kept teasing me that his dad had a special copy and he was in it. I don’t believe him but he kept saying it was true. His name’s Martin Simmons and he comes from somewhere near Newcastle.’
I looked again at the flattened JPS packet. Now I could see that the signature said Martin Simmons.
‘On the way home we stopped in Peasholme Park and he started kissing me, then we got in the back of his car and we did it, it was fantastic and he kisses really well.  Afterwards we stayed in the back for ages and he told me about Newcastle and talked about music and stuff.  He’s really, really sweet and gentle and he’s going to take me out again while he’s here. We smoked nearly forty fags and he had got some beer from the Spar, so then we went back in the front drank some cans and sat up at the park till half one. He wanted to take me home, but I got him to drop me near South Parade and I walked down the hill. Didn’t want dad to see me get home in his car. Said he’d ring me tomorrow. He’s got green eyes and long dark wavy hair and a really nice moustache. Had to sneak in so Dad didn’t know what time I got home on a work night. Think it’s O.K.  Can’t wait till tomorrow.’
There was the same unsophisticated giddiness in Angie’s telling of the story but none of the coarseness which had made some of her other encounters seem so unclean.  He had stayed with her for hours after they had ‘done it’ and they had shared cigarettes and beer and conversation. He had taken her to a country pub, he had fed her and at the end of the night, he had wanted to take her home and when he had left her he had done so with a promise of more.  I felt a sense of warm relief.  Martin Simmons from Newcastle with green eyes and a shirt that makes your eyes go funny is going to take her out again.
I quickly checked back through the pages, wanting to be sure there had been no other sex which might interfere with my now desperate desire that he was the man I had been looking for.  There was an asterisk a week and a half before, someone called John Clarke; I supposed that he could be a contender but it was more unlikely I convinced myself. I wanted Martin Simmons to be the one. The last sweet and significant piece of my jigsaw clicked into place, somewhere so visceral I couldn’t locate it.  It made me shudder.  My picture felt complete. This was all that I had needed; a few precise brush strokes and a name. I liked him.
What I now understood was that Angie, having committed this act to paper, must have known all along that he was most likely to be the father. So why had she refused to tell. When she realised that she had missed a period, she had to have known; the facts had been in front of her written there in black and white. I couldn’t understand why she had refused to tell me anything about him, given that there seemed to be a lot less to be ashamed of in this encounter than there had been with the rest of them.
I excitedly turned the page to the fifteenth and then the sixteenth but they stared back glaringly and humiliatingly blank.  He had let her down.
I felt as deflated and sorry and disappointed for Angie’s empty pages as she probably had.  They whispered a sad defeat. There was none of the excuses and angry expletives which had followed her earlier let-downs. He had been nice to her, he had been different and she wanted to see him again but he hadn’t phoned.
I turned the page, and another and another, wanting so badly to see one of her big, shouting HURRAHS!  Instead there was nothing but a piece of newspaper folded into a yellowing square.
I opened it carefully, the creases so well pressed that it threatened to break apart as I unfolded it; The Scarborough Herald; the top half of the front page with a colour photograph and a blaring headline, ‘Man found murdered in Scarborough B&B’.  The page was dated Fri. 14 June.
The newspaper picture showed a typical Scarborough guesthouse, but with two policemen standing guard at the wooden front gate.  A Ford Escort squad car was parked in the street. The pavement had been taped off.
I read the article. ‘The body of a man, not believed to be a Scarborough resident, was found yesterday morning at the Golden Sands Bed and Breakfast on South Parade.
The owner of Golden Sands, Mrs Edna Carr, who became suspicious when she found blood on the walls and in the entrance to the property on Thursday morning, made the grisly discovery at about 6.30 a.m.
The man who is thought to be in his early twenties and who, police report, was repeatedly stabbed, bled to death in his room.  Blood found in what is assumed to be his car, lead police to believe the attack may have taken place elsewhere.
Police say they have no clues at present although Mrs. Carr told police that she thought she heard him returning at about two a.m on Thursday morning.
The victim is 6’1” tall, of slim build, with dark hair and a moustache.  Police are appealing for witnesses who may have been in the vicinity of South Parade in the early hours of Thursday morning or who may have seen anything suspicious.’
And I knew it was him. Martin Simmons. I felt winded. I involuntarily stood up, my emotions oscillating between shock and disbelief and a selfish little thrust of horrible disappointment.  Within those two small pages he had been a possibility. Alive and warm, talking, laughing and eating and having young sex in the back of a car and with a turn of the page, he was dead. Not just dead, but murdered, stabbed repeatedly.  How many times was repeatedly?
The word ‘repeatedly’ hung in my head and suddenly felt sickening, the imagined sound of blunt fist and sharp blade again and again driving into the minced flesh and adrenaline engorged organs of the man in the shirt that made your eyes go funny, with his green eyes and dark wavy hair.
Had he put his hands up to protect himself while the blurry image of his murderer flickered before him like the fragmented frames of a terrible film?  I curled my hands to my chest, the backs of my knees zinging as I imagined the shear and sting of flashing metal as it slashed through the tautness of the tendons in his fingers, rendering them useless red jelly on bone.
I imagined Mrs Carr the next morning, knocking, ear to the door, calling with increasing urgency, her concern growing until unable to stand it any longer, she made a proprietary stand and gained entrance with her master key.
Did she find him lying across the bed? One dried up eye, a slit of white staring at the wall, cheek stuck to the pillow with a foamy splutter of bloody spume coughed out and fanning from his mouth and beginning to dry black at the edges.
Where was Angie in all of this? My head felt as if infused with menthol, airy and clear as images flashed graphically and in full, horrible colour. I shook myself to make the pictures go away, feeling nothing and yet everything, the silence of the attic roaring, as the man I so badly wanted to be my father died on the little piece of yellowing, dried up paper which trembled in my hand.

Stay tuned next week for Chapter 4, and don’t forget to comment.

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