Since I moved to Beckford in 2008, I have swum in the river almost every day, in winter and in summer, sometimes with my daughter and sometimes alone, and I have become fascinated by the idea that this place, my place of ecstasy, could be for others a place of dread and terror.
When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning, but I had become obsessed with the Beckford pool long before that. My parents were storytellers, my mother especially; it was from her mouth that I first heard Libby’s tragic story, of the shocking slaughter at the Wards’ cottage, the terrible tale of the boy who watched his mother jump. I made her tell me again and again. I remember my father’s dismay (“These stories aren’t really for children”) and my mother’s resistance (“Of course they are! They’re history”).
She sowed a seed in me, and long before my sister went into the water, long before I picked up a camera or set pen to paper, I spent hours daydreaming and imagining what it must have been like, what it must have felt like, how cold the water must have been for Libby that day.
The mystery that has consumed me as an adult is, of course, that of my own family. It shouldn’t be a mystery, but it is, because despite my efforts to build bridges, my sister has not spoken to me for many years. In the well of her silence, I have tried to imagine what drew her to the river in the dead of night, and even I, with my singular imagination, have failed. Because my sister was never the dramatic one, never the one for a bold gesture. She could be sly, cunning, as vengeful as the water itself, but I am still at a loss. I wonder if I always will be.
I decided, while in the process of trying to understand myself and my family and the stories we tell each other, that I would try to make sense of all the Beckford stories, that I would write down all the last moments, as I imagined them, in the lives of the women who went to the Beckford Drowning Pool.
Its name carries weight; and yet, what is it? A bend in the river, that’s all. A meander. You’ll find it if you follow the river in all its twists and turns, swelling and flooding, giving life and taking it, too. The river is by turns cold and clean, stagnant and polluted; it snakes through forest and cuts like steel through the soft Cheviot Hills, and then, just north of Beckford, it slows. It rests, just for a while, at the Drowning Pool.
This is an idyllic spot: oaks shade the path, beech and plane trees dot the hillsides, and there’s a sloping sandy bank on the south side. A place to paddle, to take the kids; the perfect picnic spot for a sunny day.
But appearances are deceptive, for this is a deathly place. The water, dark and glassy, hides what lies beneath: weeds to entangle you, to drag you down; jagged rocks to slice through flesh. Above looms the grey slate cliff: a dare, a provocation.
This is the place that, over centuries, has claimed the lives of Libby Seeton, Mary Marsh, Anne Ward, Ginny Thomas, Lauren Slater, Katie Whittaker, and more—countless others, nameless and faceless. I wanted to ask why, and how, and what their lives and deaths tell us about ourselves. There are those who would rather not ask those questions, who would rather hush, suppress, silence. But I have never been one for quiet.
In this work, this memoir of my life and the Beckford pool, I wanted to start not with drowning, but with swimming. Because that is where it begins: with the swimming of witches—the ordeal by water. There, at my pool, that peaceful beauty spot not a mile from where I sit right now, was where they brought them and bound them and threw them into the river, to sink or to swim.
Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.
ERIN MORGAN
It’s a fucking weird place, Beckford. It’s beautiful, quite breathtaking in parts, but it’s strange. It feels like a place apart, disconnected from everything that surrounds it. Of course it is miles from anywhere—you have to drive for hours to get anywhere civilized. That’s if you consider Newcastle civilized, which I’m not sure I do. Beckford is a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history. And all through the middle of it there’s this river, and that’s the weirdest thing of all—it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river.
There’s something a bit off about the DI, too. He’s a local boy, so I suppose it’s to be expected. I thought it the first time I laid eyes on him, yesterday morning when they pulled Nel Abbott’s body out of the water. He was standing on the riverbank, hands on hips, head bent. He was speaking to someone—the medical examiner, it turned out—but from a distance it looked as though he was praying. That’s what I thought of—a priest. A tall, thin man in dark clothes, the black water as a backdrop, the slate cliff behind him, and at his feet a woman, pale and serene.
Not serene, of course, dead. But her face wasn’t contorted, it wasn’t ruined. If you didn’t look at the rest of her, the broken limbs or the twist of her spine, you’d think she’d drowned.
I introduced myself and thought straightaway there was something strange about him—his watery eyes, a slight tremor in his hands, which he tried to suppress by rubbing them together, palm against wrist—it made me think of my dad on those mornings after the night before when you needed to keep your voice and your head down.
Keeping my head down seemed like a good idea in any case. I’d been up north less than three weeks, after a hasty transfer from London thanks to an ill-advised relationship with a colleague. Honestly, all I wanted to do was work my cases and forget the whole mess. I was fully anticipating being thrown the boring stuff at first, so I was surprised when they wanted me on a suspicious death. A woman, her body spotted in a river by a man out walking his dogs. She was fully clothed, so she hadn’t been swimming. The chief inspector set me straight. “It’ll almost certainly be a jumper,” he told me. “She’s in the Beckford Drowning Pool.”
It was one of the first things I asked DI Townsend. “Did she jump, do you think?”
He looked at me for a moment, he considered me. Then he pointed to the cliff top. “Let’s go up there,” he said, “find the scientific officer and see if they’ve discovered anything—evidence of a struggle, blood, a weapon. Her phone would be a good start, because she’s not got it on her.”
“Right you are.” As I walked away, I glanced at the woman and thought how sad she looked, how plain and unadorned.
“Her name is Danielle Abbott,” Townsend said, his voice slightly raised. “She lives locally. She’s a writer and photographer, quite successful. She has a daughter, fifteen years old. So no, in answer to your question, I don’t think it’s likely that she jumped.”
We went up to the cliff together. You follow the path from the little beach along the side of the pool until it veers right, through a clump of trees, then it’s a steep climb up the hill to the top of the ridge. The path was muddy in places—I could see where boots had slipped and skidded, erasing the traces of footprints laid before. At the top, the path turns sharply left and, emerging from the trees, leads right to the edge of a cliff. My stomach lurched.
“Jesus.”
Townsend glanced back over his shoulder. He looked almost amused. “Scared of heights?”
“Perfectly reasonable fear of putting a foot wrong and falling to my death,” I said. “You’d think they’d put a barrier up or something, wouldn’t you? Not exactly safe, is it?”
The DI didn’t answer, just continued on, walking purposefully toward the cliff edge. I followed, pressing myself against the gorse bushes to avoid looking over the sheer face to the water below.
The science officer—pale-faced and hairy, as they always seem to be—had little in the way of good news. “No blood, no weapon, no obvious sign of a struggle,” he said with a shrug. “Not even much in the way of fresh litter. Her camera’s damaged, though. And there’s no SD card.”
??
?Her camera?”
Hairy turned to me. “Would you believe it? She set up a motion-activated camera as part of this project she was working on.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “To film people up here . . . to see what they get up to? You get some weirdos hanging around sometimes, you know, because of the whole history of the place. Or maybe she wanted to catch a jumper in the act . . .” He grimaced.
“Christ. And someone’s damaged her camera? Well, that’s . . . inconvenient.”
He nodded.
Townsend sighed, folding his arms across his chest. “Indeed. Although it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Her equipment’s been vandalized before. Her project had its detractors locally. In fact”—he took a couple of steps closer to the edge of the cliff and I felt my head swim—“I’m not even sure she replaced the camera after the last time.” He peered over the edge. “There is another one, isn’t there? Fixed somewhere below. Anything on that?”
“Yeah, it looks intact. We’re going to bring it in, but . . .”
“It won’t show anything.”
Hairy shrugged again. “Might show her going in, but it won’t tell us what happened up here.”
• • •
MORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS had passed since then, and we seemed no closer to finding out what really had happened up there. Nel Abbott’s phone hadn’t shown up, which was odd, although perhaps not quite odd enough. If she’d jumped, there was a chance she might have disposed of it first. If she’d fallen, it might still be in the water somewhere; it might have sunk down into the mud or been washed away. If she was pushed, of course, whoever pushed her might have taken it off her first, but given the lack of any sign of a struggle up on the cliff, it didn’t seem likely that someone had wrested it away from her.
I got lost on the way back from taking Jules (NOT Julia, apparently) to do the ID at the hospital. I dropped her back at the Mill House and thought I was heading back towards the station when I found that I wasn’t: after I crossed the bridge I’d somehow swung round and found myself back at the river again. Like I said, whichever way you turn. In any case, I had my phone out, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going, when I spotted a group of girls walking over the bridge. Lena, a head taller than the others, broke away from them.
I abandoned the car and went after her. There was something I wanted to ask her, something her aunt had mentioned, but before I could reach her she’d started arguing with someone—a woman, perhaps in her forties. I saw Lena grab her arm, the woman pulling away and raising her hands to her face, as though afraid of being struck. Then they separated abruptly, Lena going left and the woman straight on up the hill. I followed Lena. She refused to tell me what it was all about. She insisted there was nothing wrong, that it hadn’t been an argument at all, that it was none of my business anyway. A bravado performance, but her face was streaked with tears. I offered to see her home, but she told me to fuck off.
So I did. I drove back to the station and gave Townsend the lowdown on Jules Abbott’s formal identification of the body.
In keeping with the general theme, the ID was weird. “She didn’t cry,” I told the boss, and he made a kind of dipping motion with his head as though to say, Well, that’s normal. “It wasn’t normal,” I insisted. “This wasn’t normal shock. It was really odd.”
He shifted in his seat. He was sitting behind a desk in a tiny office at the back of the station, and he seemed altogether too big for the room, as though if he stood up he might hit his head on the ceiling. “Odd how?”
“It’s hard to explain, but she seemed to be talking without making any sound. And I don’t mean that kind of noiseless sobbing either. It was strange. Her lips were moving as though she was saying something . . . and not just saying something, but talking to someone. Having a conversation.”
“But you couldn’t actually hear anything?”
“Nothing.”
He glanced at the laptop screen in front of him and then back at me. “And that was it? Did she say anything to you? Anything else, anything useful?”
“She asked about a bracelet. Apparently Nel had a bracelet that belonged to their mother, which she wore all the time. Or at least she wore it all the time when Jules last saw Nel, which was years ago.”
Townsend nodded, scratching at his wrist.
“There’s no sign of one in her belongings, I checked. She was wearing a ring—no other jewellery.”
He fell silent for so long that I thought maybe the conversation was over. I was just about to leave the room when suddenly he said, “You should ask Lena about that.”
“I was planning to,” I told him, “only she wasn’t all that interested in talking to me.” I filled him in on the encounter at the bridge.
“This woman,” he said. “Describe her.”
So I did: early forties, slightly on the heavy side, dark hair, wearing a long red cardigan despite the heat.
Townsend studied me for a long time.
“Doesn’t ring any bells, then?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he said, looking at me as though I was a particularly simple child. “It’s Louise Whittaker.”
“And she is?”
He frowned. “Have you not seen any background on this?”
“I haven’t, actually,” I said. I felt like pointing out that filling me in on any relevant background might be considered to be his job, since he was the local.
He sighed and began tapping at the keys of his computer. “You should be up to speed with all this. You should have been given the files.” He smacked a particularly vicious return, as though he was banging keys on a typewriter rather than an expensive-looking iBook. “And you should also read through Nel Abbott’s manuscript.” He looked up at me and frowned. “The project she was working on? It was going to be a sort of coffee-table book, I think. Pictures and stories about Beckford.”
“A local history?”
He exhaled sharply. “Of sorts. Nel Abbott’s interpretation of events. Of selected events. Her . . . spin on things. As I mentioned, not something that many of the locals were keen on. We have copies, in any case, of what she’d written so far. One of the DCs will get you one. Ask Callie Buchan—you’ll find her out front. The point is that one of the cases she wrote about was that of Katie Whittaker, who took her own life in June. Katie was a close friend of Lena Abbott’s, and Louise, her mother, was once friendly with Nel. They fell out, apparently over the focus of Nel’s work, and then when Katie died—”
“Louise blamed her,” I said. “She holds her responsible.”
He nodded. “Yes, she does.”
“So I should go and talk to her then, this Louise?”
“No,” he replied. His eyes remained on the screen. “I’ll do it. I know her. I was the DI on the investigation into her daughter’s death.”
He fell into another long silence. He hadn’t dismissed me, so eventually I spoke. “Was there ever any suspicion that there was anyone else involved in Katie’s death?”
He shook his head. “None. There didn’t appear to be a clear reason, but as you well know there often isn’t. Not one that makes sense to those left behind, in any case. But she did leave a note saying goodbye.” He passed his hand over his eyes. “It was just a tragedy.”
“So two women have died in that river this year?” I said. “Two women who knew each other, who were connected . . .” The DI said nothing, he didn’t look at me, I wasn’t even sure he was listening. “How many have died there? I mean, in total?”
“Since when?” he asked, shaking his head again. “How far back would you like to go?”
Like I said, fucking weird.
JULES
I’ve always been a little bit afraid of you. You knew that, you enjoyed my fear, enjoyed the power it gave you over me. So I think, despite the circumstances, you would have enjoyed this
afternoon.
They asked me to do the identification—Lena volunteered, but they told her no, so I had to say yes. There was no one else. And although I didn’t want to see you, I knew that I had to, because seeing you would be better than imagining you; the horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is. And I needed to see you, because we both know that I wouldn’t believe it, wouldn’t be able to believe that you were gone, until I did.
You lay on a gurney in the middle of a cold room, a pale green sheet covering your body. There was a young man there, dressed in scrubs, who nodded at me and at the detective, and she nodded back. As he reached out his hand to pull back the sheet I held my breath. I can’t remember feeling that afraid since I was a child.
I was waiting for you to jump out at me.
You didn’t. You were still and beautiful. There was always so much in your face—so much expression, joy or venom—and it was all still there, the traces of it; you were still you, still perfect, and then it struck me: you jumped.
You jumped?
You jumped?
That word, which felt wrong in my mouth. You wouldn’t jump. You never would, that’s not the way to do it. You told me that. The cliff’s not high enough, you said. It’s only fifty-five metres from the cliff top to the surface of the water—people can survive the fall. So, you said, if you mean it, if you really mean it, you need to make sure. Go in headfirst. If you mean it, you don’t jump, you dive.
And unless you mean it, you said, why do it? Don’t be a tourist. No one likes a tourist.
People can survive the fall, but that doesn’t mean they will. Here you are, after all, and you didn’t dive. You went in feetfirst and here you are: your legs are broken, your back is broken, you are broken. What does that mean, Nel? Does it mean that you lost your nerve? (Not like you at all.) Could you not bear it, the idea of going in headfirst, ruining your beautiful face? (You always were very vain.) It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not like you to do what you said you wouldn’t, to go against yourself.