by Diane Janes
Leah Cattermole had gone missing while Peter had been working on their house. He had hidden the necklace in their attic. He had already been acquitted of murdering Leanne Finnegan through lack of evidence. Now she was holding the evidence that would convict him of murdering Leah.
A board creaked ominously behind her. She jumped and turned, almost expecting to find Peter himself behind her, but the attic was just as empty as before.
She ought to go straight to the police. But what about the children? What about the house itself? The police would be sure to want to take the place apart, searching for more clues showing Peter’s involvement. Perhaps they would dig up the garden, searching for the girl’s body. That would be horrible – and totally unnecessary as Peter couldn’t possible have buried anything in the garden without her noticing the freshly disturbed ground when she had been working there herself. Bruce would be furious. And he would blame her … Oh yes, he would perceive it as all her fault for failing to convey Mrs Parsons’ original warning.
Why on earth had Peter hidden the necklace in their attic at all? She had read somewhere that rapists and killers sometimes retained trophies, but what would be the point of hiding such a thing in a house which belonged to someone else? She fingered the beads, twisting them so that the letters of the girl’s name appeared and disappeared. If Mrs Parsons was right, Peter had been a suspect in the first murder and might have realized that he would be a person of interest in the second case too. Perhaps he had initially planned to keep his trophy then, realizing the police might get a search warrant but unable to bring himself to discard the necklace completely, he had decided to hide it in a place where he knew it was unlikely to be discovered by anyone. Except that she had discovered it. Thanks to the photograph. Almost thanks to Dora. Was one victim pointing the way to justice for another?
A police investigation would very likely create problems in trying to get a house sale through. Once the police became involved, the press might get hold of it too. Prospective buyers might be put off by the notoriety or the second-hand association with a murder. She twisted the beads until all the letters were hidden against her palm. Peter had already got off on one charge. She didn’t know any details, but he must have very clever lawyers. How would anyone be able to prove that it had been Peter who had placed the necklace in the attic? In handling it, she had probably smudged any fingerprints. He would say that someone else must have put it there. Good grief, he might even say that Bruce could have put it there! And what about Katie and Jamie, who were already a bit funny about the attic? How could it be kept away from them that a bad man had put a dead girl’s necklace just above the ceilings beneath which they slept?
She recalled Joan’s final advice to her: to rejoin her husband as soon as possible. More than ever, she wondered if rediscovering that photograph today had been a sign. If it hadn’t been for her smashing the photo frame, she wouldn’t have found the necklace. Someone, something, maybe even The Ashes itself, had wanted to warn her about its presence, but even so she now wished that she had not found it. Ignorance is bliss. The answer was to put it back, pretend she had never seen it, say nothing to Bruce or indeed anyone else. She replaced it carefully and slotted the board back into place, stifling her conscience with the thought that her silence on the subject did not have to be permanent. A point might come, at some stage in the future, when she was able to drop a hint in the right place. Maybe even provide an anonymous tip-off. Not a nice thing to do to the new owners, of course … But perhaps there were other clues anyway? Maybe justice would catch up with Peter Grayling without her ever having to become involved.
Joan Webb’s funeral took place the following Monday and was well attended. Wendy recognized no one, though she guessed that the slim, handsome women in the front pew must be Bunty’s daughters. Not technically Joan’s nieces, though they had evidently been accustomed to calling her ‘auntie’. She found herself a seat at the back, glad for Joan’s sake that so many people had turned out. At the end of the service the women she had earmarked as Fiona Huntley-Wilkes and her sister took up positions at either side of the outer doors, along with a tall, dark-haired man, who must be their cousin Charles, in order to greet the emerging mourners.
‘So good of you to come.’
Wendy recognized the voice of Fiona Huntley-Wilkes. ‘Thank you for taking the trouble to let me know,’ Wendy said. ‘I’m Wendy Thornton. I live in Elaine Duncan’s old house. I think she was your grandmother.’
‘Really? What an interesting coincidence that you should know Auntie Joan.’ The tone was polite, rather than interested.
‘It isn’t really a coincidence. You see your aunt … Joan … approached me. She was interested in the house because she used to stay there as a child.’
‘Yes … yes, I suppose she would have been.’
Wendy realized that the woman was waiting for her to move on and stop blocking the way for the handful of people who were still attempting to exit the building. ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ she repeated, as she moved down the steps, allowing Fiona Huntley-Wilkes to greet an elderly couple, both leaning on sticks.
‘So good of you to come,’ Wendy heard her say.
The small funeral reception at Joan’s bungalow was limited to close family. As Wendy rode the bus home she reflected that Fiona and her sister probably had not known Joan all that well. She hadn’t even been their auntie – a cousin of some degree, if truth be told. A middle-aged relative who’d spent a lot of time abroad and was therefore something of an unknown quantity. Someone who must not be accidentally omitted from wedding guest lists (even if she lived too far away to attend), a name on a reciprocal Christmas card each year. Someone who’d moved about a lot, making a mess of a page in their address books.
Fiona and her sister would care nothing for Joan’s precious albums of photographs. The information that she, Wendy, lived in the same house where her grandmother had lived and their own mother had grown up, had elicited not the slightest flicker of interest. Had Joan bequeathed her photographs to anyone? Wasn’t there a danger that they might end up trashed in a skip? That would be awful. The precious archive – and in particular photographs of The Ashes itself – lost forever. And surely, if Joan had known what was going to happen, she would have offered to pass on some of those images herself?
When she got off the bus in the village, Wendy all but ran along Green Lane. She had no idea where Fiona Huntley-Wilkes or her sister lived, and it was no use writing to them care of Joan’s bungalow, because by the time the letter got there, a house clearance firm might have been in and done their worst. Her only concrete hope of getting to Joan’s relatives was here and now. As soon as she entered the house, not even bothering to take off her coat, she turned up Joan’s details in the book which sat beside the telephone.
Suppose the line to the bungalow had already been cut off?
But it had not. It was answered immediately. Someone must have been standing right beside the telephone.
The woman who had answered sounded slightly startled. No doubt she had not been expecting the phone to ring.
‘Hullo,’ Wendy said. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. Is that Fiona Huntley-Wilkes?’
‘No. Hold on, I’ll get her for you. Who’s calling, please?’
‘My name is Mrs Thornton. I’m a friend of Joan’s. I was at the funeral today.’ She heard the faintest of clicks as the receiver was put down. The woman must have laid it on the little polished side table where Joan’s telephone was kept. There was a faint murmur of voices, then another sound as the receiver was lifted.
‘Hello? Fiona speaking.’
‘Hello. This is Wendy Thornton. You were kind enough to let me know that Joan had died. We met today at the funeral.’
‘Yes. I remember. How can I help you?’
‘I live in The Ashes, you see. The house where your grandmother used to live.’ Wendy paused, uncertain how to proceed, hoping for a little encouragement.
‘Yes, so I r
ecall.’ Very cool. Precise diction. Almost certainly someone who’d been privately educated.
‘I don’t know whether you know this … but Joan has quite a number of photographs – old photographs – which show the house. And I was wondering …’ Wendy began to stumble, the impudence and impropriety of her call belatedly flooding her consciousness. ‘Well, I was thinking … that perhaps you wouldn’t want all of them. I wondered if I might be able to have one … just a snap …’
‘I’m aware that Aunt Joan had a lot of family photographs.’ Was it Wendy’s imagination, or was particular emphasis placed on the word ‘family’? ‘My cousin Charles has offered to deal with all that kind of thing. I will pass your request on to him. We already have your name and address, in Aunt Joan’s address book.’
‘Thank you … thank you so much. So sorry to intrude.’ Wendy stumbled through a farewell, red hot embarrassment prickling her entire body. She imagined the conversation as Fiona Huntley-Wilkes explained the interruption in proceedings to the rest of Joan’s family.
‘The nerve of it!’
‘If there are any pictures of Grandma Elaine, then naturally we will want to have them ourselves.’
‘What a peculiar woman. Must be off her head.’
Grandma Elaine. Wendy continued to stand alongside the telephone table in the hall. Grandma Elaine, so very much loved by her family, but who had – according to Joan – occasionally shown terrible bursts of temper. The photograph of Johnny, the local boy, which Dora had chosen to hide in the attic and never retrieved. Dora going out alone for a bike ride, not telling anyone where she was going. Her own words returned to her: to think that she was almost home and never made it.
An unlucky house, Peggy’s grandfather had said, because it had been associated with two murders. Her own mother had always adhered to the superstition that deaths came in threes, and so, it seemed, did murders, because Peter’s made three. She shuddered as she remembered him looming up behind her in the outhouse, waiting to show her the photograph he had found, not accidentally as he had suggested, but more likely because he had been hunting around for a place to hide something himself. There had been another occasion when he had startled her. In the cellar. Where he had drawn her attention to the wine rack …
Her hands were shaking as she collected the torch again, and she was afraid her legs would give way as she descended the cellar stairs. The light in the cellar was better than that in the attic, so she did not need the torch in order to check the state of the nails which held the panel installed to make the wine rack appear to fit the wall, but they were all reassuringly rusty. Nothing had been interfered with recently, but the more she looked at it, the odder it seemed to be. Why go to the trouble of moving a purpose-built fixture in the first place, and why install a false back to it? She tried to picture the layout of the floor above. If the wine rack had been repositioned to create a secret cavity, it couldn’t be more than two or three feet deep at most. A closer investigation, this time employing the torch to illuminate the recesses of the racking, suggested that the false back was little more than hardboard – something easily confirmed when she fetched the tool basket and attacked it with a screwdriver, punching her implement of choice repeatedly into the back of one of the wooden compartments. Then it occurred to her that making an obvious hole at head height might be spotted if a particularly nosey prospective purchaser chose to peer too closely into the empty rack. It would be more sensible to commence her investigation in one of the floor-level compartments, where the rest of the structure would hide the damage from anyone who wasn’t crawling about on the cellar floor.
She dragged a flattened cardboard box over and used it to kneel on. (Jamie’s den had long since been dismantled and its soft furnishings relocated upstairs.) Using a long chisel and belting it with a hammer while taking great care not to hit any of the surrounding framework, Wendy gradually managed to create a hole at the back of one section. The noise of the hammer, greatly magnified by the enclosed nature of the cellar, made her head ring. She longed to stop, but the need for knowledge forced her to continue. When the hole was the size of a tennis ball, she exchanged the tools for her torch and shone a light into the dark void: a space created by someone with something to hide.
Peering at a tiny section of a largely hidden object reminded her of a regular feature in the old quiz show ‘Ask the Family’, when the screen would be filled with a close-up of some mystery object and the contestants vied to guess its identity as the camera gradually panned out. Wendy had never been good at guessing the mystery objects, but then – unlike now – she’d had no advance warning as to what the object might be. On this occasion she knew at once that she was looking at the spokes of a bicycle wheel, rusted with age, but unmistakable. A bicycle which had been hidden even longer than the necklace.
A millstone of knowledge pressed down upon her as she carried the torch and the tool basket back up the cellar stairs. The bicycle, the necklace, the photograph of Johnny … burdens she must carry alone, for none of these things could be shared. The house had revealed its secrets to her, and now she fervently wished that it had not.
I have learned not to expect good things. After all that has happened, I still don’t know how much is pure bad luck, how much is natural evil and what is pre-ordained.
THIRTEEN
29 July 1981
Wendy could not help feeling that in common with a good proportion of British citizens, Katie had become somewhat obsessed with the royal wedding. ‘Suppose it rains …’ she said anxiously the night before.
‘It won’t,’ Wendy said. ‘The forecast is for sunshine. Now you just get off to sleep and stop your worrying. It’s not you who’s getting married, you know.’
It struck Wendy, as she opened the fridge the next morning and took a last look at the stacked Tupperware boxes and washed-out margarine tubs, the contents of which represented hours of threading cubes of cheese and pineapple onto cocktail sticks the night before, that today would be one of those defining moments in people’s lives. In decades to come, people would recall how they spent the day of the royal wedding. It would be to one generation what the Kennedy assassination or the outbreak of the Second World War had been for others. And it was going to be a happy day for everyone, a day of celebration. A day to forget the bicycle, standing in the darkness, mere feet away from where Jamie had constructed his den, the necklace positioned in a cavity which lay directly above Katie’s head as she slept.
After they had washed, dressed and eaten breakfast, Wendy and the two younger children settled down in front of the television in the sitting room to watch events unfold. Katie seemed full of nervous excitement about the wedding itself, though Jamie was much more interested in the party to be held on the village green later in the day. Bruce was down in Ashby and Tara was in Portugal with her father and his family, but she had informed Wendy that they would be watching the wedding on a television specially set up by the pool. Wendy had considered ringing Bruce to wish him Happy Royal Wedding Day but decided against it. He probably had enough to contend with. His mother was an ardent royalist and had apparently been talking of little else for weeks.
She joined in as Katie oohed and ahhed over the various dresses of the female guests and the bridesmaids, but after all the anticipation, Lady Diana’s dress was rather a disappointment.
‘It looks all creased,’ Katie mourned.
‘You’re right, pet. It looks as if it could do with a good iron across it.’
Katie lived the ceremony, visibly wincing when the bride stumbled over her future husband’s names, but Jamie grew bored and eventually got up from the sofa and drifted across to the window.
‘Mam,’ he said, beckoning. ‘Come over here and listen.’
Wendy joined him, mystified. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ she said.
Jamie nodded. ‘The whole world must be watching the wedding,’ he said.
She realized then what he meant. Not a single car had travelled along Green L
ane since proceedings in St Paul’s had begun. No voices, no vehicles, nothing but birdsong disturbed the stillness of the glorious summer day.
They ate cold chicken and salad for lunch, the children being allowed fizzy drinks while Wendy had a large glass of white wine. The whole world was celebrating, so why not? She noticed that Katie seemed even more het up than before. Jamie was excited too. They were both wound up about the party, she supposed.
After lunch she took the various plastic boxes from the fridge and packed them into her largest shopping bags. There were too many to fit into just two bags and she had to press the children into service as porters. It was times like this when you really missed having a car, she thought. And thank goodness the children hadn’t been dragooned into donning fancy dress, which would surely have created an added complication. They walked up Green Lane and along the High Street to the village green. The route had been festooned with flags and bunting, pretty much every shop and dwelling on the High Street joining in. Cardboard crowns covered in kitchen foil jostled with garish pictures of the newlyweds, some cut out of newspapers, some hand-drawn. There had been nothing like it since the Silver Jubilee in ’77. If anything, John Newbould and his team had exceeded their previous efforts, for on the village green they encountered displays from a ferocious-looking troop of Viking re-enactors, a bouncy castle, and a carousel whose inbuilt barrel organ competed loudly with the kazoos, drums and glockenspiels of the local junior jazz band as they marched about and twirled their batons in unison.
‘They must be hot in those uniforms.’ Andrew Webster’s mother had appeared alongside Wendy, holding a cloud of pink candy floss on a stick, which she used to gesture towards the youngsters in the jazz band, who were now effecting a complicated-looking manoeuvre which entailed two groups crossing one another on opposing diagonal routes.
‘It is hot,’ Wendy said. ‘I’m afraid I’m getting a headache, what with the noise and the heat.’ And possibly also the unaccustomed wine at lunchtime, she thought.