The Skeleton Tree

by Diane Janes

  ‘It would be lovely if you could make it up here for a weekend,’ Wendy found herself saying with monotonous regularity, to which Tara invariably responded by saying that she’d see what she could do.

  ‘I’ll come up and surprise you one of these days,’ she said, and Wendy thought sadly that it would be a surprise because, on bad days, she sometimes wondered if she would ever see Tara again.

  She had been to see a solicitor in the village for advice regarding access to the children, but he told her it was complicated. There was nothing to say that she had a right to have the children living with her. If she took her case to court, the court would consider what was in the best interests of the children, and she had to appreciate that they had perhaps settled into new schools by now and made new friends. They might well say that they preferred to live with their father and his new partner.

  ‘Well, of course they would,’ Wendy said angrily. ‘They’ve been brainwashed.’

  On her way home, as the wind stung her face and made her eyes water, Wendy concluded that it was Frances (who had turned out not to be a ‘nice girl’ at all) who was at the root of the problem. Bruce could not have stolen the children without her complicity. He would not be able to manage them now if it wasn’t for Frances having given up her job to take care of them. Even some old fool of a judge would see that Bruce could not juggle his job and the care of his children alone. The question was how to remove Frances from the equation. Once she was out of the picture, the children would have to come home and she could win Bruce back … Everything could return to the way it used to be. To a time when everyone was happy.

  A letter from Jamie helped to crystallize her plan. Wendy sensed the editing hand of some southern schoolteacher in play.

  Dear Mummy,

  We are writing letters in class so I am writing to you. Daddy and Franny are well. So is Katie. Franny says I can have a rabbit if I promise to look after it myself. Daddy is going to Belgium all next week and he will bring back special chocolate. I hurt my knee when I was in the playground yesterday because I fell over but I am fine now.

  Love from Jamie xxxxxxxxxx

  She waited until midway through Bruce’s week in Belgium before she telephoned, reasoning that this would minimize the chance of Frances speaking with him again before his return. She timed her call for after the children’s bedtime, thereby ensuring that it was Frances herself who answered the phone and removing the likelihood of there being any inconvenient witnesses to the conversation.

  ‘Hello … Is that Frances?’

  ‘It is. Who’s speaking, please?’ Frances sounded guarded, as if she knew perfectly well who was speaking and was already suspicious.

  ‘It’s Wendy. Listen to me, Frances. Don’t put the phone down. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘If it’s about the children or the separation, you need to speak to Bruce.’

  ‘No, no. It’s about Bruce. I need to speak to you.’

  ‘To me? What about Bruce?’

  Wendy caught the note of alarm. That was good. She had got her interested. ‘There’s something I have to tell you about him. Something I can’t say on the phone. It’s something you need to know.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Wendy … have you been drinking?’

  ‘I don’t drink. Very rarely anyway.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You know you do. You were caught drunk driving.’

  ‘That all happened because I hardly ever drink. I wasn’t used to it. Someone else gave me a drink and I hadn’t realized what was in it. Believe me, I would never drink and drive on purpose. I was always the one on the Britvics so that I could chauffeur Bruce home after work dos. I bet he’s got you doing that for him now.’

  A short silence at the other end told Wendy that she had hit the mark.

  ‘What is it that you want?’ Frances asked. ‘Why have you rung?’

  ‘I know Bruce is away. Jamie wrote a letter to tell me. That’s why I’m ringing you now, so that Bruce doesn’t find out. I want you to get a babysitter for the children and come up here to see me. Come on Friday night. Don’t tell Bruce anything about it and don’t mention anything to the children. Then I can explain.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Surely you can tell me whatever this mysterious thing is on the phone?’

  ‘Come on Friday night. I can’t tell you on the phone. And don’t tell Bruce I rang, or let anyone else know. He mustn’t find out.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Frances said.

  But Wendy noted that she didn’t sound very sure of herself.

  In the forty-eight hours that followed, Wendy laid her plans carefully. She fluctuated violently between deciding that Frances would ignore the invitation, dismissing the whole thing as nonsense, and feeling strangely confident that she would not be able to resist turning up.

  When the street lamps came on in the late afternoon of Friday, Wendy noticed that the one that usually illuminated the top end of the drive was flickering. It created a somewhat sinister effect, she thought, like something in a B-movie. She switched on the sitting room light and drew the curtains. That way, to anyone passing the house or approaching from the road, it would appear that she was in there as usual, reading or watching the TV. She took care to leave the hall and passage lights, as well as the lights in the kitchen, switched off. She did not want anyone who came up the drive to be aware of her silhouette as she stood watching them from the kitchen window. She had eased the window open an inch. It allowed a lot of cold air into the room, but it was important that she be able to call up the drive at the right moment. She huddled a coat around her as she waited, stuffing her hands into the pockets to keep them warm, not daring to leave her post and place them against a radiator. When the moment came, she would need to be on the spot so that she could act quickly. Timing would be everything. Otherwise she would lose the element of surprise.

  At just before eight o’clock the flickering street light gave up altogether, immediately plunging the end of the drive into shadow. Wendy gasped. That wasn’t in the script at all … but as she stared towards the gate, she realized that the section of the drive nearest the road was not in complete darkness. Once you let your eyes get used to it, there was still enough illumination from the next closest street lights to make out the open gateway. She would still be able to see anyone as soon as they came onto her property.

  But of course Frances would not come. Wendy’s earlier certainty had been extinguished as surely as the street light. It seemed childish now, this plan of hers, to lure her husband’s mistress more than 150 miles north. She might as well give up her vigil, close the window and get warm by the sitting room fire.

  She decided to give it until nine. Surely Frances wouldn’t time her arrival any later than that? Not that she was likely to come at all. It had been a stupid idea, stupid, stupid.

  Then she saw her. It was all she could do not to cry out as the figure, unmistakably female, hesitated for a fraction of a second before heading smartly up the drive. She was carrying a bag of some sort. That was as much as Wendy could make out before the figure was lost completely in deeper shadows.

  ‘Come down to the back door,’ she called out, before racing out of the kitchen and into the courtyard. She knew she had no more than seconds to be ready. Any hesitation would be fatal. She reached the corner of the courtyard as the figure turned round the side of the house. Drove the knife in hard, with a strength she had scarcely known she possessed, and as the woman collapsed forward against her she was already withdrawing the knife and striking again, driving in a second blow before her victim had time to speak. Before that single, desperate gasp of ‘Mam.’

  ‘Tara. Oh my God! Tara! What are you doing here? Oh my darling, my sweetheart …’ The words tumbled out as Wendy sank to her knees, dragged to the ground as she attempted to support the weight of her dying daughter.

  Tara did not answer.

  NOVEMBER 2011

  She died in my arms. I didn’t know what to do. I would never g
et my children back if anyone found out that I had killed one of them. So I carried part of my original plan through. I washed the knife and replaced it in the kitchen drawer. I made a bonfire of the clothing. I began to dig the grave in the corner of the back garden, close to the wall of the outbuildings, but I barely got down a foot before I hit something hard. Scraping away the earth, I easily identified what I had found. I didn’t explore any further. From the day I saw the spokes of that bicycle, I had understood why it was that Elaine Duncan couldn’t leave. Dora had last been seen heading homewards … In one way or another, the house always claimed its victim. Two victims sometimes – the one who was buried and the one who stayed to guard the place. The one whose continuing ownership precluded any accidental discoveries.

  I laid one daughter of the house above another then planted the tree, leaving the sacking loosely wrapped around the roots as the man in the garden centre had suggested. It has grown tall now. Much taller than me.

  The university alerted me to Tara’s disappearance. She had said something to a friend about going home for the weekend, but no one was sure which home she meant. When Robert called me to ask about her, I cut him off short. ‘You wouldn’t speak to me for nearly twenty years,’ I said. ‘Why should I speak to you now?’

  She was listed as a missing person, but there was some doubt about whether or not she had actually come to any harm. As one policeman said, in a voice no doubt designed to reassure, ‘Just because a person has chosen not to communicate, it does not necessarily mean they are missing in the accepted sense, it’s just that not everyone knows where they are.’ One girlfriend thought Tara had not been altogether happy on her course. Another said she’d been having boyfriend trouble. Someone else thought there had been a plan to run off with some unidentified boyfriend. Yet another fellow student said that things between Tara and John had become more intense. None of them had known her above a matter of weeks. She’d had no time to develop any special confidantes at university, but had seemingly already drifted apart from her old friends in the north. The police had that John boy in for questioning but it got them nowhere. He didn’t know where she’d gone.

  I know where she is. She is here, with me, every day and every night. I have tried putting a padlock on the bedroom door – not my bedroom, but the one that belonged to her and to that other victim, Alice. But padlocks cannot hold that kind. She watches me. Always.

  Frances never answered my summons. It was never mentioned by anyone again. Presumably it was dismissed as another of my eccentricities. I gave Bruce his divorce and he married Frances. Katie sent me a photograph, which I burned on the sitting room fire. I was allowed to keep The Ashes and much of what remained of my legacy. Bruce took the proceeds of the house in Jasmine Close and everything else I had ever held dear. Now they are grown up, the children come to visit me from time to time, Jamie less frequently than his sister. Katie does her best to make conversation, but there is always something strained about it. Tara watches me from the corner of the room.

  Justice caught up with Peter Grayling. It was no thanks to me. I couldn’t afford to attract any police interest in The Ashes. The little necklace of wooden beads lies where he hid it, beneath the attic floorboards, waiting for some future explorer to discover it, pluck it from its hiding place and wonder over the fading letters, spelling out the name of a girl long dead. No, it was a different form of justice for Peter. I saw the story in the local paper. He lost control of his car on a bend and hit a tree. No other vehicle was involved. Divine justice. I like to think he saw a figure in the road as he took the corner, and tried to swerve out of the way with disastrous consequences. There were no witnesses, according to the press. But in my mind there may have been one – the girl in the road, who watched him die before quietly fading away.

  My contacts within the village have dwindled. I had not realized how much of my life was lived through my husband and children. As time went on my chats in the supermarket grew shorter and less frequent, as I carried my sad little wire basket down the aisles where I would once have pushed a full trolley. Then I noticed that people had started to avoid me. Well, what could they say? They must have wondered about what kind of terrible woman I am, to have been abandoned by two husbands and become estranged from all my children.

  Money has become an increasingly pressing problem. Economies have had to be made. Just a fire for the sitting room now, no question of running the central heating. It doesn’t matter much. I don’t go into all those empty bedrooms, nor eat alone at the dining room table. I never enter the study at all. One afternoon when I was weeding in the garden, the sensation of watching eyes from the study window became too much. I got a sheet of hardboard, a hammer and some tacks and I boarded it up. That window isn’t visible from Green Lane, so there won’t be tittle tattle in the village.

  The gardening grew more difficult, particularly after I passed my seventieth birthday and became less and less inclined to kneel down and engage in the never-ending battle with the weeds. When the time came that I couldn’t afford to have the electric mower repaired, I let the back garden go completely. The nettles have long since taken over. It doesn’t matter anyway. No children have played on the rusty climbing frame since 1981.

  The front garden is still reasonably neat. I manage the grass with shears, doing it a bit at a time. Roses still bloom in the beds and I have repelled the convolvulus from the sundial for another year. I am resigned to the peeling paint on the doors and windowsills. I expect passers-by have noticed that the house is beginning to look run down. Newcomers from Magnolia Road and Cyclamen Drive glance curiously over the closed gate, wondering about the house’s name, curious as to who the unseen occupant might be.

  I had the agents remove the sale board in November 1981. I have resigned myself to the fact that The Ashes will be my home until I die … and maybe even after that.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to record my thanks to the family and friends who have offered so much support during the period when I have been working on this book: Sam and John, Ash, Richard, Clare, Arthur and Daniel, Les and Sarah, and of course Erica and Pete. Thanks are also due to all at Severn House for their patience, in particular to Kate Lyall Grant, Sara Porter and Natasha Bell, and finally to Jane Conway-Gordon, who remains the best agent anyone could hope for.