The Woman in the Wood

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘Yes, but it is possible you are picking up on Maisy too. It’s said that most twins have almost telepathic powers about one another.’

  She could see he really wanted to believe that he might be able to tune in to Maisy, only his head was telling him it wasn’t possible. But Grace believed his dream meant something. When she was in the asylum feeling at her most hopeless she’d had a series of dreams about a house in a wood or forest. She had found it a comforting dream, something to make her believe her future might one day be brighter than the way things were now.

  She couldn’t believe her eyes when Mr Brady took her out to the forest and showed her his place. It was the same place she’d dreamt about, all those years before. She didn’t tell him that; he might have thought she really was mad. But she took it as a sign that it was the place she was meant to be. Where she belonged.

  So if Duncan was feeling his sister was in something that looked like a shelter near the sea, she and Toby were going to find it. Starting the minute she got out of this hospital.

  She opened up her bag and brought out a bacon and egg tart she’d bought in a fancy grocer’s in Brockenhurst, and a jar of preserved raspberries from her garden. ‘The lady in the grocer’s called that tart something posh and French,’ she said. ‘But I asked what was in it and she said bacon and egg, so that’s what I’d call it. You need building up, and so does your friend, so give him some.’

  ‘I will if the nurse lets me, but I don’t think he’s going to recover,’ Duncan whispered. ‘His parents came not long before you and he didn’t seem to know them. I overheard them talking to the doctor and he was suggesting he should be moved to a mental hospital as soon as possible. His mother was crying, I felt so sorry for them.’

  ‘Sometimes the brain shuts down because a memory is too painful to bear,’ Grace said. ‘But time is a great healer, I can vouch for that. It’s time I went, Duncan – I’ve got important things to do, and Toby is waiting for me.’

  ‘Can I really come and stay with you when they let me out of here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, you can, if you still want to. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d welcome a guest, but it seems that day is about to come.’

  Outside the hospital, sitting in her van with Toby beside her, Grace studied her map of the south coast and particularly the locations where the other boys had been found, which she had marked with crosses.

  The first had been Littlehampton, the second in Southampton, the third in Portsmouth and then on to Newhaven and Eastbourne. Then he came back west again to Seaford and Brighton.

  Apart from Duncan, who appeared to be an anomaly, there was a pattern to the abductions. They were always on a Friday afternoon. Then a gap of eight to twelve weeks before the next one. Grace thought perhaps he had business in the areas. For some reason she didn’t think the abductions were completely premeditated; she doubted he’d been watching any of the boys for a great length of time. It seemed to her that the desire for a new boy overwhelmed him and he felt safer going to a school where he’d never been before. Once he saw the kind of boy he was looking for, he felt compelled to take him.

  She had read widely about all the dead boys. Their parents claimed they were quiet, shy boys, and that description fitted Duncan too. But there had been other things said, by neighbours and teachers; suggestions their home lives were not so good. She felt each boy was isolated, by personality, poverty or neglect.

  It would be simple for a man such as Grainger to be able to identify these characteristics; he’d spent many hours in court watching the flotsam and jetsam of life.

  As all the boys aside from Duncan were from seaside towns, it stood to reason Grainger was familiar with the coastline. Grace wasn’t, unfortunately. But as each of the bodies were found about twenty miles from where they had been abducted, that suggested to her that he had some kind of compulsion to put them back on home ground.

  Duncan had said he and the other boys were in a house somewhere beyond Southampton, so maybe that compulsion Grainger had extended to himself too. He couldn’t go too far from his home territory.

  He favoured seaside places, and he wouldn’t have dared drive Maisy very far because he knew the police would be looking for his car.

  She looked sideways at Toby curled up on the passenger seat.

  ‘Well, Toby, let’s check out how good you are at finding.’

  Right since she first got Toby as a puppy she’d played retrieval games with him in the forest, taking something of hers and hiding it, then sending him off to find it. He was very good at it, and she hoped he’d be just as good with Maisy’s scent.

  She had found Maisy’s scarf in the van and she took it from the glove compartment to let Toby sniff it. ‘I’m going to keep letting you sniff it when we get to the seaside, and you, my boy, will help me find Maisy.’

  He looked at her, dark brown eyes bright and intelligent, his ears cocked. He was raring to go.

  ‘Maybe I’ll change your name to Watson,’ she said, ruffling his ears. ‘Seeing as I’m going to be Sherlock.’

  She started up the van and drove out of Southampton towards Lyndhurst, with the intention of going on to Christchurch to start searching. She had some blankets in the back of the van. Once it got dark she’d get in there and sleep, so she could continue her search at first light tomorrow.

  16

  For the first time in his life Donald Grainger didn’t know what to do.

  After dumping the girl he’d had to abandon his car because he knew the police would be looking for it. He had less than ten pounds on him, no change of clothes or shaving gear. He couldn’t get on a bus as his face was on the front of every newspaper this morning. So he trudged back towards the coast, the collar of his raincoat turned up and the tweed cap he kept in the car in case of heavy rain pulled down low over his forehead.

  As he walked he trawled through all his friends in his mind, wondering if any of them would help him now. He knew people with boats all along the Solent, many of whom he’d done favours for in the past, but he doubted that would help him once they’d read about what he’d done.

  Some of them were bloody hypocrites – several of them liked underage boys and girls too. So many times these same men had promised they’d always have his back if there was trouble, just as he would have theirs. But he knew that he couldn’t trust any of them. As soon as they put the phone down on him they’d be ringing the police.

  So he had to think of someone he could blackmail into helping him.

  Plenty of his clients had been involved in dodgy deals; he’d even perjured himself in court to help a couple of them. But he needed someone who stood to lose everything they had if he squealed on them.

  Then it came to him. Hugo Fairbanks.

  Grainger smirked at the very thought of him: a public schoolboy who not only had a taste for young boys, but had destroyed his late wife’s will, and maybe even hastened her death. Mildred Fairbanks had found out about his little peccadillo when she was dying of cancer and, never guessing that her solicitor had the same interests as her husband, came to see him to change her will.

  Mildred came from ‘old money’. Her grandfather and father had made fortunes in steel, and without any sons to leave their wealth to, she got it all. She was no beauty even when young, but now as the cancer spread she was painfully thin, flesh hanging off her big frame. The day she came to see Grainger she wanted Hugo’s blood.

  ‘I don’t want him getting a penny, because he disgusts me,’ she said, grimacing with distaste. ‘I want him homeless and miserable, and if he tries to contest my will I want you to tell the court that he buggers young boys, and that was why I didn’t want him getting my family’s hard-earned fortune. You will do that, won’t you?’

  Of course Grainger promised he would. He drew up the will, in which she left everything to her nephew, got her to sign it, and one of his employees to witness it, then put it in his safe.

  It was only about a month later that Mildred die
d – incredibly quickly for a woman who had told him she still had a year to live. Her doctor thought she had overdosed on her medication.

  Hugo was still in the marital home because Mildred didn’t want to give him any advance warning of her plans. Grainger felt it was very likely he gave her the overdose because he couldn’t bear another year with her. Meanwhile Mildred would have been savouring the thought of him being out on the street after her death. Perhaps she even hoped he’d give her an overdose and welcomed it, anticipating he might be convicted of murder too.

  The speed with which Hugo rushed to see Grainger so soon after Mildred’s death was unseemly, even by Grainger’s standards. He got the will out of the safe and handed it to him to read, then watched the colour drain from the man’s face as it slowly dawned on him that Mildred was punishing him in possibly the only way she could really hurt him.

  It said a great deal about the man’s lack of any moral code when his first question was to ask who knew about this new will. Then, without any preamble, he suggested Grainger destroy it in return for a share of the fortune.

  Grainger remembered pretending to be outraged. But then a few weeks later, having left Hugo to stew for long enough, he pretended to feel sorry for him and said he couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to, as the witness knew a new will had been made.

  In point of fact a witness doesn’t ever get to read a will, and that same witness isn’t likely to be there when it’s being read, either, so it was quite feasible to destroy the new and read the old. Mildred had told Grainger she had no intention of telling anyone she’d changed her will, not even the nephew who stood to gain from it. She relished the shock value of the new one, and of course she trusted Grainger to do as she asked.

  But Mildred was dead, she’d had her fun anticipating Hugo’s distress, and Grainger had never liked her much anyway. He’d also had his fun watching the bombastic oaf fall apart. To make himself look like Hugo’s true friend, he finally agreed to do it, salving his conscience by only asking for a mere two thousand pounds. The truth was he wanted Hugo in his pocket, just in case one day he needed something from him.

  That day had come.

  Hugo had a boat moored down in Lymington, small enough to slip under the radar. He would telephone him, get him to meet him, bringing money and food, then take him across to France.

  What to do about that girl, though? He couldn’t let her go; the police would be on to him the moment she was free.

  ‘Kill her,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Maybe take her with us and sling her body in the sea.’

  While Grainger was making his way towards Lymington, Linda had joined a search party to look for Maisy back in Lyndhurst.

  As she waited amongst the crowd getting instructions from the police, to her surprise she saw Steven and Alan were there as well.

  She was so distraught about Maisy being snatched and maybe already dead, she needed to be with someone who also knew her. She ran up to them. ‘I’m so glad to see you. No one here really knows Maisy – well, not like we do,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘It means a lot to me that you’ve joined the search.’

  ‘I felt bad enough about her brother going missing,’ Alan said, ‘and I didn’t even know him. But now Maisy, it’s just awful. I liked her so much, and I was a real prat to lose her. But this was my only way of trying to show I cared, and Steve agreed to come too.’

  Linda nodded. She knew why he had broken it off with Maisy and how that had made her friend feel. But that was in the past. Right now they needed all the eyes they could get on this search.

  ‘Well, I’m really glad you two are joining the search. I didn’t think you’d come back for the Easter hols as I hadn’t seen you around.’

  ‘We’ve been stuck into revision,’ Steven said. ‘We can’t gad about any more if we want to get firsts. But let’s forget our lives at uni. That’s not important. This is. We can’t really believe that Donald Grainger is the man who took Duncan and all those other boys. How could he have hidden what he was up to for so long? Do you think his wife knew?’

  ‘My parents were often at the same parties and dinners as Grainger,’ Alan admitted, hanging his head as if ashamed. ‘I was very quick to point out what bad judges of character they are, consorting with a man like him, yet insisting I gave up seeing Maisy because her family “weren’t quite the ticket”, as my dad said at the time. Then I overhead Mum talking on the phone this morning; she was actually squeezing out tears as she told some friend I used to go out with Maisy. Such hypocrisy!’

  Linda had experienced similar reactions from people she knew too, and it sickened her. ‘Well, I just hope you never go along with what your parents want again. You lost out on someone really special, Alan. I’m proud to say she’s still my friend. I can’t believe how brave she was the whole time Duncan was missing, and in the end it was purely her determination that saved him.’ Her lips began to quiver and her eyes filled with tears. ‘I keep praying that man won’t kill her.’

  Alan reached out and put a hand on her shoulder in comfort. ‘We’re all praying for that, Linda. But it looks like the search is starting, so eyes peeled for anything that might help.’

  Linda was glad the police made everyone walk at least four feet apart from one another. It was intended so they could cover a big area thoroughly, but it also discouraged talking and possibly missing things. Linda was far too upset about what Maisy might be going through right now to hold a conversation with anyone.

  One of her father’s friends was the doctor who had examined the boys when they were first brought in to the hospital, and Linda had overheard her father telling her mother what he had told him. It sounded absolutely barbaric, so shocking that Linda had put her hands over her ears.

  She’d heard enough to be deeply disturbed by it, and she couldn’t get the images out of her mind. Without telling her father what she’d overheard, later she asked him if Duncan could recover from what he’d been through.

  ‘It’s hard to say, darling,’ he sighed, looking very troubled. ‘After the war I treated some men who had been prisoners of the Japanese. They’d been tortured, beaten and starved. Some bounced back; once they were well again you’d never know they’d been through anything that terrible. But others, however brave they’d been in the camps, couldn’t get over it. They remained tortured by their memories; it was impossible for them to be the husband or father they’d been before the war. Some even committed suicide to release themselves from their torment.’

  ‘Oh!’ Linda exclaimed. ‘That is awful.’

  Her father hugged her. ‘Duncan is young, and there is so much resilience in youth,’ he said. ‘He could be one of the lucky ones who can recover. Let’s hope so.’

  Linda had been studying art at Southampton Art College for over a year now, with a view to teaching art once she got her degree. Thinking back to her reunion with Maisy the other day, she realized that she had been rather self-satisfied and smug. She’d thought her friend being an au pair was somewhat demeaning; she couldn’t imagine anything worse than teaching someone else’s child to wipe its own bottom or cut up its food. Maisy hardly earned any money, she worked long hours and Linda doubted she was appreciated, either.

  She was terribly ashamed of thinking that now. She asked herself what was so good about getting a degree in art. It would never help anyone, or change the world, whereas Maisy had not only spent a year loving another woman’s children but she’d risked her life to save her brother.

  But then she wasn’t the only person who had got things wrong. Alan’s parents had too, and her own to a certain extent. She remembered them saying Duncan had probably made some bad friends and gone off with them, and that the chances were Maisy knew where he was and would join him as soon as she could get away from her grandmother. But at least they had the grace to admit they were very wrong.

  Then there were all those who blamed Grace Deville when Duncan first disappeared. It was the talk of the town, with some hothea
ds wanting to go into the forest and string her up. But since she’d outsmarted the police in detection work and made it perfectly clear she was neither bad nor mad, many of those same people were now saying she ought to be given a medal and a council house. How stupid they were – didn’t they understand she had chosen to live in the forest because she didn’t want to live close to small-minded people like them? As for a medal, from what Linda knew of the woman it would mean nothing to her. She’d probably think it was insulting.

  Linda vowed to herself that if Maisy should be found unhurt, she was going to make sure she never again made rash assumptions or accusations about people, and that she’d be kinder to people less fortunate than herself.

  Alastair Mitcham was nervous as he approached the hospital ward. He hated having to deal with emotionally charged incidents, whether they were his own or someone else’s. He usually closed down and walked away if it was possible. But with his son rescued from the jaws of death by his own daughter, and her now being missing, he knew he couldn’t hide from his emotions any more.

  Even his mother, who he had always believed incapable of any human feelings, had sobbed when she related what Janice had told her about Duncan’s condition.

  ‘Son, you are going to have to show him that you love him,’ she said brokenly. ‘I know you’re a cold fish because I made you that way, and I am ashamed of that now. But it’s not too late for you and Duncan. You must tell him that the terrible things he’s been through are not in any way his fault. The only way he can recover fully is by knowing he is loved, and that we are all prepared to listen to him and help him in any way we can.’

  Alastair had sat beside his mother on the couch and held her in his arms as she cried. He cried too: for his missing daughter, his poor son, and for himself and his mother who had to have something as bad as this happen before they could speak of their feelings. He knew that the time was coming for him to reveal the truth about his wife. And maybe the other things he’d kept secret from them all.