by Russ Thomas
Lily watches her go, but she can’t let her face this alone. She can’t fall apart again. Like on the rooftop. Like in the alley behind the pub. Like the day Gerald came to them crying over Cynthia.
Edna is the one who fixes things . . . while Lily crumbles.
“Aunt Lil?”
The attic room is much as it was the last time she was here. No camera, though. No men. Just an incredible number of candles. And lying on the same bed . . . “Oscar!”
She rushes to him. He seems so tired he can barely keep his eyes open.
“Oh, Oscar!”
“She’s . . .” he whispers at her. He seems confused. “Why is she here?” he asks. “She brought me up here but . . . Auntie . . . you need to get help.” Even through her terror her heart tears to hear him call her that. She wants to shout at him, “I’m your grandmother!” She wants him to call her Nana, or Gran or . . . But he doesn’t know. They all agreed. No, Gerald and Edna agreed. Why confuse the boy? Why burden him with the truth of his father’s ignominious conception? Just the first secret among many. Perhaps if she’d been stronger from the start and told the truth, none of this would have happened.
She tries to move him, but he’s too heavy. Who has done this? Who has brought him here? No matter what he’s done, he’s still her grandson. She has to protect him.
Lillian. Edna is there, standing by the gable window in the roof. Go now, she says. Do what the boy says. Get help before it’s too late.
“Aunt Lil,” says Oscar, “please . . . you have to help . . .”
“Oh, Oscar!” Lily sobs, pulling him into her arms. He’s just too heavy for her. His body sags back onto the mattress.
Lillian. Go. Now!
Once again, Lily runs.
* * *
—
“I used to come down here sometimes,” says Sally-Ann.
Tyler can’t see her, but he can hear the scraping of the trowel.
“Sometimes if everyone was out, or Gerry was busy with work. There’s a coal chute for deliveries behind you. It was never locked. I’d come down here and sit in the dark, striking matches. Watch them burn down to my fingertips to see how long I could hold them.”
He knows now what she’s doing. She’s rebuilding the wall torn down by the builders. Gerald Cartwright’s final resting place. And Cynthia’s. He has to keep her talking, keep stalling.
“You don’t have to do this.” He flexes his wrists again, and this time he feels something give. He twists the string but his hands are still held.
“I’m afraid I do.” Sally-Ann reappears, the trowel in her hand. “Someone has to take Gerry’s place, you see? At first, I thought it would have to be Oscar. I got him to come here by telling him you wanted to see him. I knew he’d come; he’s actually pretty keen on you. All I had to do was drug the champagne and leave it out for him. He thought you’d arranged all this, the tea lights, everything. And then you actually turned up. I would have been angry with you if it wasn’t so funny. But then I thought, perhaps it’s better this way. Now you get to take Gerry’s place instead, and we get to keep Oscar.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ Sally-Ann? You mean Gerald, don’t you? You still hear him?”
She nods slowly. “He went away for a while, but he never stays gone. That’s why I came back the first time. A few months after . . .” She trails off, and then picks up again. “I had to know if he was still here. I came in through the coal chute and listened at the wall. I could still hear him scratching at the bricks.”
“He was long dead by then, Sally-Ann.”
She grins again. It’s a sick sight, no humor in it. “I know that, Adam. I’m not crazy.” She rolls her eyes at him. “I could still hear him, though.”
“So you set fire to the house?”
“It was my first really big fire. I didn’t do a very good job of it, I’m afraid. I wanted the place to burn to the ground, but the flames just didn’t want to catch. This time will be different.”
“Tell me about Oscar. How did you meet again? Or have you just stayed in touch all these years?”
“No, I told you the truth about that. We met a few weeks ago by chance. Until then I thought it was all over. I was in therapy, and I could keep Gerry quiet most of the time. But then Oscar got back from uni, all grown up and looking just like his father and making noises about renovating the house.”
“And that’s when Gerry woke up? It was Oscar’s idea to bring in the builders, wasn’t it?”
“I couldn’t tell him he was making a mistake, could I? Not without letting on how I knew, that Gerry had told me he didn’t want to be found. He was happy down here, you see? And then they dug him up and the screaming started all over again.”
“Why me? Why did you involve me?”
She looks down on him. “Poor Adam.” She sticks out her lower lip. “When I realized Gerry was going to be coming up I started worrying what else might get found. DNA and stuff. I thought it might be useful to know someone on the case, so I started talking to you. You’re not easy to befriend, though, do you know that? Very self-absorbed.”
He says nothing to that.
“Then Oscar confided in me about his sexuality, and I knew I could get the two of you together. It’s easy setting people up, isn’t it? Especially pretty boys like you two, so used to the world falling at your feet.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “It made Gerry laugh.” She looks back at the wall. “I think he’s ready now.”
“Wait, I still don’t know what happened. Sally-Ann, please! You have to tell me.”
She scratches her head and narrows her eyes. “You’re stalling, Detective Sergeant Tyler.” Her other hand traces the outline of a burn on her elbow. She leans back against the pallet again. “All right,” she says, hugging her arms. “They forgot about me in their haste to get away. I’m not even sure Lily knew it was me. She just kept screaming Oscar’s name over and over again. The others ran for it, and Gerry just threw his clothes back on and rushed downstairs to talk the old women out of phoning the police. So I snuck down here. The old bolt-hole. I knew Gerry was going to kill me this time, and I knew I had to get away. I thought I’d wait for things to die down and then get out through the coal chute. I could hear them fighting upstairs. Him and the schoolteacher. I’d never heard him so angry. And I realized something else. He was afraid of her.
“Then that door opened.” Sally-Ann points to the top of the stairs. “And down they came.”
* * *
—
Lily runs . . . after Edna through the hallway. She hears her confronting Gerald. Her voice is like acid; it eats at Gerald and he dissolves under her attack. But then he changes. The devil resurfaces. He spits venomous words back at her, accuses her of terrible things.
“You knew what was going on! Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
“You wicked creature!”
Lily watches as he threatens, and then pleads. He switches between scared little boy and monstrous beast, and through all of it Edna stands steadfast. The unbendable headmistress. She says, “I wish to God I’d convinced her to snuff out your miserable little life before it began.” And then she falters, the cancer and the drugs ganging up on her at the worst possible moment. Her tired, aging body lets her down.
He sees her weaken and takes it as a sign. He grabs her by the arm, and Edna cries out. He pulls her after him, down the cellar steps. Lily can only follow. She can do nothing. She can’t even speak. She watches as he places his hands round Edna’s throat and starts to squeeze. Lily looks into Edna’s eyes over his shoulder. They plead with her. Lily. Lily, my love. Lily, please!
She cannot say how it got there but she has a bottle in her hands. The light is fading from Edna’s eyes. She watches them darken, the fire going out.
Lily has to choose.
The bottle goes up . . . and comes
down.
He drops like a dead weight; facedown, his arms outstretched. Edna collapses next to him, gasping in the damp air.
Time passes.
Edna is no longer there. There’s just Lily and her son, his head haloed by a growing pool of blood.
And then Edna is back with the gardener, Joe Wentworth. He’s saying, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!” over and over again. Edna tells him to be quiet. Her voice is croaky. She rubs at her throat. She tells him to help them or she will tell the police what he’s been getting up to.
He knocks down the bit of wall where they buried poor Cynthia. Lily watches him haul Gerald’s body through the hole. Then he rebuilds it. By the time he leaves, he is white-faced and shaking. Edna talks to him in a low, calm voice. After this day neither of them will speak to him again.
Finally, Edna comes for her, tries to take the bottle that’s still in her hand. It hasn’t even broken. Her hand is paralyzed; Edna has to prize her fingers open one by one. On the bottle’s thick green base there are splashes of red and brown, flecks of gray. She lets go suddenly and the bottle falls. It bounces on the concrete floor. Still it doesn’t break.
Edna takes her home and puts her to bed.
Much, much later, Edna tells her the rest. She makes Joe Wentworth drive the car to the station. She empties the bottle down the sink and takes it to the recycling point at the supermarket. Lily wonders if it even smashes then, when it drops into the green-glass bottle bank. Edna searches the house for evidence of what Gerald was up to. Some of it, like his shady business deals, she leaves for the police to find, but other bits—the tapes and DVDs, the photos—she takes and burns on a bonfire in the garden.
Oscar comes home the next morning. He apologizes, tells them he stayed at Sophie’s. They go along with the story. Lily thinks they should get him some help, but Edna tells her if he doesn’t want to talk about it then it’s probably best left. They both fuss over him. Edna tells him his father has left early for his business meeting in Frankfurt and that he’s to stay with them until he returns.
Lily and Edna spend much of the week talking. Getting their stories straight. Edna tells Lily what she’s to say and what she is not to say to the authorities. Lily wants to tell them the truth, but Edna says it’s far too late for that. Besides, they must think about Oscar and what’s best for him.
The following Monday, Edna rings Gerald’s office. The secretary tells her that he missed his meetings. Edna feigns some concern, but not too much. She calls the police. She handles them so well. Her answers are perfect, her timing impeccable. Lily never has to lie, not even once.
They turn their attention to Oscar. He wants to know where his father is. They tell him they don’t know. He’s a weak link, weaker in fact than Lily. If he should tell someone the truth about what Gerald was doing . . . But strangely, he doesn’t. In fact, he stops communicating entirely. He grows cold and sullen. It breaks Lily’s heart to see him change. First his mother, now his father. He thinks he has no family left. She wants to tell him differently, but she can’t. It’s too difficult. There are too many questions to answer.
Months later they wake to sirens in the night. They see the flames through the trees. The Old Vicarage burns. The police say it’s arson. Probably kids taking advantage of the empty house. The officer investigating Gerald’s disappearance is a suspicious ferret of a man who scares Lily until she can no longer talk at all. Thankfully, and just as Edna said, things begin to die down. As the truth about Gerald and his unscrupulous business dealings comes to light, the police begin to look further afield than sleepy Castledene.
But Oscar is growing more unruly, asking more and more questions. He’s no longer their little boy. He’s lost his way. Against Lily’s wishes, Edna arranges with Michael Denham for him to be sent away to boarding school. He resists at first, but eventually seems to realize there’s nothing left for him here. They see him off at the station.
And then Edna’s cancer returns to punish them. Why is it Edna that must suffer all the pain? What about her? Why should it be that Edna is dying while . . .
Lily goes on.
* * *
—
“I saw the whole thing. I was crouched down, naked behind that wine rack, ready to bolt the moment anyone saw me. But nobody did. I must have been there for hours. I was weak with hunger and frozen stiff. Even after they’d gone I stayed another hour or two. That’s when I heard it. The scratching. Like rats trapped in a box, scrabbling to get out. It was coming from behind the wall. I crept forward and listened. I could hear him on the other side, going at the wall with his fingernails. I must have made a noise or something, because he knew I was there. He called out for help, then he called out for his mum.” She marks the points off on her fingers. “Then he said he was sorry. Then he screamed.” Sally-Ann licks her lips. “I ran. Naked and dirty and bleeding, I ran all the way home and shut myself in the bathroom. I thought about going to the hospital, but in the end I just dealt with it myself.”
“That’s the scream you hear?” he asks.
Sally-Ann wipes the tears from her face and looks up, as though seeing him for the first time. “I think we’d better get on,” she says. She starts toward him.
He’s not ready. He needs a few more minutes to gather his strength and give himself a fighting chance. “Wait, Sally-Ann!”
But this time she won’t be distracted.
“Sally-Ann, you don’t have to do this.”
She crouches over him again. “I’m sorry, Adam, but we’re running out of time now. Oscar will be waking in the attic soon and wondering where I am. I have to get back to him.”
“Sally-Ann, wait! What are you going to do?”
“Time’s up,” she says, and leans in to haul him up by the arms.
Now or never. Tyler untangles his wrists and drives his fists hard into her stomach. She wheezes as the breath goes out of her body, but at the same time she lashes out at his head with both arms. He manages to block one of the blows, but the other takes him hard on the side of the head. It wasn’t enough; his body wasn’t ready. He tumbles sideways, his legs still tied at the ankles. Then she’s on him in a fury, pushing him toward the wine rack. They hit hard. He feels something sharp stab its way into his back. There’s a pain in his side and another in his arm, and then his head is full of bright white light.
* * *
—
“Do you know her?” Paul Enfield asks from the rear passenger seat.
Doggett glances in the rearview mirror briefly and returns his eyes to the road. Something for which Rabbani, sitting in the front passenger seat, is enormously grateful. The man’s not exactly the best driver in the world and is currently doing seventy along a winding country lane that’s supposed to be a thirty zone.
“Who?” Doggett asks.
“Sally-Ann Digby. Is she involved with the case somehow?”
Doggett shakes his head. “She’s a civilian, works in IT. She’s the bloody one we put in charge of tracing the Internet address. When I chased it up with her yesterday, she fobbed me off with some excuse about the servers being busy, and I fucking believed her!”
They fall back into silence. Rabbani has her mobile pressed to her ear, but Guy Daley’s phone just rings and rings until it cuts to voicemail again. The car speeds on.
Enfield says, “Does Adam know her?”
Doggett doesn’t answer straightaway. Then he says, “Yes, Adam knows her.”
“And now Adam’s missing.”
“Trust me,” Doggett says. “Jordan’ll have half of South Yorkshire Police out looking for him by now.”
They drive on in silence. Rabbani clutches at the armrest on the door as the country lanes continue to unwind ahead of them. After a few more miles, the fire officer says, “Are we sure it’s this Digby woman?”
Doggett looks to Rabbani to answer, and she realizes that in
his eyes she’s the computer expert.
The IP address Enfield gave her led to the comms room, where it was easy enough to trace which terminal the blog entries were uploaded from. “Then,” she says, “it was just a case of checking who had access to that terminal at the right times. They were mostly posted early in the morning when there were only a few people in the building. Less chance of getting caught, I guess.” When she saw the name on the list of employees Rabbani shivered. “Ask Sophie Denham,” Tyler had said to her earlier, “if a girl called Sally-Ann Digby ever visited the Old Vicarage.” She didn’t know who Sally-Ann Digby was when she spoke to Denham, but she knew whatever theory Tyler had, he must be on to something. She just never got the chance to tell him. She hopes that lack of information hasn’t cost him.
Again the car is silent for a time, the only sound the straining of the engine and the screech of tires desperately trying to stay on the tarmac.
“Why did she do it?” She’s talking to herself more than anything, but Doggett answers her anyway.
“How the fuck should I know?” he says. “’Cause she’s a bloody loon!”
“Do you think . . . ?” Enfield trails off.
Doggett glances in the mirror again. “I think we need to find them. Fast.”
When they reach the Old Vicarage, Rabbani knows they’ve made the right choice. The police tape across the drive has been broken. Tyler’s car is parked by the side of the road.
“Find Daley,” Doggett tells her. He turns to Enfield. “You stay here. This is still a crime scene, and I’ve got at least one officer missing.”
Rabbani notices a movement in the long grass. “Lily!” she shouts, recognizing the woman.