The Drowning Ground: A Novel

by James Marrison

  It cast a long, cold shadow on the gravel driveway. Hurst’s old, battered and apparently immortal Land Rover was parked at the front, which meant, as I had thought, that yesterday Hurst had simply hopped over his garden wall at the back and then climbed up the hill to the other side.

  I turned away and walked towards the gates, where Cleaver and Graves were looking through the bars. Cleaver was gesturing to the house as if he owned it, but it was Graves – younger, aristocratic-looking – who appeared more in keeping with the sedate surroundings of Dashwood Manor.

  Graves moved his head closer, so that his forehead was touching the flaking black-painted metal bars, and squinted as he tried to look further in at the house. ‘I still can’t see what you’re talking about,’ he was saying. ‘And I really don’t see why you just can’t tell me, Cleaver.’

  Cleaver was in his mid-forties, wiry and ruddy-faced, and at the best of times surly and bad-tempered. I always had the impression that the moment I told Cleaver to do something, he’d be rolling his eyes like a teenager in disgust behind my back. But Cleaver seemed relatively cooperative right now and even eager to please, despite the peculiar guessing game he appeared to be playing with Graves.

  ‘There,’ he said, putting his hand as far as it would go through the bars, ‘and there,’ he said, pointing to the bottom of the house. Then he slowly moved his finger upwards towards the second floor. ‘And there,’ he said finally.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cleaver,’ Graves said, losing patience, ‘will you stop playing silly buggers and bloody well tell me or…’ Graves stopped and began to press his face even closer to the bars of the gate. ‘All of them, you say?’

  Cleaver nodded and poured out a cup of something hot from his flask and offered it to Graves as if he had just won a prize. Graves took it, looking doubtful while Cleaver wasn’t watching, but then taking a polite sip when Cleaver turned towards him.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s the big deal about the house?’

  Cleaver wisely did not play the same guessing game with me. ‘Hurst’s only gone and barred all the windows, sir. All of ’em. Noticed it first thing this morning.’

  I looked. I hadn’t noticed either on first inspection. But now that Cleaver had pointed it out, I realized immediately that he was right. Thick black bars spanned every single window. The original front door also appeared to be barred from the outside.

  ‘How very odd,’ Graves said quietly.

  ‘Maybe this isn’t going to be so easy after all,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could try round the back?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to help much, sir,’ Cleaver said, sounding pleased with himself.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, when they sent me out this morning’ – Cleaver looked vaguely resentful at the thought – ‘to guard the house, I had to check to see if there was any sign of a break-in, didn’t I? So of course I had to go round the back. You’re not going to believe this, but he’s only gone and bricked up some of the windows in the back and put bars on all the others. Looks bloody horrible.’

  ‘Bricked some of them in?’

  Cleaver nodded. ‘He’s bricked in the big old French windows at the back, and he’s barred all the others. Didn’t do a great job of it either. It looks sturdy enough, but there’s cement everywhere.’

  I briefly considered this. ‘Does it look recent?’ I asked.

  Cleaver scratched at the back of his neck. ‘Hard to tell, really. But no. Looks like it’s been that way for a while – few years at any rate.’

  ‘What is it, sir?’ Graves said quickly.

  ‘Well,’ I said, not all that sure myself yet, ‘the only place where you can get a glimpse of the back of the house is from the top of that hill over there. We’ve been hearing all day about how much he hated people rambling through his field.’

  ‘So you think he wasn’t really bothered about the field at all?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe he just didn’t want people to know what he’d done to the back of his house.’

  ‘Yes,’ Graves said, ‘there must be laws against that kind of thing. You can’t just do whatever you want to a house, even if you do own it.’

  Cleaver said bitterly, ‘Took a year before the council gave me permission to build a conservatory for the missus.’

  ‘I bet it looks absolutely horrendous,’ Graves said, before adding politely, ‘Hurst’s house, Cleaver, not your wife’s conservatory.’

  ‘Bloody terrible job,’ he said. Ironically, Cleaver himself had the look of one of those cowboy builders who knock on your door and tell you cheerfully that your roof is about to cave in.

  ‘He must have really lost it,’ Graves said in awe. ‘Wonder what else he’s done to the place.’

  ‘Looks like we’re about to find out,’ I said, suddenly in a hurry to get going. ‘If we can find a way in, that is. You got a couple of torches in that car of yours, Cleaver?’

  Together, Graves and I walked towards the gates as Cleaver rummaged loudly in his patrol car for a couple of torches. Then, after handing them over, he switched on the car’s headlights so that they were shining through the bars of the gates towards the house. Dashwood Manor probably still looked all right by daylight, but now, in the dark, I could only think: Christ Almighty, but it’s grim. The barred front door was like a big yawning mouth full of teeth. You could see the signs of slow decay: the wet, crumbling stone lintel above the front door; the roof patchy where the tiles had slipped off; the gutters blocked by fallen tiles and God knew what else. Ivy had crept along the walls of the house and wrapped itself around the windowsills. There had been flowerbeds on each side of the driveway, but the weeds had taken over and smothered them, while large clumps of grass had managed to find a foothold in the driveway’s gravel.

  And through the bars you could just make out dark piles of what looked to be newspapers, as if Hurst had piled stacks and stacks of them behind the windowpanes. It was all wrong somehow. The bars made it wrong, of course, but there was something else too, apart from its strange and unsettling remoteness. But right now I didn’t know what that was.

  Less than a mile away were homes and shops and cars and people. There were televisions and radios and houses and people buying stuff in supermarkets. I thought of the pub on the green. I thought of families in their homes, gathered round comforting pools of light. I thought of plastic penguins tumbling into a pale blue papery sea and disappearing beneath the water. All of it seemed very far away now and somehow unreal.

  It was as if we had stumbled upon something that had stood here for years, silent and watchful but yet unnoticed as it had slowly deteriorated in its isolation. I suddenly seemed to see both myself and Graves as if from above: two small figures preparing for a long journey to a place where neither of us particularly wanted to go.

  ‘Are you ready?’ I said.

  Graves nodded, but now he too looked tense and uncertain. Cleaver pushed open the gates for us, and we set out on the gravelled driveway towards the house.

  9

  Near the front door we slipped a little, almost colliding with Hurst’s Land Rover. Then we took the narrow path at the side of the house, leading to the garden at the back.

  I used Cleaver’s torch to get a good, long look at the garden. There was a kind of carefully maintained ruggedness to it, and Hurst had, with some sustained determination, kept it up. This was rather surprising, given the general air of abandonment that pervaded the rest of the place, and it pleased me now to see that Hurst had not let it go completely to ruin.

  I lifted the torch higher and its strong beam revealed the low wall on the other side of the garden and a handful of stone steps.

  ‘So what happened to them?’ Graves asked impatiently. ‘The girls that went missing. Gail … and Elise. They just disappeared you said, sir?’

  ‘Surprised you never heard the names before. Couldn’t be more than, I don’t know, around seven years now.’

  ‘Seven years? I was
just finishing school then,’ Graves said.

  ‘It was everywhere for a while. All over the television. In the newspapers. You sure you never heard the names?’

  Graves slowed down a little. ‘I’m not sure now,’ he said, a little flustered. ‘Maybe I have. I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, you won’t get much out of the villagers. They won’t talk about it even now, if they can help it. They’ll speak about it amongst themselves, but not to us and definitely not to any outsiders. Gail Foster went missing from Quinton. The village never really got over it. Never will either, until she’s found one way or the other. She’s there, though.’

  ‘Where?’ Graves said.

  ‘Out in the village,’ I said simply. ‘You can feel her, ever since she vanished. The village kind of … drew in on itself and shut up shop. But it’s waiting – waiting for her to come back.’

  Graves looked at me doubtfully. ‘But she’s never coming back, is she?’ he said finally.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s not. It’s been far too long for that.’

  ‘And nothing’s been heard of the other girl either. Nothing at all?’

  ‘There are still appeals every so often, and every now and again something will turn up and lead nowhere.’ I gestured vaguely at the black fields and ridges. ‘But someone got their hooks into those two little girls, and one day we’ll find what’s left of them and then we’ll know for sure.’

  ‘But what do you think happened to them?’

  I didn’t answer straightaway. The horror of it all was coming back far too quickly, now that I was at Hurst’s house again. But then the horror really hadn’t gone away. It didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing. Sometimes it would hit me almost like a physical force. I could be driving, sitting in my house, reading about how River Plate were faring in the Apertura tournament, preparing my dinner, standing over the boiling saucepans, and I would suddenly remember them both. A cold sickness would run over my body.

  I would remember their pictures: removed with great care from scrapbooks by parents with shaking hands. Childish grins staring up at me that became branded in my memory forever. But perhaps all that really remained of them were ashes and fragments of burnt and shattered bone.

  For a while longer we carried on in silence. I ducked under the branches of an old silver birch and let Graves go on ahead, then caught up with him again.

  ‘Sir? I said what happened to them?’

  ‘They were abducted,’ I said finally. ‘Elise lived in Chipping Norton, a few miles away from Quinton. She was out in the garden. Just got home from the school they have over there, and she was messing about in her garden, playing. She was supposed to be inside doing her homework, and her older brother was supposed to be making sure she was doing it. But he had some friends round, and they went to play football out the front. When he came back she was gone. He looked for her up and down the street. He thought she might have been hiding or playing a game. So he waited until his mother came home from work. She was a GP, and on Tuesdays she always arrived late. But Elise was gone.

  ‘Their house backed on to a little lane, and the lane overlooked the rear gardens of some of the houses. We think someone waited. Saw her brother leave, or maybe saw him messing about with his mates. So they went round the back and somehow coaxed her out of her garden and into the lane. Then they took her.’

  ‘And Gail?’

  ‘She went missing almost exactly a week after Elise, and at roughly the same time. Just after school at around 4.00. A teacher saw her leaving the school and heading back home. He didn’t give it a second thought. The kids had been warned by then, of course, told to watch out and stick together. But her mother’s house was in the middle of a small street that practically backed on to the school playground. Later, a few neighbours remembered seeing her walking towards her house in the lane that the locals use as a shortcut to the shops. They knew her, you see, and they remembered her. But she never got beyond that lane.’

  ‘So someone was waiting for her?’

  ‘Looks like it. They talked her into coming with them. Had a car waiting, maybe, and just took her. And the same goes for Elise. That’s what we think anyway.’

  ‘Someone she knew, then?’ Graves said.

  ‘Yes. Someone who knew she’d be walking home at that time. Was aware of her routine. Probably local. It was almost … it was almost, I don’t know, instinctive somehow. I always thought of it that way.’

  ‘And no one remembered seeing a car hanging about, or Gail waiting for anyone near the shops?’

  ‘No. She just … well … she just vanished. Of course we checked the lane. Looked for tyre tracks and any evidence on the scene. We interviewed absolutely everyone – rounded up all the local sex offenders, but there was nothing.’

  ‘God, their poor parents,’ Graves said, echoing my own thoughts exactly. ‘Imagine not knowing like that.’

  ‘They moved,’ I said.

  We carried on walking. The path skirted past wild-looking bushes, and as we drew closer to the house the vegetation on either side became increasingly thick. Tendrils from weeds coiled along the grass and reached out towards the edges of the path. It was almost as if you could see Hurst purposefully letting go of control of the garden at this specific point, with this wilder space marking the boundary between the determined order of the garden and the strange disorder of the house itself.

  ‘It’s something truly terrible to make someone disappear,’ I said. ‘You have to try to imagine it, if you can, Graves. To make someone simply vanish, so that no one knows where they are or what happened to them. It’s even worse than murder. Because the family never know, you see. There’s hope, but such hope is worse than despair. It’s poison.’

  I had already said too much and knew it. Graves looked at me, baffled again, and waited for me to go on, but I didn’t. I stopped walking.

  Through the trees I had glimpsed a collection of small outbuildings by the side of a far wall: a battered-looking old shed, a small garage, and, next to that, as if slumped against the shed, a small greenhouse. Beyond these was the black fence surrounding the swimming pool.

  ‘We’re going to need something to break our way in,’ I said, looking closely at the barred windows. ‘Go see if there’s something over there in that shed, will you?’

  ‘We’re going to break in?’ Graves said. He sounded genuinely shocked. ‘We can’t do that, sir. What about Rebecca – his daughter? What if she comes back and sees that we’ve smashed her door down?’ Graves laughed. ‘We can’t just break in. First we need to…’

  I looked at him, really wondering. So far today Graves had seemed efficient but a little limited. Lacking in imagination. Maybe he lacked guts as well. Again, I thought of Powell. But it was no good thinking about all that now.

  ‘I do think we should come back tomorrow, once we’ve got the keys,’ Graves said a little nervously.

  I kept on looking at him and wishing Powell was with me instead. Was Graves going to slow things down? Be a burden to me? If so, I might have to get rid of him somehow, like the others. I didn’t like doing it, but there it was. We might get in a little trouble for the door. But so what? It was only a door. But then I remembered. Graves was already on thin ice.

  I kept on looking at him, then I said, ‘I didn’t come all the way out here in the cold just to admire his garden. Hurst isn’t going to mind either way, and I couldn’t care less about his daughter.’ Involuntarily my shoulders hunched; I lifted my right hand into the air, brought it down very quickly to my waist and looked directly at him. ‘I’m going into that house. So do what I tell you and go find me something in that shed of his.’

  Graves stood very still. He seemed disconcerted. This was a moment in which things could go either way, and that would be it. Both of us were perfectly aware of this. For a second I was sure that Graves was going to refuse, and I would be seeing the back of him. Then very suddenly Graves made up his mind.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, of cour
se, sir.’

  Together we strode off the path and through the trees. Graves trotted ahead, towards the shed’s open doors. His torch flickered through the gaps in the shed’s wooden frame, and a few minutes later he emerged carrying a rusty old pickaxe broken halfway along the wooden shaft.

  Graves lifted it in the air and examined it. ‘Sorry, sir, but that’s all there was.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’ll do.’

  We reached the back of the house. Stretching all along the back of it stood a raised stone platform surrounded on either side by balustrades topped at the crest by globes of moss-covered stone. Five years ago I had led Hurst along this platform to the French windows in his living room. Now it looked dark and the stone stairs leading up to it slippery and treacherous.

  Breaking the platform into two was another, far less grand flight of stairs, which led downwards. A servants’ entrance by the looks of it. Graves headed straight towards it and disappeared, while I shone my torch along the house, scanning the upper walls.

  At the top, near the roof, were large patches of old grime, as if the black rain from the roof had slowly stained the stone over the years. Then I caught a dark, sunken shape like a sightless eye in the round, yellow beam of light.

  It caught me completely by surprise. I had forgotten about the windows. I swung the torch back to a far corner of the patio, taking in the ugly dripping gouts of cement that smeared the house and staring in astonishment at the grey-streaked walls.

  Cleaver had been right. Hurst had bricked in the French windows and barred all the other windows. The bricked-in French windows somehow distorted the whole sense of the house; the delicate balance of the design was gone. And Cleaver had been right about something else: Hurst had done a lousy job, and it looked like he had done it in a hurry.