by Tin Larrick
She let out a sigh.
“I invited him in, and showed him around.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. He was quite pleasant, though. A little strange, but you could see he was caught up in some very old memories. The next day, however, he came back, and he was quite different. He wanted – no, demanded – that I sell him the house. I shouted at him, and he gave me a week to think about it. Then Sean’s tyres were slashed while he was at work, and mine too. My car was on the driveway. He must have done it just as I shut the door. You can’t tell me that was coincidence?”
“What did the police say?”
“I haven’t spoken to them. Sean did, but only about the tyres. He didn’t know anything about Jamie at the time.”
“Charlotte, you need to tell the police.”
“What will they do?”
“Christ, I don’t know. Send a patrol round, take a statement, investigate. Stalking is a crime, Charlotte. What else do you know about him?”
“Only what he told me. His name, that he grew up here, and was in Eastbourne for a friend’s funeral, so he thought he’d ‘swing by the old place.’ He’s from Wakefield, or so he said. That’s about it. I put his name into Google, but nothing much came up.”
“All right. Charlotte, try not to panic. It’s all going to be okay.”
“He knew my name, Richard. He called me Mrs Rowntree. How the hell would he have known that?”
“Well, I don’t know. Is there anything lying around with your name on? Post, maybe?”
She looked down at the telephone table. There were indeed a couple of letters sitting there, addressed to Mr and Mrs Rowntree. Maybe she was overreacting.
But the tyres, Charlotte.
And the fleur-de-lis.
“Charlotte? Are you still there?” Richard was talking. “Do you want me to come round?”
For a moment, she did. But if Jamie Brazill had some ulterior motive to cause her burgeoning family to implode, then inviting Richard round after Sean had just found about an – admittedly very old and very over – affair would surely be a good way to achieve it.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you? But thank you anyway.”
“Okay. Call me if you need me. Tell the police.”
Charlotte hung up the phone, and the silence in the house enveloped her once more. The urge to bolt returned, but the conversation with Richard had given her some grains of strength, and she opted to remain in the house – if for no other reason than she didn’t want Jamie Brazill to occupy it while she was out and then claim some warped version of squatters’ rights.
She stared out at the garden. What the hell was out there?
The happy faces of a Disney screensaver from the still-on laptop caught her eye, and it occurred to her that she had not properly completed her internet research. She went over to the laptop and poked a key; the characters vanished and Charlotte tried not to think about the kinds of faces, happily accrued over the years, that she would far prefer to have smiling at her from a computer screen.
A blanket search of Jamie Brazill had not returned anything of note. She added ‘Eastbourne,’ and even less came back. She added ‘Wakefield,’ and still got nothing.
She pushed her knuckles against her cheekbones and stared at the floor. Jamie Brazill – who’s to say that it was his real name? Or, if it were, that he’d ever done anything sufficiently noteworthy that it would find its way into the public domain and thence into an internet search engine? Put a friend’s name into Google and their social media accounts might come up, but if they hadn’t won a competition, run a marathon for charity, set up their own business or made themselves otherwise newsworthy, that might be about it.
What about the bag? Jamie’s pale green duffle bag was clearly packed to the hilt and very heavy. It looked like his entire worldly belongings were stuffed in there, but the air of the nomad about him did not just stem from the bag.
What about the funeral?
Briefly excited by a line of enquiry, she got up and called the crematorium. She worked out the days on her fingers – shit, had she really only met Jamie Brazill yesterday? – and he had said the funeral was the day before that, hadn’t he?
The crematorium staff were happy to give her the names of the deceased for the services that day – to her amazement, there had been eight. They were even content to give her the names of the funeral directors handling each one. As far as the names of attending mourners, however, they regrettably could not help. They also helpfully suggested that the funeral directors, while they may hold that information, would not be able to disclose the names of mourners without the consent of the family – and, in point of fact, the mourner themselves.
Charlotte hung up the phone and looked down again at the letters on the telephone table. She shut her eyes, the smell of the old wood in the house suddenly heavy in her brain. The cherry blossom tree scraped its black gnarled fingers across the roof tiles.
Her eyes flew open.
The cherry blossom use to give him nightmares, Jamie had said. But the cherry blossom was at the front of the house.
How could he have heard it if his bedroom was at the back?
She ran up the stairs and into the rear bedroom, the one in which she had animatedly described her plans for the future to a stranger called Jamie Brazill.
She stood in the centre of the room and shut her eyes.
Nothing.
The cherry blossom, its branches tap-tap-tapping the roof at the front of the house, was inaudible from this room.
She opened her eyes, and looked around her, her eyes running in tail-chasing circles around the corners of the room.
It was just a room. An empty room calling out for life. Packing boxes like building blocks on one half of the room, bare walls and floor on the other.
She walked slowly to the window and looked out at the overgrown garden and the uneven flagstones of the forgotten patio, weather-beaten and strewn with moss. Beyond that, the forest with its accusatory whisper and thick, moist green flesh.
Charlotte turned and faced into the room again, the metal radiator under the sill cold even through her jeans.
She folded her arms and her eyes drifted to a default position on the floor as her brain worked.
Then she saw it. It was perched on the edge of one of the boxes, on a narrow lip created by the stack. It was at waist-height, partially-concealed by the shadow of the two boxes above it. The light from the window had caught its silver casing, otherwise she might not have seen it.
She frowned. It was her camera – a small silver digital Fuji with a purple embossed CHARLOTTE sticker on one side – but it did not belong here and she had not put it here. As far as she was concerned it was still in a packing box somewhere. In fact, she could not recall the last time she had seen it, but it was definitely in the old house. Maybe Sean had found it and put it here.
But why would he do that?
She picked it up.
Switched it on.
The device was in ‘shoot’ mode, and so she slid the little switch across to ‘playback.’
The first three images were so nondescript they could almost have been accidental – Charlotte’s arm reaching for the kettle, a view of their old garden almost totally obscured by a thumb and a bizarre one of Sean washing the car that he appeared to have taken himself using a timer.
The next two were slightly more posed – a grinning Charlotte in a kagoule, leaning against a tree during a walk in the woods (she quite liked that particular shot) and the two of them in the pub – which, she recalled, had been taken by Richard.
When she scrolled through to the next one, her heart went cold.
The first thing she noticed was that she clearly hadn’t taken it.
The next thing she noticed was the grainy, barely-colour finish, suggestive of a faded 1970s Polaroid than up-to-the-minute high definition technology.
The third thing she noticed was that the house in the
picture was hers.
She flicked through to the next picture, and the next one, the one after that and the one after that.
There were twelve shots in all. They were all of her house in Ratton, but they clearly had not been taken recently. Charlotte was no technophobe, however, and it only took a few button-presses to bring up the time stamps.
All twelve images had been taken the day before, but the pictures themselves were far older than that. Although the colour had faded, the blues, greens and yellows of a long hot summer and a world lit by a powerful sun were apparent.
Most of the shots had been taken in the back garden. They were innocuous enough in themselves, but their very existence – and the subject matter they displayed – made Charlotte’s hands shake and a curious high-pitched whistle to issue from her throat like a distressed kettle coming to the boil.
This was her house.
What was it doing in these pictures?
Or rather, how had these pictures found their way into her hands?
Unlike its present condition, the rear garden in the photographs was vibrant, lush and extremely well-tended. Charlotte could almost hear the buzz of insects and smell the earthy aroma of bursting vegetation.
She flicked through them once, and then back the other way, and then forwards again, too full of questions to take in all the detail on a single viewing.
One shot in particular eventually caught her eye. It had been taken from about halfway up the garden facing back towards the house, and showed the patio and the rear of the house.
On the left side of the patio was a white metal picnic table with heavy ornate chairs around it. In one of the chairs sat a slim man, about fifty, with thick white hair. He was bare-chested, wearing denim shorts and sandals. He was facing the camera, a pipe in one hand, and his left ankle resting across his right knee.
His attention – and a smile of sheer paternal delight – was on a boy and a girl playing in the centre of the patio. The girl was about nine; the boy younger, maybe six or seven. The girl wore a yellow cotton dress, the boy a football World Cup T-shirt with Mexico ’86 in striped green letters across the chest.
On the right of the patio, coming out of the lounge door, was a straight-backed and handsome woman in her forties. She was carrying a tray with two champagne flutes on it; the concentration framing her face and the chocolate-coloured hair pulled into a tight bun gave her a serious, almost prim look, but the royal blue summer dress and slight flush in her cheeks suggested she was anything but.
There was no clue as to who the photographer was. The picture was clearly not posed, but it had captured the ingredients of a summer Sunday afternoon perfectly. It was definitely her house and garden – of that there was no doubt – but it seemed to have been taken from a slightly elevated position. This was odd, because the patio was actually above the garden, with the four flagstone steps leading down from the patio to the garden itself.
She didn’t dwell on it. Maybe the photographer was up a since-felled tree, or at the top of a climbing frame long since rusted and carted off for scrap. At the very least they had their back to the forest, which caused an involuntary shudder to escape Charlotte.
Instead, Charlotte used the camera’s zoom facility to move in on the faces in turn. The kind, happy face of the man at the table gave Charlotte a desperately sad feeling; the look was so honest, so untroubled, that she felt she knew him from this photograph alone. Similarly, the woman, although her eyes were fixed on the tray in front of her, seemed to project every shred of her firm-but-fair countenance into the camera.
Charlotte focused on the children. It was clear that, in both appearance and comfort with their surroundings, they belonged to the man and the woman. Both children had their mother’s chocolate hair; the girl’s fell free and loose around her shoulders, while the boy’s curled thickly over his ears. The girl had her back to the camera, but the boy was facing it, his dark eyes fixed on a yellow-and-black ball at their feet.
A chill filled Charlotte’s chest as she realised the boy was Jamie Brazill, and her heart began to drum at the possible and not-quite-formed ramifications of how this picture had come to be in her possession. Her breath quickened and she was aware of strange mewing noises humming through her lips. She gripped the window sill behind her with both hands, the camera dangling from her wrist by its strap. It clonked against the radiator.
Calm down, she thought. Calm down. This is just another one of his silly mind games. He wants you to freak out.
She took several huge, slow breaths – an act she felt was quite underestimated by the medical profession in settling troubled minds – and clarity and reason slowly returned to her.
Who was the little girl? If the boy was Jamie, who was the girl? The camera had only caught the back of her head, and Charlotte desperately wanted her to slowly look over her shoulder, to face the camera dead-on.
She picked up the camera and looked again at the photograph. Again that elevated angle struck her as odd – the photographer was looking down on the patio. Not by a very sharp angle, but….
She turned it upside down, and that chill filled her chest again. She wondered if going mad was a sudden thing; when the brain reaches its ceiling of trying to cope with the irrational and simply turns in on itself like a dying planet folding into a black hole.
Charlotte dropped the camera and turned to the window. She opened a window and looked down onto the concrete below. She wanted to scream. Now she had seen the patio – clean and unspoiled circa 1986 – the hitherto unnoticed image jumped out at her through the moss and weeds and grime of nearly thirty years.
A fleur-de-lis, simply formed of dark and light flagstones.
She sprinted down the stairs and to her computer. She put ‘Jamie Brazill,’ ‘Eastbourne,’ ‘family,’ and ‘parents’ into Google.
There it was. A news item, updated only an hour ago.
Police are warning the public not to approach Declan Rossiter, 35, who should be considered dangerous and may be armed. Rossiter, who may be travelling under the aliases of Paul Hutton or Jamie Brazill, escaped from HMP Wakefield with three other inmates on Thursday. Rossiter had been serving an indeterminate sentence for the murder of his parents in 1993. The bodies of his victims were never found, and despite four failed appeals, Rossiter has maintained his innocence throughout the twenty years he has served…
Charlotte slammed the laptop shut and ran out of the lounge door – the same door that a woman carrying champagne flutes had walked through in another lifetime – to the small lean-to that doubled up as a makeshift garden shed. She scrabbled around the rotting wooden shelving, unaware of the splinters that caught in her fingers and the grime that collected under her nails.
Fortunately for her, Sean had not been lax about unpacking his tools. She found a small wood-axe, sledgehammer and a shovel. She tucked the axe under her arm, put the shovel on her shoulder and dragged the sledgehammer along behind her to the patio as fast as her burden would allow. She suddenly felt like she should be whistling a ditty like the Seven Dwarves as they went to work, and a laugh escaped her; a laugh, she knew, that was just the wrong side of hysterical.
Who was the little girl?
She lifted the sledgehammer up, but it was so heavy it caused her to overbalance backwards. She tried again with the same result, and then some instinctive sense of physical laws led her to place her left hand at the end of the handle and the other right under the head. She loosened her right hand as she swung, and it slid down the shaft so both hands were at the end of the handle as she brought it down onto the onto the neglected stone patio.
The impact rang out like a bell, and sent shockwaves riddling up her arms like snakes. She looked around nervously, but one of the benefits of eye-watering mortgage repayments was the privilege of being relatively sheltered from inquisitive neighbours.
Charlotte…
She looked out at the forest, the black hole of the undergrowth like an insidious eye staring back at her.
>
She swung again – twice, three times – and cracks began to appear in the stone. When they split across two conjoining flagstones, she used the wood-axe to work the gaps, prising and pulling until she was able to get two tense white fingers between the flagstones.
Who are you, little girl?
She pulled up a flagstone; the forcible movement caused it to crack into two jagged shards like teeth as she did so. She let them go, and they tipped backwards and smacked dully onto the patio. She pulled up another one; the same thing happened. Under the patio was a thick layer of earth, like a pantomime curtain ready to reveal the final truth.
“What, exactly, are you hoping to find, Charlotte?”
Charlotte whirled around. She still had the axe gripped in both hands, and she wielded it in front of her, a sharp blade of steel between her and Jamie Brazill.
He was grinning that cheeky-boy grin again, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. The duffle bag was still strapped across his back, and he was still clad from head to foot in denim. The razored haircut had grown out a bit, and had started to curl over his ears.
“Don’t come any closer, Declan,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
He frowned; Charlotte, unwittingly, imitated his expression.
“Yes, I know who you are, Declan Rossiter. You’re all over the news. You used to live here. The police will know that, and they’ll be round here before you know it. You killed your parents. You’re a monster.”
“Shit, Charlotte, I’m disappointed. You don’t really believe that, do you?”
She didn’t say anything.
“I never killed anyone.”
“Then how…”
“How what? How did I spend twenty years of my life in prison for murdering them?”
He shook his head.
“I never killed them. And if I had, you don’t think I’d have buried them under the patio, do you? That’s the first place they’d look.”
He rocked on his heels and laughed.
“They’re not under the patio, Charlotte. They’re out there.”
He inclined his head towards the forest, his eyes on Charlotte’s, his eyebrows raised in a smile.