by Ann Troup
She looked down at her untouched meal and pushed it away in disgust. Perhaps she would die soon and join the other Hallow ghosts, wringing her hands and haunting these walls for all eternity, in mourning for her bartered soul. She was wrenched from her maudlin thoughts by the sound of the library bell ringing in the kitchen hallway. Her brother was calling for his tray, as if there were still a battalion of staff to do his bidding. There was only Pavla now, and she for only seven hours a day. Since 1970 there had only been Esther and Miriam and the odd woman from the village. Yet still he rang, like Perrault’s Beast, summoning his invisible servants to attend his whims. With a sigh of resignation Ada rose, she touched the pearls that circled her throat and grimaced slightly at the thought that she was the lady of the house, queen of all she surveyed. She picked up Albert’s supper tray and made her way to the library.
Albert was at his desk, poring over some tome or other. ‘Just put it down there.’ he said absently, waving in the vague direction of the cluttered room.
Ada set the tray down and moved towards the French doors. ‘You really should shut these at dusk Albert, the room will be full of insects.’ She reached out to pull the door shut but paused as a delicate breeze teased her nose with the scent of roses. As she peered into the evening gloom, the scent changed into a sour miasma picked up by a soft puff of wind and she recoiled from it. She sensed something dry and gritty on her lips, it tasted bitter and made her want to spit, but ladies never spat. She pulled the doors and locked them, then reached for her handkerchief, dabbing at her mouth with it.
Albert looked up from his studies. ‘I think I should rather enjoy some cocoa later on, will you arrange it?’
Ada stared at him for a moment and sensed something inside her stretch out and snap like a worn elastic band. ‘I am not your bloody servant Albert! In fact no one is your servant, there are no servants, there have been no servants for many years. You know this, yet you sit in this room burying your head in your books and your rubbish as if you haven’t a care in the world while everything around you crumbles. While I crumble! Like Nero, you choose to deny that Rome is burning!’ Ada had never shed a tear in her whole adult life, but they threatened her composure now. ‘I despair of you, I despair of it all!’
Albert looked at her, unflinching, over the top of his half-moon glasses. It was hard to guess at what might be going through his mind. Regret? Realisation? Ada couldn’t tell. Moments later he sat back and placed his hands behind his head. ‘You know I would have rather liked to learn the violin. A most fascinating instrument, but alas, it is not to be. Bring the cocoa whenever you’re ready my dear. I’ll still be up’
The band inside Ada shrivelled and shrank. She walked from the room with as much decorum as she could muster.
The walk back to the kitchen felt doubly long, and the sighs and moans of the mongrel house seemed twice as haunting. She wasn’t sure they even had any damned cocoa.
Chapter Nine
Brodie was loitering in the lounge impatiently. ‘What are you doing up there, we’re going to be late for the film?’ she yelled.
‘Won’t be long.’ Elaine called, her voice drifting from above. ‘I’m trying to find a scarf that matches,’ she added with a laugh.
Brodie smiled and shook her head. Bored, she ambled round the room kicking at the furniture and sighing. Patience wasn’t her greatest forte. The she spied the little jar on the mantel. Curiosity getting the better of her she picked it up and rattled it then peered through the grimy glass to study the contents.
Elaine arrived downstairs, breathless and smiling, ‘Right, I’m ready.’
Brodie waved the jar at her, ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Oh, that? Albert Gardiner-Hallow gave it to me. I was up there yesterday, he had a fall and I ended up helping out remember?’
‘Do you know what it is?’ Brodie demanded, her eyes narrowing.
Elaine was taken aback, ‘I think it’s an eye from a toy. Look he’s a weird old guy with weird old obsessions. Let’s go, we’ll be late,’ she said reaching for her bag.
Brodie ignored her and marched into the kitchen where she grabbed a rolling pin and wrapped the jar in a tea towel before promptly smashing it on the bread board.
‘Brodie!’ Elaine yelled, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Brodie shot her a fierce look. Fishing through the shards of glass she retrieved the eye and held it up, examining it. Then she unfolded the piece of paper that had accompanied it in the jar. ‘Look,’ she showed Elaine the date on the paper. ‘It says “15 July 1983. Library.”’
Elaine was completely befuddled by this, and irritated by the fact that Brodie had taken it upon herself to smash the jar. ‘So?’ With some degree of frustration she marched over and began to clear up the broken glass. ‘Honestly Brodie, I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.’
‘You don’t get it do you?’ Brodie said, retrieving the toy dog from her pocket and placing it on the worktop next to the eye.
Elaine swept the glass into the bin and rinsed her hands under the tap. ‘Get what?’ She looked round. ‘What’s that?’ she said picking up the dog and turning it over in her hands. As she looked at it a strange sensation washed through her body, it was as if an intense shot of adrenaline had been injected into her veins. She dropped the toy and stood back from it, her pulse pounding.
‘The 15 of July 1983 is the day Mandy went missing, and that dog was her toy. That eye belongs to the dog – look, one is missing. According to the papers Mandy was never in Hallow’s Court, but that proves she was. It was found inside the house. Someone lied Elaine, someone knows what happened.’
Elaine looked back and forth from the dog to the eye and tried to make sense of what Brodie was trying to say. Her mind was muddled and she felt faint. ‘I need to sit down.’ She lurched over to a chair. ‘I don’t really get this Brodie, what are you trying to say?’
Brodie sighed in frustration. ‘I’m saying that someone lied. Someone knows what happened to my sister. What did Albert say when he gave you the jar?’
Elaine shook her head, sparkles of light had started to oscillate in her left eye. It was the beginning of a migraine. As if to confirm it her stomach lurched and heaved. ‘He didn’t say anything, just gave it to me,’ she gasped. ‘Said I should show it to you. Look, Brodie I don’t feel well, I’ve got to lie down, sorry but we’ll have to give the pictures a miss.’ She was aware that her speech was beginning to slur. She didn’t get many migraines, but when she did they came swiftly and with a vengeance.
One look at Elaine’s greying, pallid face made Brodie panic. ‘Oh my God, you look really bad.’ Her voice trembled with concern.
‘Be all right, need to lie down.’ Elaine was mumbling, she squeezed her eyes shut to block out the nauseating light.
Brodie helped her get to the sofa, and covered her with a throw. Shirley often suffered with bad headaches, so she took the precaution of closing the curtains and switching off Elaine’s phone. ‘I’ll go and see if Miriam’s got any tablets.’ She felt worried at the sudden change in Elaine, she had never seen anything manifest quite so quickly. Her mother’s migraines were drawn out marathons of misery and nothing like this.
‘In my bag.’ Elaine gasped.
Brodie rummaged through the bag and found the medication, she read the instructions and popped two out of the foil, then fetched water. Propping Elaine’s head up she helped her to take them. She didn’t really know what else to do. ‘Elaine, I’m going to go, I’ll come back later and see if you’re all right, OK?’ There was nothing more she could do, and watching Elaine throw up and then sleep wasn’t going to achieve anything.
Elaine responded by raising a weak hand and flapping it at her, even that slightest of movements causing her to wince.
Brodie made sure she had done everything that she could and slipped out of the cottage, taking the dog and its missing eye with her. If Elaine couldn’t help her, she would have to do this herself.
With grim determination Brodie marched towards Hallow’s Court, ready to have it out with whomever she found there. Someone was going to tell her what the hell was going on!
Banging on the door and repeatedly hauling on the ancient bell pull had yielded nothing. Neither had stalking round the building and peering in at every window by pressing her face to the glass and leaving greasy nose prints in her wake. Suffering the exhaustion that inevitably follows defeat she flopped down onto the terrace steps and reached for her phone, scrolling down to Tony’s number and praying that he would answer. He didn’t, and she didn’t bother leaving a message.
Weary and deflated she trudged back to the cottage. Hallow’s Court could wait, it had already waited thirty years. She considered that going in guns blazing wasn’t the right way anyway. If other people were anything like her they would just clam up and stick to their guns under pressure, so perhaps she needed to play it differently. A cruel plan entered her mind and her face broke into a satisfied smile as she reached the gate of the cottage. Esther was inside, and Derry had said that Esther knew.
It was as if fate was playing straight into her hands. Esther was dozing in her chair, her mouth slack and her face surprisingly free of tension and the familiar wrinkles. Brodie gazed down at her, feeling nothing but contempt for the woman who could sleep so peacefully with such a secret to keep.
Miriam had left a note on the kitchen table explaining that she had popped into the village and would be back in an hour. Brodie had the place to herself and she meant to make use of this serendipitous opportunity.
Creeping into the sitting room she quietly moved Esther’s side table to a spot directly in front of the sleeping woman. When it was in place she took the dog from her pocket and sat it in the middle of the table so that it would be the first thing that Esther saw when she woke up. Then she sat herself on the corner of the sofa and waited. It was approaching one, and any minute the clock would strike the hour, a noise guaranteed to wake Esther from her slumber as it always did.
Right on cue the clock chimed, the clanging bell announcing the hour and rousing Esther. The old lady blinked and raised her head. She reached out with her half good hand and groped for her tissues on the table. A look of surprise crossed her face at the realisation that the table wasn’t there.
Brodie observed all this with grim satisfaction as Esther’s rheumy eyes adjusted to wakefulness and settled on the scene in front of her. The old lady’s gaze settled by astonished degrees on the object on the table. Brodie watched as a myriad of emotions flickered across Esther’s features, not the least of which were shock and fear.
The good hand clutched at the arm of her chair as she tried to pull herself up, failing miserably, betrayed by the weakness of age and illness. Her mouth opened and shut, and she was gasping like a landed trout. Brodie watched it all with cruel dispassion, not once feeling any remorse for what she was inflicting on the woman. She stood up and walked into Esther’s line of vision, which forced the woman to cower back in the chair. Brodie picked up the dog and pushed the table back into its normal position and replaced its usual objects. ‘Recognise it do you?’ she said, her eyes narrowed.
Esther turned her head away, nestling into the fabric of the chair, her lips set firm in a line of determined, not just stroke imposed, silence.
Brodie stood above her, feet apart, ‘You wouldn’t tell me even if you could, would you?’ she said without compunction. Her words caused Esther to flinch and cringe in the chair.
Brodie leaned forward, so that her breath would brush the woman’s face, ‘I’m going to find out what you did, and I’m going to make you suffer just like you made everyone else suffer.’ She hissed the words, not allowing Esther’s fear to sway her from her course.
Leaving the terrified woman cowering in her chair and unable to move, Brodie stalked from the room slamming the cottage door behind her. She was going back to Jack Pearson’s house. Someone had to answer for this and he was the man who was going to find out who knew what. Brodie had decreed it.
*
The noise of the slammed door echoed around the cottage. Tangs of vibration resounded the throes of Brodie’s temper by touching everything hollow in the room and making it hum. China and glass sang and the bell inside the mantle clock chimed a high, continuous note like a half-hearted tuning fork. The hollow space in Esther’s mind, where conscience should have reigned, rang and rattled with Brodie’s accusation and her internal voice howled with indignation.
Esther’s lifelong fear and rage had summoned many monsters over the years, some had manifested from the red mist and some had hidden in the black. Once created they could never be destroyed and had waited, patient and enduring, in the forgotten corners of her memory. The accusation had acted like a call to arms and all the creatures born of meanness, hatched from cruelty, spawned from piety or bred from misguided love banded together and formed a battalion. At their head was a cloaked figure, he had waited a long time to collect his dues from Esther.
In her mind’s eye she saw them all, parading past her in a spiteful carnival procession, re-enacting scenes from her life in the form of a bitter parody. It seemed cruel and unjust. She had not been that person, she had not! The troops took up her objections, grasped her sullied principles and used the lies that she had told herself to fashion weapons. Esther had no defence; the allies of justification and false morals had turned their coats and were rallied against her. In abject terror she tried to see their faces as they circled her, there was no escape and she had to meet them face to face. Some had the look of her father and embodied his unnatural instincts in their stares. Others seemed like variations of her sister, some winsome, some childlike and terrified, others haunted by betrayal. Another had the essence of Peter Handley though he looked crippled and twisted by the pain of disappointment. Max and Alicia were there, between them the ghost of the son they should have had. Flanking them were Albert and Ada, confusion and need flickering across their gaunt features. Somewhere in the hoard she glimpsed Shirley, a sorry figure weighed down with the chains of loss. Last of all, her tiny hand on the handle of the cloaked figure’s scythe, Esther saw the child. At the end there was no white light, no chorus of angels, no glimpse of St Peter. As Esther’s last breath caught in her throat, there was only Death, unlocking the door to purgatory.
Chapter Ten
Dan dialled Elaine’s number and groaned when yet again a tinny voice told him she was not available and advised him to leave a message. In frustration he threw the phone onto the table and reached up to rub his face with both hands.
Bob was still hovering, ‘Don’t you think you should just call the police or something?’ Experience had made him wary of Dan in this mood.
‘Yeah, because it’s going to come so much easier from them isn’t it?’ Dan snapped, gripping the back of a chair and slamming it into the table in frustration.
Bob hesitated, then said it anyway. ‘Look mate, I know you’ve got a soft spot for the girl, but this isn’t your problem. Leave it to the police eh?’
Dan whirled round, causing Bob to take a step back. ‘If you were that bloody worried Bob you’d have left that stuff where you found it and kept your mouth shut, but you didn’t. You opened a bloody can of worms and you know it!’ he shouted.
It was an action that caused Bob to flinch defensively.
Dan looked at his colleague’s face and felt the temper ebb out of him. Falling out with Bob wasn’t going to solve anything. ‘Look, I’m sorry all right? I shouldn’t lose my temper, and yeah you’re right, I like her, I like her a lot and I just don’t think that this should come from a bunch of strangers that don’t care what happens to her. This is going to knock her for six, and I think maybe she could do with a friend on her side, don’t you?’
Bob raised an eyebrow, ‘Is that what you are, just a friend?’
Dan shot him a look, which told him not to push his luck.
‘OK, I get where you’re coming from, so what are you going to do?�
� Bob asked, his voice suggesting that he was aware that he was in sensitive territory. A man’s emotions could be a fragile thing.
Dan sighed, ‘I’m going to go and see her, that’s what. I’ll tell her what we’ve found and take it from there.’