by Ann Troup
*
Dan arrived at Meadowfoot Cottage just as a body was being wheeled out of the house next door. Not for the first time that day he wondered what on earth he was walking into. His reservations were compounded when he entered the open door of Elaine’s temporary residence and was confronted by the sight of a weeping child who was nursing a bowl of vomit.
Through the cacophony of teenage misery and garbled conversation he managed to establish that the child’s great-aunt had just died and that she had been sent to sit with Elaine. But Elaine wasn’t there and the girl had no idea where she had gone.
Feeling completely unequal to the task of calming down the overwrought child Dan plied her with tissues and hoped the crying would burn itself out. ‘I’m sorry about your great-aunt,’ he said lamely.
This kindness only served to refresh the bout of hysterics. Though he managed to establish, through a garbled saltwater and snot mess of words, that the girl thought it was her fault the aunt had died. ‘I scared her to death,’ the girl declared with miserable resignation.
As the only responsible adult in the visible vicinity Dan felt obliged to try and deal with the kid’s distress. ‘And how on earth did you manage that? You don’t really strike me as the terrifying sort, a bit moody maybe, but not frightening,’ he said, hoping the wry humour would jolt her out of her angst.
Haltingly, Brodie told him the story of the dog and what she had done to Esther in her desire to solve the mystery. Unburdening herself to him, a complete stranger, seemed to have a calming effect, and as she talked her words became less stilted.
Dan considered her story for a moment, ‘Well, not that I know the circumstances exactly, but it sounds to me like she might have had good cause to be shocked, and maybe that was what tipped her over the edge and brought on another stroke. But whatever it was, it had to be pretty bad to cause that. Nothing shouts louder than a guilty conscience, so perhaps you were right and she did know more than she should,’ he paused, aware that he probably wasn’t making her feel any better. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say is that maybe you shouldn’t have done what you did, but all you’re guilty of is not being very nice at that moment. Whatever killed her was inside her. It didn’t come from you. If she was more involved with what happened than she let on, she’d been nursing that for years. What you did was just a catalyst wasn’t it?’ He really wasn’t sure he was helping at all and was starting to have fond memories of the traffic jam. It had been less traumatic and frustrating than this.
Brodie nodded unhappily, better a catalyst than a murderer, ‘I still feel crap though. If I hadn’t done it she’d still be alive.’
‘But you’d still be none the wiser about the toy, whether it had any significance or not. Now you know it was important.’ What was he saying? He really didn’t know what had come over him, or why on earth he was embroiling himself in this mess. He felt like this girl had just presented him with a bigger spade so that he could dig himself a deeper hole.
Brodie sniffed. ‘Anyway, I’m going to take a guess and assume that you’re the sexy builder, Dan. Elaine doesn’t really know anyone else. Why are you here?’
She had used the word sexy. He wasn’t sure whether to feel gratified or surprised by the description, but that fact that Elaine had used it impressed him. That she had shared the thought with a stroppy teenager who went round scaring old women to death was slightly more worrying… ‘I’m Dan, yeah. But who are you? I mean I know your life story and all but you still haven’t told me your name.’
Brodie had the grace to blush, she had poured out everything to a man she didn’t know and looked worried that she had scared him off Elaine for life. It was hard to imagine that her day could get any worse. ‘I’m Brodie, Elaine’s my friend,’ she muttered, looking thoroughly ashamed of the way she had behaved in front of him.
‘Well, she’s my friend too, I hope. So where is she?’
It was a good question, but Brodie had no idea. ‘I don’t know, I saw her this morning but she wasn’t well. I left her here, on the sofa. But the door was wide open when I came in.’
‘What was wrong with her?’
‘A migraine I think.’ She handed him the strip of pills that she had left on the coffee table.
Dan studied the tablets; they were hefty stuff familiar to him from the occasions his mother had been laid out for days at a time with tortuous headaches. ‘Hmmm, that’s worrying. These things could fell an elephant at forty paces. It’s hard to imagine she would have gone wandering off with these on board. How many did she take?’
Brodie looked concerned, ‘I only gave her two, do you think she’s all right?’
‘I don’t know, but I think it might be a good idea to try and find her.’
*
Jack Pearson had made it halfway home before curiosity finally got the better of good sense and forced him to turn round and drive back to Hallow’s End. Despite his better judgement the kid was right, that dog had raised more questions. For thirty years he had nursed his failure to find Mandy. If he were honest he would admit that it had eaten away at him, eroding his confidence both as a man and an officer of the law. There had been many disappointments in his career, criminals caught but released on technicalities, others let out too soon to repeat their misdeeds, but failing to find Mandy had been the worst. His own daughter hadn’t been much older at the time and he could clearly remember going home after every shift and just watching her, pleading with fate to keep her safe. Shirley Miller hadn’t been afforded that luxury and maybe it was time he did something about it. Finding the dog would probably lead to yet another dead end, but he had to try. If only to appease that pushy kid and stop her cluttering up his nice peaceful retirement. He concluded his thoughts with an absent smile, he had to admit he kind of liked her.
As he rang the heavy doorbell of Hallow’s Court he wondered if Ada and Albert Gardiner-Hallow would remember him as the man who had spent weeks trudging all over their sensibilities in his jack boots? He remembered them all too well, Ada with her starched, old colonial, defensiveness and Albert, hiding his obsessions and compulsions behind aristocratic eccentricity. It was a sad façade; evidence of lives lived unloved and unfulfilled. A legacy of unhappy childhoods spent with inadequate people. As he recalled, during the investigation they had found out that the pair had arrived at Hallow’s Court as children, refugee’s from the partition of India in 1947. Their father had been some kind of diplomat who had never returned home and had died there of some exotic disease. Ada and Albert had been sent ‘home’ to their grandmother, who had been ill equipped to take on two traumatised and grieving children. They’d had a lonely and difficult childhood in the company of a cold and unloving woman. When she had died, the house passed to Albert. Poor Ada had experienced history repeating itself when all she had inherited was the unlovely offspring of her half-sister, Alicia. Jack remembered the child, a pouting and needy boy called Alex. He was sure he had read something about him in the papers recently, something about big political aspirations.
His musings were interrupted by the appearance of a squat, fierce looking woman who had opened the door to him.
‘Yes, I help you?’ she said in a manner that conveyed that the last thing she wanted to do was to help anyone.
Jack gave her the once over, noting the flour on her apron, a smear of which adorned her brow; he had obviously interrupted a baking session. ‘I’d like to see Miss or Mr Gardiner-Hallow please,’ he said.
‘Mr Gardiner-Hallow is in the hospital, Miss Gardiner-Hallow says no visitors.’ She made to shut the door on him. An action which he prevented by inserting his foot between it and the doorframe.
‘Please tell Miss Gardiner-Hallow that Jack Pearson is here to see her,’ he said, with a polite but insistent smile.
He could tell the woman knew that he wasn’t going to give up. With a scowl she opened the door and directed him to wait in the hall.
‘I go tell her.’ She disappeared off into the labyrinth of t
he house, which Jack remembered so well. Nothing had changed, except the staff. The last time he had rung that bell it had been Esther Davies who had answered, impeccably starched and unhurried, embodying the perfect archetype of the old family retainer. The Gardiner-Hallows had fallen far if they’d had to resort to foreign labour.
The little woman reappeared, ‘She say to go to drawing room, follow please.’ Without waiting she turned, shedding a powdery trail of dry flour as she led him to Ada.
‘Mr Person,’ the maid announced as she led him into the room.
‘Thank you Pavla that will be all,’ Ada said graciously from her elegant perch on a faded brocade chair.
‘You will want tea?’ Pavla asked.
A flicker of irritation passed over Ada’s face, ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, I don’t think Mr Pearson will be staying long.’
Pavla looked relieved. ‘I go finish in the kitchen.’
The fixed smile stayed in place while Pavla extracted herself and shut the door. When she was gone Ada turned her gaze to Jack. ‘Inspector Pearson, what brings you back after so very many years?’
‘Not inspector any more Miss Gardiner-Hallow, just plain old Jack, I’m retired now,’ he said. He didn’t wait to be invited to sit down and selected a comfortable seat opposite to Ada. A move that accomplished exactly the right level of disconcertion in the woman, just as he had intended it should.
‘Well, that makes me doubly curious about your visit, is there something you think I can help you with?’ Her imperious smile had slipped a little.
‘Perhaps.’ He launched into the story of the toy dog, watching to see if her dispassion faltered at all. When he had finished speaking she rose and wandered over to the window. He was sure he could detect a frisson of discomfort in her demeanour.
‘Well, Mr Pearson, those are some very old coals you have decided to rake over, and I must say I don’t know what to tell you.’ She had her back to him, as if the view of the garden would offer some inspiration. ‘I can’t account for my brother’s strange gift, you know what he’s like, God knows what unutterable junk he has collected over the years. I try to ignore it – it seems the best way. How he came into possession of that item I simply don’t know, but you do realise he’s not terribly reliable don’t you? I can only repeat what I told you then, to the best of my knowledge the child came nowhere near the house that day.’ She paused and turned to face him, her composure re-established. ‘I fail to see what you hope to gain from reinstating the enquiry; it’s been over thirty years. What could you possibly hope will be revealed now?’
Jack showed her an unperturbed face, and brushed an imaginary thread from the arm of the sofa, ‘Oh, I don’t know Miss Gardiner-Hallow, perhaps the truth?’
Ada gave a weary sigh, ‘I’m afraid the matter will always remain a mystery. It’s tremendously sad for those involved but a mystery nonetheless. I’m sorry I can’t help you further and that you’ve had a wasted journey.’
Jack was about to argue, and point out that she was being as evasive now as she had been then and that he didn’t believe in the veracity of her cool detachment for one minute. However, he was interrupted by a resounding crash from somewhere in the bowels of the house.
Ada Gardiner-Hallow paled visibly as the noise echoed through the building.
He watched with interest as she caught her breath and clutched at the pearls which adorned her age sagged neck. She had been fiddling with them on and off throughout the whole encounter. She seemed frozen to the spot by the sudden interjection of what had sounded like an explosion in a china factory.
Jack rose from the sofa, ‘I think we’d better go and find out what that was, don’t you?’
Ada hesitated, ‘I expect Pavla has dropped something in the kitchen.’ Her conviction seemed as feeble as her explanation.
Jack merely frowned and led the way out of the room.
*
Brodie and Dan trudged along the track, which led through the woods towards Hallow’s Court. Brodie couldn’t explain why she felt the need to go in this direction, or why she felt that Elaine had taken this path. Something primal was feeding her instincts and leading her towards the ruined chapel.
The one thing she was sure of was that she was worried. The last time she had set eyes on Elaine it was clear that her friend was in no fit state to be wandering about on her own.
She had yet to work out why Dan had chosen to turn up out of the blue on this strangest of strange days, though she was grateful to him for rescuing her from the pit of misery and guilt where he had found her drowning. She was also ashamed of having spilled her innermost fears and that the leakage had illustrated how weak she really was. She was not a fan of looking weak. Consequently they had walked in silence for what felt like hours, but had in reality only been a few minutes. Brodie couldn’t bear the weight of the silence. ‘So do you like her then?’ she asked, glad that he was behind her and that she couldn’t see his face.
‘Elaine? Yeah I like her, I wouldn’t be here otherwise would I?’ he said after a moment’s pause.
‘Well, she likes you too, so don’t go hurting her or anything when we find her. She’s a really nice lady and she deserves someone nice to be with.’
Dan chuckled at this, ‘I agree, but I wasn’t quite on the brink of proposing. Why don’t we just find her first eh?’ He shook his head in an attitude of disbelief at the cheek of the forthright child.
They broke out of the woods and entered the clearing where the crumbling chapel stood, ‘What makes you think she would have come here?’ Dan asked, peering at the squat ruin.
Brodie shrugged, ‘Dunno, just a feeling.’ She jogged across the rough grass and began to scramble over the fallen masonry.
Dan followed, his heavy rigger boots making him less nimble on the rough terrain than Brodie was in her trainers, ‘Hold up, where are you going?’
‘Down here,’ Brodie called, pointing to the rotting trapdoor, still propped open from when she had explored the crypt earlier.
Dan was dubious, unable to fathom why the kid thought Elaine would be lurking around some old ruin, but as he was none the wiser he followed her anyway.
‘Jesus, this place is a bit rank.’ He wrinkled his nose as he joined her in the crypt.
‘She’s not here,’ Brodie’s voice sounded small, constricted by unfathomable disappointment. She had seemed so sure this was the place.
‘Hang on, let’s shed some light on the subject.’ Dan fished in his pocket for the torch that he always carried, in case he needed to pry into dark corners. He played the beam around the walls of the empty chamber, finally letting it come to rest on Brodie’s pinched and miserable face. ‘I think we can safely say she’s not down here kid.’
Brodie looked as if she was on the point of tears again. Looking frustrated, defeated and just a little bit overwhelmed she threw herself back against the wall seemingly with the intention of slumping there and sulking. The bricks moved.
‘What was that?’ Dan demanded. The grating sound of moving masonry had drawn his attention away from the girl’s face.
Brodie shoved back again, the wall gave a little under her touch. Freaked, she shot forward and hid behind Dan.
He played the torch beam over the area where she had been standing, ‘Clever bastards,’ he said with a chuckle.
‘What?’
He moved across to the wall and pushed it, ‘Look, whoever built this place put in a false wall, this is a hidden door. Clever stuff.’ He showed her the solid piece of masonry that moved reluctantly under his touch. ‘I wouldn’t have even noticed if this stone hadn’t been caught under the mechanism.’ He pried out the small stone that had caused the grating noise. ‘It must have prevented it shutting properly which is why it gave when you leaned on it.’
Brodie shuddered, ‘It’s effing creepy,’ she announced.
‘Not really, quite a few old places have secret passageways and the such. I did a job a while back on an old place that had a
priest hole, nobody knew anything about it until we had to replace half the staircase, and there it was, hidden away for years.’ Dan was fascinated by this latest find and warmed to his theme. ‘In a place like this, it probably connects the church to the house, built so the family can get to the church unseen, or dry in bad weather. They’re a lot more common than you’d think. I saw a place for sale recently, up in Derbyshire, that had two secret passages.’
Brodie had gone quiet, her mind making connections nineteen to the dozen. ‘We have to go in, I think Elaine’s inside.’ She grabbed the torch and pushed past him.
Dan’s protestations died in his throat as he was forced to follow her. It was either that or remain completely in the dark, literally and metaphorically.
*
They found her about a hundred yards in, lying on a marble bench, which had been built into the side of the tunnel. For one horrifying moment Brodie thought Elaine was dead. Her tentative fingers had reached out to touch the woman’s skin and found it ice cold and clammy to the touch. It was only when Dan pushed past her and grabbed Elaine up that Brodie realised the woman was still alive. The jarring movement of Dan’s intervention had elicited a moan from Elaine’s cold, enfeebled lips.
Dan was panicking. He crouched on the dirt floor and cradled Elaine. With only the dwindling beam of the torch to illuminate his endeavours, he tried to rouse her and got only feeble groans in return for his efforts, ‘We have to get her out of here, she’s freezing.’ His words caused Brodie to run back down the passage towards the crypt.
‘It’s shut behind us, I can’t get it open,’ Brodie cried, her voice rising to fever pitch.
‘Come back, we’ll have to go the other way.’ He was clinging on to the limp body which lay in his arms.
The passage seemed to go on forever. Brodie led the way, trying to illuminate their steps with a torch that was dimming by the second. Behind her she could hear Dan’s heavy breaths as he carried Elaine’s dead weight.