Murder at Twilight

by Fleur Hitchcock

  “Oh, no, we’ll be fine now, Tony. Thank you. Bye, Poppy,” I say and glance up at the back window of the flat. It’s dark, so I scuttle back with Tai leaping at my ankles to the front courtyard. He races up the steps and puts his paws up against the door. But I stop outside the entrance to the flat. The door’s locked and for one moment I think Mum’s going to be in there, that Tony’s wrong, that she has come back.

  Tai whines and looks up at me, and then, the moment I open it, runs in to sniff at everything in the flat. It must smell of police people.

  The flat feels very empty without Mum. Maybe Tai notices it too. He stays close to me, sitting on my feet and trotting round in small circles checking everything. “C’mon then, Tai, just the two of us,” I say, and open the cupboard. Everything’s in there, everything’s neat, but it’s all in the wrong places. The dog food has moved to the lower shelf. The Cup a Soups have swapped places with the green tea. It’s like we’ve been burgled. For a moment I don’t want to take anything – it all feels sullied – and then I reach for a sachet of noodles.

  “So what if they’ve been here?” I ask Tai.

  He growls, sniffing the air.

  The kettle hasn’t moved, and I set it to boil, finding a bowl and crumbling the waves of noodles into the bottom of it.

  I feed Tai, even if it’s the wrong time of day, top up my bowl with boiling water and sit at the kitchen table, blowing clouds of steam from the noodles. Outside, I hear footsteps on the courtyard drive and peer out. There are three police cars, Lord B’s Land Rover and Chris Mumford’s Land Rover. Then Chris drives off and fallen leaves dance in the empty space.

  It’s feeling lonely.

  Wandering to the back door, I look down over the back yard. Connor Evans has gone. Poppy’s playing as Tony hoses down some sheets of glass. She’s stamping her wellies in the puddles and then she stops and looks up. As I watch, a policewoman appears in the yard and says something to Tony, who nods and goes to turn off the hose.

  “I wonder what that was about, Tai,” I say, as Tony rolls up the hosepipe. “Perhaps if we went for a walk we might find something out, or Mum might come back – while we’re out?”

  Tai raises one ear, looks up from his bowl and trots over to stand under his lead hanging from a hook on the back of the door.

  “So you agree, do you?” I ask him.

  He answers by patting the door with his paw.

  I’m listening to the silence, thinking about walking, thinking about Mum, and a very tiny bit of me is also thinking about Noah, when the doorbell shrills through the flat. I consider hiding and then wonder what good that would do. Just as I’m getting to the door, it rings again, insistently enough to be quite irritating.

  “I’m coming!” I shout, shuffling across the carpet with my shoes half on, half off, and find the policewoman who took my phone at the door.

  “Hello, Vivienne. Would you mind coming into the house? We need to talk to everyone at the same time.”

  It occurs to me that they’ve phrased it as if I have a choice, but I haven’t.

  I shuffle the shoes back on, pick up my door key and follow her across the courtyard. Behind the closed door, Tai whimpers, disappointed.

  I rush to catch up with her and say, “Where’s Mum? When’s she coming back? And can I have my phone back?”

  “Oh – your mother, she’s helping us with our enquiries.”

  “I know, but what does that mean?”

  “Exactly how it sounds.”

  “Is it the blood? Because if it is, it’s just the nosebleed he had in the car. He has loads of nosebleeds.”

  “I can’t tell you anything at the moment,” says the policewoman, pausing on the steps. “Are you all right, Vivienne? There’s nothing you want to tell us – is there? I mean, do you know of anything that your mother might have been planning? We’ll have to charge her soon – it’s been nearly thirty-six hours.”

  It comes as such a shock I feel all the blood race to my face and then back to my shoes and I have to hold on to the railings to stay upright.

  “Charge her?”

  “Well, yes. I’m not sure exactly what the charge will be but if she’s an accomplice, or even the perpetrator…”

  My feet move slowly up the steps and I lurch through the doorway. The policewoman keeps talking as she ushers me on. “Anyway, Inspector Hager might be able to tell you more. Ask her about your mum.”

  We enter the hall. Everyone’s there – everyone who lives or works on the estate, even little Poppy. There’s almost no room for me to stand and I think about sitting on the sofa where Lady B is, but it’s like an empty zone around her that I don’t feel I can invade.

  Her face is all puffy.

  I stand next to Maria. She’s trembling. Just a little. She takes my hand. “See you later, poppet,” she says. “Pizza for supper.”

  Charge her.

  Charge her?

  I really hadn’t expected that.

  On my left stand the waterkeepers. Still holding Maria’s hand, I try to catch Chris’s eye but Ron, the other water bailiff, gets in the way. He turns his back and blocks Chris so that I can’t even see his face. I shuffle closer to Maria, and she does a little smile and strokes my arm. Even she thinks Mum’s not coming back, I can tell.

  Sniffing back tears, I wipe my nose on my sleeve but Connor Evans pushes past me to stare out of the window and I’m forced to let go of Maria to avoid him and then she’s swept away by everyone else milling around. Connor tuts and starts to text, raising his shoulder to protect his phone like I’m just a busybody nuisance. I try to get back to Maria but Sally Parsons, the dairy farm manager, plants herself right in front of me so that I can’t see, and two women who work in the summer gift shop box me in completely until I’m staring at their backs. Seconds later they’re joined by the man who did the bike hire last summer and then Dave from the sawmill gets up out of a chair and everyone moves around again. It’s getting warm and fuggy in here, and I want to leave. I want to talk to the inspector and get out.

  The door finally closes and through a gap I see Shona and Tony and Pavel from the garden, all trying to talk to the police. I look down at my feet. I feel horrible.

  The buzz of conversation booms through the huge room. I can pick out some voices. Chris and Ron talk about the river. All the rain’s made the banks boggy and at least two of the meadows are under water. Dave’s telling Lord B about a tree down because its roots are too wet, but both of them look like they could burst into tears at any moment. The gardeners are talking about the tulips rotting. The cleaners, Olga and Natalia, are talking in Ukrainian. Connor Evans and Sally Parsons are looking out at the trees thrashing in the wind.

  We all stand like we’re there for a family photograph, but nobody’s smiling.

  “Thank you, everybody,” says a policewoman who isn’t wearing a uniform and who might be Inspector Hager. “Thank you for coming in. I know you’re busy, but we thought that rather than allowing gossip to spread, we’d like you all to know that we can confirm that Noah has been kidnapped.”

  A giant sob breaks out from the sofa in front of me and Maria rushes forward to put her arm around Lady B’s shoulder. “And we have probable proof – a photograph of Noah holding an edition of a daily newspaper, today’s. It appeared in the letterbox of the house first thing this morning. Hand delivered; no stamp.”

  Like a single being, we suck in our breath.

  “This morning?” asks Dave. “How?”

  “We were hoping somebody might know. Have there been any deliveries today – you know, compost for the gardens? Veg for the kitchen? Apart from Mr Vitello collecting Vivienne from school, has anyone been out?” Low-level chat starts to spread through the mass of people.

  “And…” The inspector holds up a hand. “We can confirm that we are very interested in Sanjeev Gupta, who disappeared at the same time as Noah. We’d like any information about him – although of course we’ll be going to the media about this too.”
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  At once they all start to talk – each telling their story on top of the other.

  Again, the inspector holds up her hand. “Please be aware that this a very sensitive situation. Please, no posting on social media, no public speculation. We have of course advised Lord and Lady Belcombe that they shouldn’t pay the ransom.”

  “How much is it?” calls Connor Evans.

  “That’s not something anyone needs to know—”

  “But we are raising it anyway,” interrupts Lord B. “My brother Peregrine has agreed to help us because of course Noah is very important – he is the last of the line, the last of the…” He breaks down and Lady B grips his arm and they both look at the floor.

  The policewoman who came to the house and a policeman I hadn’t noticed before move in to record everyone as they begin to talk, and no one pays any attention to me.

  “Hey!” I say. “What about Mum? When’s Mum coming back?” I shout into the storm of voices but nobody seems to hear me. “Listen to me,” I yell into the mass of people surging towards Inspector Hager. “Please – what’s happening about my mum? Are you going to charge her? Has she got a lawyer?”

  The inspector looks at me. Maybe she sees my age; maybe she sees my school uniform. Whatever, she doesn’t answer me, she just starts noting down something that Shona says.

  “What?” I say. “What about me? What about Mum?”

  I give it a minute, five perhaps, before turning and slamming the door and marching out into the garden.

  They didn’t want me. They didn’t notice me.

  They don’t care.

  It’s been so wet for so long that the edges of the lawn are falling away into a kind of swamp, and the rain’s actually causing ripples between the blades of grass.

  Without thinking, I’ve ended up at the bottom of the main lawn, my shoes squidging into the turf, springs bursting out all around my feet, drowned worms caught in the waterlog.

  I glance back up towards the house. The tall windows shine blankly back at the sky. I can’t see it at all, but I’d bet they’re all still in there, talking. I bet no one’s even noticed that I’ve gone.

  “Damn you, Noah Belcombe! Damn you and damn your whole horrible family! Damn this place!” I shout, and a duck takes off in a panic, flapping away upriver.

  A scraggy goat willow hangs over the river and I pick my way to it through the waterlogged grass, clambering up the long horizontal trunk so that I can sit, hanging over the river as it charges past beneath me.

  Surges of anger and then panic race through my chest. How dare they all ignore me? How dare they ignore Mum?

  But what’s going to happen to me if Mum doesn’t come back?

  All the stories I’ve ever heard about wrongful convictions race through my mind. People have served really long prison sentences for crimes they didn’t commit. Loads of investigations go wrong because the police don’t get all the evidence at the beginning.

  Why did I have to punch stupid Noah?

  Why did his stupid nose have to bleed all over the stupid car?

  Why did he have to be such an idiot? If he was a reasonable human being we’d never have got into a fight.

  “Ugh!” I shout at the river, and this time a coot takes off, calling with each beat of her wing.

  “Stupid!” I shout at the top of my lungs and the crows in the beech trees burst into the air, circling and landing, circling and landing.

  I try to calm myself by watching the river. Every second the surface changes. Whorls of water curl around the centre of the stream, black from the dead leaves lining the gravel bottom.

  This was always a good place to sit. On very hot days, Daisy and I would hang from the main branch, letting our legs dangle into the icy river, until the current took us and our hands slipped and we bounced downstream, our bums catching on the chalk-pebbled mud banks, our hands scrabbling at the boards that held back the banks.

  When it was too cold to swim, we pretended to fish here. A hook, some line and a twig. Nothing caught, but hours of fiddling and rearranging. Once, Chris taught us how to tickle a trout.

  “You need a bramble, and a lot of patience.”

  He brought one out that day. A rainbow trout, silver and spotted and clear-eyed, which wriggled and flipped on the bank until I begged him to throw it back. It swam the instant it hit the water and we watched it laze in the current, swishing its tail left and right, effortless.

  Then there were the waterweed islands. Huge rafts of festering green stuff that formed over days after the waterkeepers had trimmed back the plumes of fresh green waterweed in the river. Moorhens would try to nest in it and ducks would sit on top as it floated downstream. Under the mill bridge it wedged beneath a low sewer pipe and Chris and Ron would wade into the stream and tug at it with giant rakes until the huge fizzing, stinking island broke loose and bobbed in the water, gaining speed and crashing into the packhorse bridge further on. Then they’d thrash at it and we’d help, grappling with rakes, tearing it apart, breaking it until it whizzed away to get caught on someone else’s weed rack.

  Noah would never help. He’d just watch, all perfect in his white socks, from the riverbank. Him and Herbert. We had such a good time, but was he wishing he could join in? I wonder.

  Just now, the river’s so full and so cold, I can’t imagine that anything would get stuck under the sewer pipe, or that anything would want to build a nest. Looking down from here in my tree I can see the water running fast through the lawn grass. The river’s spread so much even in the time I’ve been sitting here.

  Shuffling round I turn to face the house. I don’t expect anyone can see me here. The goat willow’s leaves have gone but the twigs are dense and give a good cover. Upstream, the riverbank’s dotted with willows and small outcrops of hawthorn, but just now the footpaths that line each bank have disappeared so that the river seems to run right into the fields. Some cows stand ankle-deep, drinking from the water that’s appeared by their feet. The rain intensifies and the smell of woodsmoke drifts across the lawn. They’ve lit the fire in the house. The day’s fading and without my anger to keep me warm it’s getting cold.

  There’s just a chance that they’ve brought Mum back, although there’s been no actual sign. No cars. I don’t want to go back to find the flat empty again but I’m getting very wet.

  I go back to the empty flat.

  * * *

  Soon, the giant puddle in the centre of the stable courtyard will form.

  The rainwater drains will overfill and the river will come right up to the house.

  I should be settling in with Maria in the kitchen, like a servant, but I don’t want to be in the kitchen with Maria and anyway, Tai needs a walk. Tai deserves a walk.

  So I put on my raincoat and head out. They can’t get hold of me, I haven’t got a phone – still. And I don’t owe any of them anything. If I choose to disappear then bad luck to them. None of them have got Mum back. They’re not even trying to get Mum back.

  I hate them all.

  “All except you, Tai.” I run my hand the length of his back, comforted by his warmth. “All except you.”

  Grabbing his lead, we slip out of the back door down to the stable courtyard and into the rain. It patters on my face, tapping on my hood. The orchard, usually sweet with fermenting apple juice, just smells cold and wet, and the heaps of fruit sit blackly by the path, late autumn slugs gorging themselves on the rotting pulp.

  From the orchard, the ground is squelchy and it takes a while to reach the dark hedges that line the rose garden. Wet wind roars through the valley, playing between the hedges and beating my coat around my legs. This must be the storm that Chris mentioned yesterday. Tai gallops off after a squirrel and charges back, squeezing through a gap in the yew and then returning, a stick in his mouth.

  I throw it, once, twice, three times, until we’re on the edge of the formal garden, heading towards the orange clouds of beech trees massing up the hillside.

  In front of us, in
the heart of the woods, an early owl hoots. Behind us, a distant someone starts a car.

  “Which way, Tai?” He leaps as I throw the stick and he charges off into Folly Wood, galloping through the beeches, hunting smells and rabbits between the huge grey tree trunks.

  Somewhere a long way back, a door bangs. A woman’s voice calls. It might be my name, but it doesn’t sound like Mum’s voice so I ignore it and turn out of the garden, following Tai, picking my way along the path that in summer is wide and filled with birdsong. Now it’s deep with the fallen leaves. They form a carpet that dances like orange handprints all around my feet, still bright even on the ground.

  The rain falls so heavily that beyond my hood I can hear it hammering on the woodland floor. A blackbird cries as I approach and the crows answer.

  Picking up speed, I stomp under the trees, swinging around the bend so that the house disappears behind me. Overhead, the branches wave and beech leaves still fall. Tai races off from the path, chasing the leaves as they spiral down and thundering through drifts of fallen ones, throwing up bursts of reds and yellows. He disappears for minutes at a time and then charges back towards me. We pass a giant yew we used to hide in and the donkey hut with the metal tank that Noah dared me to climb inside, but luckily Chris rescued me before I clambered in – or I probably would have died in there as it was taller than me and full of stinky water. Typical Noah.

  Tai bombs across the logging path and bursts out of the woodland and I follow until I’m in the meadows that run along the river.

  “Stupid idiot!” I say out loud. “Stupid family!” I remember Lord B’s furious outburst and shudder. “Like it’s my fault I was trying to find your scabby son.” Kicking a molehill, I stamp on through the wet field, muttering to myself. “And why aren’t you helping me get my mum back?” I say, sticking mental pins in Lord B’s imaginary effigy. “Why aren’t you being the adult? I’m just a kid.” I’ve got so many emotions fighting for air I have to sniff back the tears and walk faster to drive them away.