The Dark Corners Box Set

by Robert Scott-Norton

  Judy spun around, sensing another presence in the room, and there he was.

  Phil looked just as she remembered him. His oversized frame was even more intimidating in his death. He had been capable of so much when he was alive, what was he capable of now that he was dead? He was wearing the ill-fitting jeans and polo shirt that he’d wear whenever he wasn’t working. The face was a pallid white, with skin stretched over sunken cheekbones. This was the Phil she remembered during his illness, when treatment had started for his cancer. His eyes locked on her, the intention clear.

  You’re not going anywhere. Not until we’re done with you.

  They were in the most terrible danger. Sarah had shown how powerful she was when she attacked them at Lisa’s house. Two of them together was an entirely different proposition. As if reading her mind, the bedroom door swung shut behind Sarah. Their only escape route had been cut off.

  “Dad, what the hell’s going on? How can this be my mum?”

  “It’s to do with the adoption, isn’t it?” Judy said, directing her question at Adrian. “It wasn’t a coincidence that the adoption agency you used was in the same office as your letting agency. It was stupid of him really, to let you have the paperwork at all. I imagine he trusted that upon hearing that your parents were dead, you’d give up on any hope of tracking them down. And it worked, didn’t it? You passed the paperwork to me and you’d given up. But, I was curious. It seemed such a turnaround from your dad who only a few days before had been vehemently opposed to you finding out the details of the adoption.” She addressed Adrian, trying to ignore her tightening chest. “You should have taken more care over the paperwork. Leaving a trail would only encourage me to follow it.”

  Adrian turned his attention to Judy. “You should never have got involved. It was supposed to be over with. Lisa didn’t need to know.”

  “Know what, Dad?”

  But Judy interjected. “Know that he’d faked the whole thing. There was no adoption agency. That paperwork was a fake, the adoption agency never existed. Matt Hodgson knew the truth though, didn’t he?” Judy racked her brain, trying to piece together how this ruse had played out. Had Faith known that the adoption wasn’t genuine? No, she couldn’t have. This was done for her benefit, no one else’s.

  “I don’t understand. How can the adoption agency have been fake? Where did Phil and I come from? How did we get adopted?”

  Adrian was still throwing daggers at Judy, but he swallowed and straightened.

  “Your mother and I had wanted children for years, but it wasn’t happening. It was difficult to get much help from the NHS in those days. There was no such thing as IVF and fertility treatments were in their infancy. Besides, your mother was only blaming herself for not being able to have children. She’d resolved herself to it and had given up.

  “The letting agency was doing all right, better than all right—it was thriving. But it was taking all the spare time I had to build it up. I was looking at other opportunities and happened upon this caravan site. We used to come to the area when I was a boy and I suppose I was thinking of the good times we’d had, and how it might be a good project for your mum to be involved with, take her mind off the pregnancy thing. But then I met Sarah.”

  He glanced at the sentinel blocking the doorway. Neither Sarah nor Phil were showing any signs of movement against them, perhaps they were as keen for the story to be told as Judy and Lisa were.

  Adrian cleared his throat, then glanced up at the ceiling, anything to avoid looking his daughter in the eye. “We fell in love.”

  Lisa stepped back, her face displaying the hurt for all to see. Her eyes were wide, her lips curled down. It looked like she was on the verge of tears. “You cheated on Mum?”

  “I’m not proud of it, but understand that it was difficult for us. The pressure of starting a family was showing. Your mum was blaming herself and I just did what I’d always done, throw myself into my work. So, when Sarah showed me some interest, I couldn’t help myself.

  “She worked on the site, lived at Castlerigg, and was happy to show me around. She knew I was married, and at first, she kept her distance, but the more I came up here to check on the progress of the site, the more I realised I wanted to spend time with her. I didn’t realise how unstable she was.”

  Judy felt a chill down her back, and she noticed that Sarah had shifted position. She’d lifted her head higher, and she was regarding Adrian as a hungry animal might regard its prey. Adrian didn’t seem concerned, his focus was very much on telling his story, getting the truth out. He was relieving himself of the burden, the lies that had been binding him to this place.

  “I suppose now, you’d call her a bunny boiler, but in the sixties, we didn’t have a term for it. Needy, perhaps? But obsessively so. She argued with me when my visits were due to end, when I had to go back home. She threatened to reveal our relationship to your mother or embarrass me in front of my employees at work. The only way to appease her was to spend even more time here, to make promises I didn’t intend to keep. You’ve got to understand… this affair was over from my point of view almost as soon as it started. Two months if that, and then she became obsessed. But I needed time to work out how to deal with the situation. I didn’t want to hurt Sarah. But it had to end.

  “Then Sarah became pregnant. She told me on the night I gave her my latest ultimatum. I’d warned her about keeping her distance, how I didn’t want her working here anymore. We argued. There was shouting. She threw things. Then she told me.”

  “She was pregnant with Phil and Lisa?”

  Adrian nodded. “We didn’t know it was twins, but yes. She was pregnant. She threatened to terminate them. And if the doctors wouldn’t help her, she was threatening to take matters into her own hands. The pregnancy changed her. She became more unstable, more desperate for me to leave Faith and raise our family together. But even then, I knew that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t spend my life with a woman who’d threatened to kill our children.”

  “What did you do?” Judy asked.

  Adrian looked downcast as if every sentence he uttered was taking him further back in time.

  “It just wasn’t fair. Me and Faith had been desperate for kids and had been trying for years. And here Sarah was, threatening to kill the very things we were dreaming about. I knew then that I couldn’t let that happen. I would not let her take them from me.” He threw a look at Sarah and the ghost’s expression seemed to change. The corners of her mouth curled ever so slightly. Judy realised with horror that Sarah was smiling.

  “Is that when you came up with the idea of faking an adoption?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t know whether Sarah would ever be happy with letting me and Faith adopt. I offered her money.”

  “You tried to buy her children? Tried to buy me?” Lisa sounded aghast at the idea.

  “You are my daughter. I’d have paid any amount of money to keep you safe and that meant getting you away from your mother. She was using you as a bargaining chip, trying to blackmail me to leave Faith. If I’d have said yes to her blackmail, how long would it be until she came up with a new set of demands? There was never any chance of me leaving your mother. I love her too much. Sarah was a mistake.”

  The floor rumbled. A vibration building, rising through Judy’s legs. She looked at the others to see whether they’d noticed it, but they were too lost in the past.

  Adrian continued. “It was the best for everyone. She would never have the stress of raising children on her own, and I’d make sure she was comfortably enough off that she would be able to start again with a new life, meet someone else. That did it. She wasn’t prepared to meet anyone else or call our relationship a day. She wanted me and the kids be damned. She was almost full term by this point and living in this house. I’d set things up nicely for her. She ended up giving birth on the bed in this room.

  I was the only other person present.”

  He looked sullen. There was something else even worse to come. He ste
eled himself before picking up the story. “But after the birth, something went wrong. She wouldn’t stop bleeding. I’d never been at a birth before so didn’t know what to expect, but she needed medical attention.”

  Adrian looked at the ghost of Phil at the far side of the room. Neither Lisa nor Phil was reacting to the news that Adrian was actually their biological father. It was news Judy thought under other circumstances, they’d be happy to hear.

  “I took the babies, did what I could for you to make sure you were safe and warm. Then I took you with me.”

  “And what about Sarah? What did you do for her?”

  “I left her to die.”

  44

  Adrian’s words hung in the air.

  I left her to die.

  He had nothing else. He was waiting for some reaction from his daughter. Judy regarded the pair of them, then looked at the two ghosts and wondered what they were thinking. Did they even think? Were they just reacting? She thought the latter was the case.

  So, when Sarah spoke it came as a shock to all of them.

  “You left me to die.”

  Whatever predicament Adrian had found himself in, he was guilty of murder, or at the least manslaughter. What must have gone through Sarah’s mind as she lay on her bed, dying after giving birth, feeling her life draining away?

  Lisa and Adrian were shocked at the sound of Sarah’s voice and it helped pull a reaction from Lisa. She turned away from her dad and stood beside Judy. Judy reached for her sister-in-law’s hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Judy said.

  “You don’t need to be sorry,” Lisa replied.

  “I did it to save you and your brother,” Adrian said. His eyes were pleading for understanding, but it was an understanding that would never come. Judy knew Lisa well enough that this revelation was enough to drive a permanent wedge between them. She would never see her father in the same light again. And neither would Judy.

  “You faked the adoption agency. How do you even do that?”

  “When we started out, we bought all the cheap housing we could. Homes for the desperate. Some of those were less reputable than others, but I wasn’t about to turn away people with criminal records if they could still pay their way. I made contacts that I thought could be useful. One man was an expert in faking identity documents.

  “It wasn’t difficult to get the birth certificates made. It was even less difficult to fake the necessary paperwork to show that we’d adopted the babies. After what happened, I took the babies to a friend’s house. Another desperate soul who owed me several favours. She looked after them until I’d sorted everything out with the adoption and introduced Faith to the idea. She would never say no to the possibility of two beautiful twins.”

  Faith had never struck Judy as particularly gullible, quite the opposite in fact. So, the idea that she’d totally believed what she was being told about the adoption didn’t ring true. If Adrian had struck deals with the shady underbelly of Southport setting up his business and she’d not objected, why would she object when promised two children, the one thing that she desperately wanted? And so what if she didn’t look too closely at the forged paperwork, squinted over the details, never questioned her husband on why he kept going up to a caravan site that didn’t warrant that much personal attention? Faith was as complicit in this as Adrian. Only, she’d never need to admit to that.

  “What about him?” Lisa said, pointing at Matt’s dead body. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  Judy had an idea. “He was the caretaker of the offices where your dad’s business was set up.”

  Adrian nodded, keen to tell the story from his perspective. “Matt helped me set up the adoption agency in one of the vacant offices. Just enough set dressing to make your mother believe that the whole thing was legitimate.”

  Except, she must have smelt the bullshit from the beginning. Judy kept that thought to herself.

  “So, what went wrong? Why is he here?” Lisa pressed.

  “It was her fault,” Adrian said, pointing at Judy.

  Lisa looked quizzically at Judy. A sinking feeling struck Judy. There was that plunging drop of the roller coaster again, tugging at her insides. She realised that she must have been a contributing factor in the man’s death. “I was asking around at Hosforth House. Asking for details about the adoption agency. Matt was suspicious. No one should know about that, so he got in touch with Adrian and he understood that there was an opportunity. If Matt said the wrong thing, the whole stack of lies would come tumbling down. I doubt he knew about Sarah. If he did, he would have been stupid to agree to visit Adrian at the scene of the crime. I think he was just promised a little extra hush money. A nice bonus after forty years.” She looked up at Adrian. “How close am I?”

  “The bastard was trying to hold me to account for faking the adoption. He didn’t know about Sarah. Only that I needed some help in setting up a fake adoption agency. He even acted as the administrator. Fair play to him, he did a good job of it as well. Faith didn’t suspect a thing.”

  She suspected, you naïve fool. She just didn’t want to risk bursting the bubble in case she lost what you were offering.

  “But you killed him,” Lisa said, her head shaking all the time like she was on the verge of a total breakdown. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

  Adrian continued. “He came to the new offices and hinted that he was a little broke and asked for some cash to help tide him over. I knew then that something had happened, but I didn’t want to rock the boat so gave him two hundred quid and told him he could keep it as long as I never saw him again. That was a mistake. He just saw the open wallet and imagined what else he could have. He rang me this morning, told me that Judy had been asking questions about the adoption and he knew that he was onto a nice pay cheque. This time he wouldn’t settle for a couple of hundred quid, he wanted much more than that.” Adrian rubbed the back of his neck. “I wasn’t about to be blackmailed. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that would end well.”

  “So, you invited him up to the caravan site? Why?” Lisa asked.

  “I wanted to implicate him in what happened. I’d buried Sarah’s body in the woods, but there’s enough evidence in this house to implicate anyone if the right piece of evidence is found. I thought I’d turn the tables on him.”

  “By bringing him into your murder scene?”

  “Yes. What good would it do to bring up Sarah’s death now?”

  “What good? She’s been missing for over forty years. What about her family? What must they think has happened to her?”

  “I had a few trips to France. I used her letters to me as the basis for some faked postcards. She only had her dad, and he was an alcoholic. He wouldn’t miss her, but a few postcards suggesting she’d started a new life in the south of France was all it took for him to stop asking questions. She’s not missed. No one is looking for her.”

  Judy got a sense that Sarah had shifted position again. And if it were possible, her face had deepened into a scowl. She was not happy with the story that Adrian was telling. Not happy at all. After seeing what she was capable of in Lisa’s house, Judy didn’t want to see what she’d do to them when she was furious.

  “Matt agreed to meet me here. I told him he could have his money, but that I kept it safe in this house where the tax man couldn’t get to it. The greedy idiot believed me. He met me here, and I told him to come upstairs. He was nervous. He told me he thought he’d seen someone else in the house and wanted to leave. But then Sarah showed herself. Matt didn’t stand a chance. She slit his throat.”

  Judy swallowed. She wanted to cough, but all she could think about were the two ghosts in the room. Neither of which had shown their intention towards them yet.

  “What do you want Phil? Why are you here?”

  Phil looked at Judy, surprised that he’d been addressed so directly. She wasn’t expecting him to speak, so when he eventually did, her knees buckled, and she almost reached out to Lisa for support.

&
nbsp; “Isn’t it obvious?” His voice was just as she remembered.

  The undercurrent of malice is still there, she thought. Be careful, very careful with what you say next.

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t get it. You didn’t die here. You didn’t know Sarah.”

  “Phil,” Lisa said. “Was that you back at my house? The night I was locked outside.”

  “You needed to listen. You weren’t listening to our mother.”

  “Listening? What was I meant to be hearing?”

  “The truth. The truth about how we came to be stolen from our birth mother and ended up with the man who murdered her,” Phil said, spitting the words across at them.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Son. I never meant anyone to die. Your mother on the other hand…”

  Sarah moved so quickly that she became just another shifting shadow across the room. She reappeared behind Adrian, the knife in her hand catching a shard of sunlight as she drew it across Adrian’s neck.

  Blood spilled from the gaping wound. A thick scarf of dark crimson flowed down his skin.

  Lisa screamed and ran to her dad.

  Sarah disappeared; the knife she’d been holding dropped to the floor. Adrian’s dying body slumped backwards. He placed his hands behind him as he staggered back into the wall. Lisa tried to ease him to the floor, but he was too heavy for her and he fell, his head knocking against the wall as he went.

  Judy spun and saw Sarah at the top of the stairs. When she looked back into the room, she saw that Phil too had vanished.

  She went to help Lisa, but it was too late to do anything for Adrian. Lisa’s hands were pressing down into the opening in his neck, but no matter what pressure she applied, it would not make any difference; the cut was too long, the knife had dug in too deep. Adrian was dying in his daughter’s arms.

  “Don’t try to talk, Dad. We’ll get help.” Then to Judy she snapped. “Call an ambulance.”

  Judy tried her phone but it wouldn’t turn on. “It’s not working. Where’s your phone?”